One of distinctive features found in post-war poet Kim Jong-sam’s poetry is awareness of death. But behind the sense of despairing death is his strong will to overcome the bleak reality and existence. This is an important element in that it corresponds to his conciliatory gesture and communication between his being and the world. However, previous studies on Kim’s poems have mostly focused on the theme of death awareness and little attention has given to consideration of awareness of life. Likewise, not much efforts have been made to explore close relations between the awareness of life and metaphor in his poems. In this regard, this article put emphasis on finding correlation between awareness of life and metaphor in Kim’s poems. To do this, I used Hrushovski``s frame of reference theory that helps to understand metaphor at the discourse level. The awareness of life reflected in his poems is taking shape as metaphors of poetic self, others or music. First, his will to live is gradually sanctified by the transformation of the poetic self. Second, transcendental life pursued by the poet is realized by the reification of others consisting of the world. Third, as layers of music are shifted to spatialization, the poet’s arrival at the transcendental world is achieved. Based on these factors, this article highlighted Kim’s awareness of life unfolds as it creates delicate semantic network by the poetic device of metaphor. This article is meaningful in that it explored the correlation between awareness of life and metaphor in Kim Jong-sam’s poems that have attracted little attention from the academic circle until now.