Examining the “Language of Poetry” in the Ashurai Poetry of Mousavi Garmaroudi

Abstract
Ashurai poems are one of the most common types of ritual poetry in which various manifestations of this great event are presented. “The Beginning of the Mirror’s Light” is one of the most important poems of Ali Mousavi Garmaroudi about Ashura and the epic of Karbala, whose linguistic functions have been analyzed, descriptively and analytically, in the following research. The research has been conduced based on one of the models of examining the language of poetry in three layers: outer layer (verbal literary devices), middle layer (figures of speech) and central layer (core of language: meaning). The model is a comprehensive one and has been used in research on stylistics. The findings indicate that this Ashurai stanza has reached relative perfection in all three layers; that is, the poet has mostly focused on the outer layer and benefited from the techniques of prosody, especially “repetition”; furthermore, he has used figures of speech such as simile, metaphor, irony, and symmetry, (especially simile and mostly synesthesia) in a good quantity and quality. This way the poet’s thought has been better conveyed to the reader. In order to deepen the meaning, along with the rhetorical devices, the poet has also used the provisions of Persian grammar, such as assimilation and transposition of sentence elements, improving the poem in terms of “technique” and “meaning” to a significant extent.