Two important factors are said to contribute to SL learners understanding of English poetry: mastery of lexical items and the syntactic rules governing them, and a fair knowledge of the devices used in versification. Still, a third factor may be said to be knowledge of figurative language which is characteristic of poetry in general. This study is aimed at measuring the extent of the relationship between conceptual knowledge of figurative language, reading comprehension skill and the appreciation of poetry. Some implications of the findings are discussed in terms of SLA and TEFL.