A Comparative Study of the Appearance of Beloved in Khaqani and Sa′di's Ghazels

Khaqani is one of the best poets and ode-composers in the Persian literature. In addition to his strong and bombastic odes, he made attempts at writing Ghazels. Khaqani’s resolution of composing sonnets included him in the pioneer group of Persian mystical sonnets. Soon after him, Sa′di, the well-known and famous Persian poet, in addition to writing two everlasting works named Golestan and Boostan, furthered Ghazel-writing to its new phase of life and brought the Persian amorous Ghazels to its perfection. The purpose of the current paper is to comparatively study the appearance of the beloved in Khaqani and Sa′di 's Ghazels through descriptive and qualitative analyses. The findings suggest that the beloved in these two poet's Ghazels have three dominant appearances: (1) beautiful and elegant, (2) unattainable, and (3) cruel. Goodness and beauty of the beloved which are described and praised in the best way in Sa′di 's Ghazels manifest the beauty-mindedness of the poet, while this tendency is not seen in Khaqani's poems. But the cruelty of the beloved is the shared motif in both Khaqani and Sa′di 's Ghazels. Although the unattainablility of the beloved exists more or less in the Ghazels of the two poets, it is more significant in Khaqani's Ghazels.