Chained Images in Shafiei Kadkani’s Poetry

Shafiei Kadkani is famous for employing images that make his poetry more coherent. These images are called chained images in the present study. In this type of imagery, the final part of each stanza is repeated in the initial part of the following stanza and the repetition is conducted repeatedly. The scholars of rhetoric refer to this type of figure of speech as a verbal stylistic device and name it as “motetabe,” “tashaboh al-atraf,” and “zubatnein.” These terms have some drawbacks, as they do not represent the characteristics we intend to assign to Shafiei Kadkani’s imagery. The examples appearing in traditional books on rhetoric tend to be naïve and artificial while Shafiei Kadkani merges images with a novel perspective and deep philosophical world-view. These chained images have links with the poet’s characteristics such as his cultural awareness and social and naturalistic ideas. This type of imagery dates back to classical Persian poetry and prose and folk literature, but is employed even in modern Persian poetry and world literature. In chained imagery the higher the number of loops used, the higher the poem’s musical value would be. However, the number of loops should not be more than four or five, as the reader would be confused otherwise. The present study attempts to investigate the chained images in Shafiei’s poetry in detail.