Rhetorical Similes in the Poetry of Shafiee Kadkani

Simile and allusion are two rhetorical aspects that have been taken into consideration by the scholars of rhetoric since long time ago. Some of the Iranian poets have used the capacities of the Persian language and integrated these aspects to create a modern rhetoric which in this study is introduced as rhetorical simile. The objective of the present study is the investigation of this rhetoric in 1340s poems and some of early 1350s works of Shafiee Kadkani. For this purpose, “a mirror for sounds” including “whispers”, “night reading”, “from the leaf”, “in the garden alleys of Neishabour”, “like a tree in a rainy night”, “from existence and singing”, and “Booye jooye moolian” are studied. The objective of this study is to introduce the features of this rhetoric such as defamiliarization, highlighting, succinctness, non-translatability, validity, and assigning them to Farsi, which is done in Persian literature for the first time. Introducing the implicit relationship of these similes and the themes of Shafiee Kadkani as well as his capability in employing the rhetoric constitute another objective of this study is investigating the use of descriptive and analytical method and content analysis. Placing mythological, religious, mystical, and scientific personalities in these similes show the awareness of the poet regarding rhetoric. This justifies the frequency of such similes in his poems, his innovations, and observation of the semantic-thematic proportion of the poems with these rhetorical aspects.