فصلنامه شعر پژوهی (بوستان ادب)
سال شانزدهم شماره 4 (پیاپی 62، زمستان 1403)

The description of mansions and buildings, called poetry of building, constitutes a genre in Persian poetry. It may be considered the equivalent to the genre of country house poetry in English literature. Poetry of building has many examples in the thousand-year history of Persian poetry. It has remained rather unknown since researchers have not conducted studies to analyse and express its characteristics as an independent literary type. Describing buildings and mansions created an opportunity for poets to record the name and the picture of a particular building in their poems, to praise the builder of the building, and to show their artistry and skill in writing poetry. In this survey, poems about buildings have been extracted from more than three hundred Persian texts, such as the divans of the poets, books of history and Tazkera (biographies of great people), and put into historical order from old to new. The results of this research, which covers all periods of Persian poetry, show that most of the poems about buildings were written in Safavid and Qajar periods and were in the form of “qasideh” and “qat’eh” (odes) and Masnavi (couplets), and were written with the aim of eulogy, description, and recording history. Among the poets who wrote poetry on this subject, Abdi Beyg Shirazi known as Navidi in the Safavid period and Fath Ali Khan Saba in the Qajar period stand out as pioneers. In this essay, in addition to explaining the artistic and literary features of the building poems, including the poetic purposes, themes, structures, formats, and rhetorical features that lead to the accurate and comprehensive understating of this literary type, the relationship between these poems with authentic Iranian architecture has been discussed, which renders it useful in architectural research, too.

The issue of death has been one of the main issues of concern to most of the world’s poets and philosophers. Well-known poets such as Rumi in Persian literature and Henry Vaughan in English literature have addressed this issue a lot in their poems. They do not consider death as the end of life, but introduce it as the gate of the eternal life. Mullah Sadra, the great Islamic and Iranian philosopher, also considers death to be a release from the bondage of the body because human beings have the tendency to connect with the eternal essence of God. Following the principle of substantial motion. According to mystics and theosophists, it is better for a person to experience death before physical death by ignoring physical ties, so that he can cope with it more easily and join the eternal essence of God, which the ultimate goal. The present research is a descriptive-analytical investigation of Rumi and Henry Vaughan’s poems based on Mulla Sadra’s opinions regarding the concept of death. The results of the research show that although these three people lived in historical, linguistic and geographical periods far from each other, they have many similar personal and religious beliefs regarding death.

Resistance literature is a thematic category whose content may appear in different forms of poetry. Minimal poems do have an especial share in contemporary resistance literature and when used with the purpose of “jihad of explanation”, they revolve around three main pivots of reminding, interrogating and complaining. Gholamreza Kafi has created short poems in line with the principles of minimalism such as limited length, realism and simplicity of language, which mark his skill in this new poetic style. This study aims at analysing Kafi’s collections of poetry, Short Songs (2005) and Passenger of the Next Station (2017) within the framework of Gerard Genette’s theory of transtextuality. It seeks to determine the role of transtextual relations in promoting jihad of explanation. This study is conducted by using descriptive-analytic methodology and the data is analysed by the use of SPSS25 software. The frequencies of transtextual types and the components that promote “jihad of explanation” are evaluated by Chi-square test. The findings indicate that “architextuality” and “time-consciousness” have the highest frequency and percentage among transtextual types and components promoting jihad of explanation and there is a meaningful relation between them. In these two collections, Kafi has chosen free style for foregrounding the promoting components of jihad of explanation by means of linguistic techniques such as “lexical play”. These impressive and meaningful short poems depict didactic and lovely aspects, which have architextual relationship with Khorasani and Hindi styles.

Equivoque, or “Iham-e Tanasob” in Persian, is one of the important stylistic features of Hafez’s poetry. Hafez was familiar with the world of music and by using musical terms, he created hidden and overt equivoques in his poetry. In his Divan, some less frequent musical terms are placed next to the more frequent terms in such a way that they make equivoques; however, since readers are not able to realize them in the first reading, some of these terms remain hidden and unknown in Hafez’s poems. In this essay, the researchers, after classifying the musical terms used in Hafez’s Divan and explaining the new type, i.e., the musical terms with hidden equivoques, try to interpret less frequent musical terms such as “charkh” (cycle), soul, glass, lover, speech, beloved, breeze, “negar” (beloved), union, “shahanshahi and shahi” (kingdom), “shekan” (curl), “shekan dar shekan” (curl on curl), and “shammameh” (lampstand). These terms are placed along well-known terms such as “pardeh” (musical tone), well-singing, song, Barbat and Ney (two musical instruments) in such a way as they make hidden equivoques. The discovery of these hidden equivoques increases the readers’ artistic pleasure from Hafez’s poems.

Romantic narratives constitute an important part for the history of human culture. Nezami’s world-famous work, Khosrow and Shirin has some hidden characteristics, such as the purpose of love between Khosrow and Shirin, which could be revealed by the help of interdisciplinary approaches. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believes the main goal of romantic relationships to be reproduction with the mutual motive of procreation. In his view, the selection of the mate is based on external beauty and with the aim of compensating biological imbalances. Without having intercourse and producing children, the lovers eventually tire of each other. It is the principle of “will to live” that makes both parties blindly fall in love. Our research extracts eight major components about the purpose of romantic relationship from Schopenhauer’s book, The World as Will and Representation, and evaluates the stages of Khosrow and Shirin’s romantic relationship according to them. This analysis shows that in their relationship, none of the factors such as distance and loneliness, not establishing a marital relationship for a long time, the presence of competing narrative elements such as Khosrow’s loveless marriage with Maryam and having a child from her, and introducing Farhad –Khosrow's love rival– could result in a permanent reduction of attraction between the two lovers. Even after marriage, they remain in love until death. In this narrative, Shirin contradicts Schopenhauer’s views more than Khosrow. Our analysis reveals that by an idealist view of romantic relationship, Nezami first builds a lyrical theme but with a spiritual infrastructure; and then, contrary to Schopenhauer’s opinions at the beginning of the narrative, he leans towards spiritual love, moving away from Schopenhauer. Eventually, Nezami’s narrative stands in opposition to Schopenhauer’s point of view by honouring Shirin’s spiritual position to the highest levels and highlighting Shirin’s persistence on chastity in accordance with the common religious practice.

Many renowned Persian poets have consistently captured the attention of literary scholars and researchers worldwide. Among these poets, Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez Shirazi stands out. From the realm of Arabic literature, Ibrahim Amin al-Shawarbi and Ali Abbas Zoleikha, both poets and writers, have shown special reverence for Hafez. Each of these two writers has interpreted significant aspects of Hafez’s poetry and expressed them in Arabic. In this research, we delve into their interpretations of Ghazal 402 (based on Ghani Qazvini’s edition), and compare their perspectives. The findings reveal that while Amin al-Shawarbi’s interpretations, often written in prose, are more eloquent due to his long residence in Shiraz, Ali Abbas Zoleikha’s reception of the emotional elements, expressed both in poetry and in prose, is more captivating and influential than Amin al-Shawarbi’s interpretations.

Khaqani is one of the poets of Persian literature whose poems are difficult to read. The difficulty of his poems had subjected them to many distortions in diction (called Tas’hif in Persian) with the aim of making them simpler. One of the sources of difficulty in Khaqani’s poetry is his artistry in making use of the characteristics of Persian writing system. This is known as pun or ambiguity of distortion or “Iham-e Tashif” in Persian, a figure of speech in which the audience’s mind is directed toward the second meaning of a word in the poem but that meaning is absent from the line while it only establishes a horizontal connection with one or two other words in the line. This figure of speech creates a difficult semantic situation in the poem. The commentators of the verses have also had problems in correcting and explaining the poems. By carefully consulting different manuscripts and studying the meaning of the poems, one can understand the correct form of the distorted words. Therefore, through a careful examination of some of Khaqani’s poems, the researchers were able to find out that the words “oshtad” and “banat” have been incorrectly changed into the words “ostad” and “nabat” which create some problems in the meaning of the poems, too.