The Aesthetics of Color Element in Contemporary Persian and Arabic Ashura-oriented Poetry

The element of color, as the widest realm of perceptions, has always had an outstanding status in the creation of artistic works. The impact of this aesthetic phenomenon on the viewers has made poets take the most advantage of it in their literary works and create unprecedented poetic images. Nonetheless, what prepares the grounds for more elaborate literary discussions are the inherent symbolic meanings of such colors standing along their visual appeals; an issue which often adds to the ambiguity of literary works and demands deeper analyses on the part of readers. There are several reasons at work for the selection of colors by poets, including aesthetic issues, mental conditions of the poet, geographical environment, socio-political factors, and the like. The reflection of the epic of Ashura in Persian and Arabic poetry indicates interesting and special employment of colors by the poets. Considering the similar and different viewpoints of the two nations with regard to the Ashura event, their literary heritage, cultural issues, and the like, the employments of this imagistic element and its denotations in poetic works of these two languages yield to be both similar and different. Among the findings of the present study, we can refer to the wider application of colors in Persian poetry, presence of two colors of red and black—as common basic colors of both languages—romantic employment of red color in Ashura-oriented Persian poetry, and completely different denotations of blue in both languages.