Abstract
Love, as the definitive theme of lyric poetry, has been embedded in, and encriched, the Persian sonnet in worldly and spiritual manifestations. The expression of love, be it the mundane ...
Read More
Love, as the definitive theme of lyric poetry, has been embedded in, and encriched, the Persian sonnet in worldly and spiritual manifestations. The expression of love, be it the mundane or the immaterial, requires the articulation of the bond between the lover and the beloved. This article studies Sa’eb’s descriptions of the beloved to address three questions: How can we describe the inward and outward characteristics of Sa’eb’s beloved? What are the differences between the beloved in the sonnets of Sa’eb and those in other works of Persian literature? And to what extent is the image of the beloved influenced by the style of the poet in question? An interpretation of more than half of his sonnets reveals that the manifestation of the beloved in Sa’eb’s body of work differ from the accepted image of the beloved in the Khorasani and Iraqi styles of Persian poetry. It will be argued that Sa’eb’s is a more intricate description of the beloved whose colourful features and emotional expressions constitute a remarkable image of the beloved in the Persian lyric tradition.
Keywords: Sa’eb, love, sonnet, the beloved
