The Functional of Epithets in Hafez’s Sonnets

Epithets are attributes that, unlike attributes in the grammatical and logical sense, have many artistic and poetic functions, and in this way, cause the poetry language to be distinguished.Hafez is superior in the discovery, construction, and use of this type of epithets, but his artistic techniques have not been well studied yet, and as a result, most of the opinions on this subject are presented just about a few of his poems; so the present paper tried to examine this issue in Hafez’ sonnetsscientifically using the content analysis. According to this paper, it has been determined that Hafez has over 1400 descriptive compositions, 560 successor attributes, and 58 descriptive groups, from which more than 480 are epithets; that is, they have aesthetic function and made the language prominence.
These epithets are analyzed in this paper based on the type of function, and it has been determined that the epithets of Hafez in his sonnets have the functions of beatification (Sarve Senoubarkharaam), uglification (Dajal Fe’l Molhedolshekl), magnification (Zabaane Atashin), metaphorical (Ashke ghammaz), sarcastic(Kootah Astinaan), simile (Dele senoubari) and allegory (Adame Beheshti). Since most of them are associated with a kind of innovation and fantasizing, they have cause the poetic language to be prominent and distinguished; therefore, Hafez is a great poet in this regard. This issue can be studied on literary masterpieces such as Shahnameh and Boostan by which the different epithets can be found in literary genres.