A Reflection on Rhetoric-Visual Function of People’s Name in Lyrics of Sanai, Attar and Rumi

People’s name, with varied details, has always had an effective role in rhetorical quality of nations’ literature, including Persian poetry. Understanding the concept of many poems is linked to understanding visual structure of their proper names. Given the importance of this issue, this study is to examine and compare visual function of People’s name in lyrics of Sanai, Attar and Rumi. For the purpose of this study, the people’s names helped transmitting the poet’s thoughts, either as a whole image or as a part of a pictorial process, are examined. In lyrics of Sanai, Attar and Rumi, there are 277, 182, and 433 images, respectively, which represent proper names of people. These three poets have so specially characterized the structure of literary images that it can be regarded as a feature of their poetic style. As regards, Sanai took the most advantage of symbols, allusions, similes, metaphors, and ironies while Attar and Rumi used allusions, similes, symbols,metaphors, and ironies the most. Proper names in this type of Sanai’s poems include:names of the prophets, fictional-historical names, names of the famous lovers, religious-mystical names, mythological-epical names, historical-Quranic names, names of angels and Devil. In Attar’s lyrics,names of the prophets, mythological-epical names, fictional-historical names, names of the famous lovers, historical-Quranic names, names of angels and Devil are more pronounced. Also, in Rumi’s lyrics,names of the prophets, religious-mystical names, historical-Quranic names, fictional-historical names,names of the famous lovers, names of angels, mythological-epical names, and Devil were most used. Another aspect of the findings suggest that, in lyrics of Rumi, thematic-contextual function of proper names was mostly mystical. Lyrics of Sanai and attar represent a combination of mystical and romantic function; the subtleties of which will be discussed