Metonymy has long been regarded as a component of conceptual metaphor until recent years some linguists start to believe that conceptual metonymy could be more important and prevalent than metaphor. The referential meaning of metonymy comes from context, which is a mental phenomenon based on embodiment, categorization, and image schema, etc. This study aims to discuss the relationship between metonymy and context through a case study of traditional Chinese poem and reveal the importance of context in corpus linguistics (corpus-based study?). The analysis shows that people’s concept and utterance are all processed in metonymical ways and that context triggers metonymy. It is for sure that the referential meaning of metonymy could only be realized by context so that referent oule be understood accurately.