Figure-bound relationship is a perceptual grouping in Gestalt psychology that has applications in cognitive poetics studies and is believed to be the fundamental features of literary stylistic analysis. Linguists believe that figure-ground relationship is a crucial element of the way we organize reality in our awareness, including works of art. Metaphors occupy a curtail role in figure-ground relationship studies. The present study aims to consider metaphors and figure-bound relationship. The corpus of the current study is Shahriar's Azarbaijani Turkish poems. the results show that there are two major kinds of figure-bound relationship in the studied metaphors; firstly, the metaphors that have a fixed metaphorical structure and secondly, the ones that are created by the poet that accept different positions in a figure-ground relationship based on the specific literary and aesthetic effects and the role they play. The current study confirms Freeman (2000) that asserts "we can perceive time as a figure with respect to some ground...or we can perceive time as the ground for the figure". Another finding of the study is that in some metaphors, time is a hidden concept that plays the same role in the figure-bound relationship when it is not hidden.
