Contrasts on the Theme of Death in Persian Romantic Poetry

The theme of "death and dying" in contemporary poetry has manifested itself through different signs of black and white. From among the themes which become dual and contrasting while facing with the conflicting romanticism is death and thinking to it. This theme has been as black and white in Persian romantic poetry. The highest sample of black death can be seen in the poetry of Nosrat Rahmani and the white death in the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri, the most optimistic poet. Therefore, using content analysis, their poetry has been examined and revealed that the two poets, in addition to having two contrasting viewpoints to the subject of death, this conflict is apparent within their poetry; i.e. Rahmani, in spite of being pessimist, is sometimes optimist and Sepehri, in spite of being optimist, is sometimes pessimist. Their intellectual conflict was the contributing factor of their similarity. Rahmani, through creating scary and gothic image and using frightening and black words and selecting the name of the poem based on the theme of death, and also using some techniques such as expression, emmory, report and description about suicise, corpse, grave, talking to the death and believing himself a dead, adds to this theme. The most important factors of such an approach include the failure of social ideals stemming from the 28 Mordad 1332 (Solar Calendar) coup d ' état, being affected by the European poetry, paying attention to the works of Sadeq Hedayat, admission of pessimism as an art and using realism in romanticism period. Sohrab Sepehri, due to his tendency to mysticism of Zen and Khorasan, sees death through having positive and white views. Through creating positive images and his mystic ideas, Sepehri shows his ideas by statements. In his last four books (Miad Dar Lajan, Hariq Bad, Pialeh Dor-e Degar Zad, and Boveh Siah), Rahmani sometimes depicts a positive image of death. The negative and grey image of death by Sepehri relates to the beginning of his poetry and his first two collections called Marq-e-Rang and Zendegi Khabha. In his poetry, Sepehri has been affected by the dominant style which was common in his era.