Artistic word play as a neglected indicator of Bīdel Dehlavī’s style

Bīdel Dehlavī’s poetry is one of the rarest poems of all Persian poetry. There are several factors involved in the complexity and difficulty of Bīdel’s poetry, which most of them, in turn, form his stylistic categories; one of the factors that undermines Bīdel’s poetry is “word play". Word play which is one of aesthetics interest points of Bīdel’s poetry manifest itself in this way that Bīdel looks at words from non-conventional angles to achieve a new meaning and alienation and to create unpredictable symmetries. These artistic plays in Bīdel’s poetry are used both with different types of verbs and with different types of nouns. In this paper, the authors have tried to examine “word play" as one of the stylistic features of Bīdel’s poems through content analysis. The results of the research showed that this trick is applied at the level of all kinds of verbs and nouns, and has a very high frequency among the verbs "pull, eat, go" and among the nouns "crispness, water, sleep, passion". Also, Bīdel often uses figures of speech such as ambiguity, amphibology of proportion, exterminated exception pun, poetical aetiology and so on to achieve this goal and sometimes resorts to tricks that are not considered part of the figures of speech, the most important of which are attention to the apparent meaning of the core or the central word in ironic phrases and combinations, and attention to the unconventional meaning of the word.