Abstract: While it has become a distinctive branch of literary studies both in China and world literature, research on Mao Zedong’s poetry is still insufficient in investigating “what makes a poem a poem”. The article continues the research tradition of cognitive poetics and offers a reinterpretation of the elements of Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) in Mao Zedong’s masterpiece Changsha-to the Tune of Qinyuan Chun, including propositional structures, image schema, metaphors, and metonymy structures. It focuses on the prose themes, the organizing of images rooted in cultural mentality and aesthetic connotation, which unveils the cognitive structuring in poetic discourse. The analysis shows that Changsha shared two propositional models of AUTUMN (“the autumn of vitality and freedom”) and YOUTH (“the youthful days of freedom and vigor”), which critically inherited the classical Chinese aesthetic tradition and reconstructed classic propositions. Also, the image schema combined CONTAINER schema with a refined, multi-layered FORCE schema based on Talmy’s force dynamics, including ENABLEMENT, BLOCKAGE, and REMOVAL OF CONSTRAINTS. They were all generated from Mao’s strong sense of self-awareness. Moreover, TIME was the target domain of the metaphorical projection in Changsha; the conceptual metaphors of TIME IS A CONTAINER and TIME IS AN ENTITY were anchored in core propositional models and image schema, along with a diverse series of metonymic structures.