The Manifestation of Ideology in the Rhetorical and Linguistic Layers of Contemporary Ritual Poetry in the Last Three Decades

Ritual poetry has experienced new semantic, visual, and structural domains in recent decades. This type of poetry is researchable as an ideological text. The meaningful connection of poetic elements with each other can be found by analyzing the linguistic and rhetorical components of poetry. Some texts have an ideological context and have the social, religious, or cultural ideals of a particular group. One way to understand these collective beliefs and ideals is to analyze the linguistic and rhetorical elements of poetry based on the beliefs and attitudes of writers and poets. Although ritual poetry has been presented in Persian poetry from the very beginning, for about ten centuries or more, it has not had the courage to change and evolve. After the Islamic Revolution, under the influence of Shiite discourse, it gradually became a dominant ideology in contemporary poetry, especially in the last two or three decades due to the provision of political and social contexts on the one hand, and the continuous activities of poetry associations on the otherhand. Ritual poetry has been polished over the centuries through ups and downs and has reached perfection in the field of contemporary literature by creating new horizons. Both in terms of form and content, it has become a place for beautiful and meaningful poems. As we read in the book Rasade Sobh (Kazami, 2009) “the tendency of young Iranian poets to ritual poetry is a good and blessed tendency and even unpredictable extent” (p. 54).

This study aimed at introducing modern examples of religious and ritual poetry to explain the relationship between the form and content of poetry through the study of rhetorical and linguistic elements. Therefore, two questions have been posed: 1) Is there a significant relationship between the form and content in the ritual poetry of the last three decades?; 2) Through which linguistic and grammatical features and rhetorical elements have the poets expressed their desired ideology? We tried to divide the dominant ideology of the text of the poem into two categories of language and rhetoric and to analyze the sub-branches of each by mentioning some examples.

The results of the present study showed that the linguistic and rhetorical elements in today’s ritual poetry are strongly tied to the ideas of poets. Poets have hidden their religious and scholastic ideology in linguistic layers and syntactic techniques such as marked words, specific linguistic combinations and constructions, type of verbs, omissions, and prepositions. Also, their intellectual worldview has been expressed in rhetorical techniques such as metaphor, illusion, symbol, and exaggeration. Such kinds of technical techniques are tools to convey the ideology of poets.

The study showed that ritual poetry is one of the texts in which linguistic and rhetorical elements are tied to thought. The language and rhetoric in various forms have  crystallized the ideologies desired by poets. The most manifestation of ideology in the linguistic layer is manifested in signified (marked) words. The high frequency of symbolic and ideological words explicitly indicates the poetic dependence of poets on certain religious beliefs. Linguistic compositions also reveal a certain intellectual world. The type of repetitions and emphasis  in ritual poetry is a diagram of mental commitment to the Shiite belief system. The aspects of grammatical verbs and omissions in most cases adhere to the ideology of the poets. In evaluating the rhetorical level, it was found that metaphors, allusions, and symbols were the most important means of conveying ideology. Metaphors such as the sun, the lamp, and the star all arose from a doctrinal belief and represented the dimension of guidance and enlightenment of the existence of the Infallible Imams (AS). The Qur'an and the Kaaba also introduced the level of knowledge of the Imams (AS) and their metaphorical position showed that they are specific to ritual poetry and such a metaphor cannot be formed in another ideology. Implicit references have also shown the concepts and intellectual foundations of poets by invoking historical propositions from hypertext to text.