Li Shangyin’s poetry features its complicated images, illusory impression, gorgeous description and endless aftertaste. There remains large room for critics’ interpretations, which actually approach meanings of Li’s poems with different conclusions. Traditional literary criticism explores literal understanding on intuitive and experiential basis while it ignores the cognition mechanism plays in meaning construction of poems. This study takes a composite view to research discourse development in Li Shangyin’s poetry with paradigms of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy to explore how conceptual system processes meaning construction.