VARIATION OF ENGLISH POETIC PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS ‘GATE OF HEAVEN’ AND ‘GATE OF HELL’ IN TEXTS OF 16-20TH CENTURIES

In this article the features of lexical and grammatical variation of phraseological units ‘gate of heaven’ and ‘gate by of hell’ are analyzed on the material of English poetic texts of 16-20th centuries. The author makes a conclusion about high efficiency and diachronic stability of the poetic phraseological unit ‘gate of heaven’, which is caused by variability of its lexical and grammatical structure. It is noticed that lexical and grammatical variability of this poetic phraseological unit is compensated by relative position stability of its components in the line and by the semantic similarity of micro-contexts caused by existence of invariant motive.