The article deals with the problem of semantics of the artistic metaphor of a poetic text in a foreign class. When considering the structure of the artistic metaphor, the author relies on a hierarchical multi-level model of construction of the connotative part of the metaphor Sklyarevskaya G. N.. This model is used on the example of semantics of the metaphorical language of the poem by I. Brodsky. The author emphasizes that for a complete understanding of the artistic image, it is necessary to have both linguistic knowledge and to possess country-specific and linguistic-cultural information.