A Structuralist Reading of Parental Love in Sharif Murtaza's Divan

Structuralism is a new critical approach based on literary methods and linguistics which identifies and analyses literary texts and elaborates on its structural beauties. Love and affection as an important element in literature and poetry is highly effective on the structure of literary texts. Therefore, studying affection in literature creates new fields in literary criticism. Love and affection toward children as an important type of affection, is also important in children upbringings and educational patterns. This issue is mostly covered by the poems of Sharif Murtaza and other poets. Thus, the purpose of this study is to analyze affection toward children in the Divan of Sharif Murtaza in the light of structuralism in the four types of lyric poetry (eulogy, salutation, honoring and elegy), based on the analysis of the theme and the structural levels of the poem (musical, grammatical, verbal and rhetorical) in some of selected poems and also based on their comparison to affection parameters. The findings show that emotion is the main element in Sharif Murtaza’s ballads and his language and expressions are colored with emotion. His adherence to emotion in his language has made his poems valuable in the literary studies.