A Structuralist Investigation of Despairing and Anxiety-Provoking Images in the Poem Akhar-e Shahnameh by Mehdi Akhavan Sales

Akhar-e Shahnameh (The Ending of Shahnameh) is one of the brilliant poems of Mehdi Akhavan Sales, which took on a form of despair and anxiety under the influence of the coup on 19 August 1953. Many personal and social conditions and factors influenced the formation of these two emotional categories, but in Akhavan’s poem, perhaps more influential than the death of relatives was the failure of the national movement due to the events related to oil, which revealed feelings of despair and anxiety in the mind and soul of the failed contemporary poet. Akhar-e Shahnameh has the potential to be studied with new literary approaches and especially with structuralist criticism due to its narrative aspect, old Khorasani dialect, syntactic anomaly, and coherent structure. The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between and the structure of despairing and anxiety-provoking images and their contrast with happy and hopeful images in Akhar-e Shahnameh; because examining the image structure in this poem helps us understand the difficulties of Akhavan's poetry. This research uses an analytical-critical method. Adopting the approach of structuralist criticism, an attempt has been made to examine the anxiety-provoking and despairing images of this poem in two horizontal and vertical axes so as to explore the grounds for its glory and coherence by means of literary criticism. The findings of this research show that in this poem, Akhavan employs more than sixty-five despairing and anxiety-provoking images using imagery tools such as irony, metaphor, simile, symbol, paradox, etc., in the two axes of coexistence and substitution to draw the atmosphere of the 1950s, which was full of despair and anxiety.