Literary Arts (Apr 2017)
Prominent stylistic aspects in music of Nāser Khosrow's poetry
Abstract
It is axiomatic for those who are stylistically a little familiar about the periods of Persian poetry that quasidas of Nāser-e Khosrow are totally different from those of the poets in fifth lunar century both in terms of their contents and technically. This difference is seen even in those areas of his poetry in which the poet is confided to make innovations. This paper investigates Nāser-e Khosrow's style in the field of the music of poetry. It also aims to identify his slylistic differences comparing with those of his most famous contemporaries (Onsori, Farrokhi and Manoochehri) in external, lateral and internal areas. As the first step, all the Nāser Khosrow's poems -exept for additions section- was considered the Scope of this study, accompanied by main parts of other three cited poets' divans (poetical works) which consists almost 23600 distiches. For the second stage, each poet's divan were separatly scrutinized in three fields of the music of poetry. The frequency of each cases were recorded and after comparing statistics related to Nāser-e Khosrow's poems with other tree poets, stylistic charachteristics of his poetry were explored. Statistical information related to the poets were generally recorded in a table and some parts of them were shown in a bar graph. It seems necessary to note that the researcher considered two items of innovation and frequncy in all phases of the study. Most of the studies done in the field of Nāser-e Khosrow's music of poetry, investigated the prosody and meter of his poetry. Most of these studies considered difficulty and relevancy as the important prosodic characteristics of his poetry. Regarding the lateral and internal areas of Nāser-e Khosrow's poetry, there are not much argument proposed except for using difficult rhymes and nominal radifs ( for lateral music of poetry) and attending to figures of speech which are based on some types repetition ( for internal music of poetry). In this paper, musical characteristics of Nāser-e Khosrow's poetry were classified into three sections comparing with those of the three above cited poets: A) in prosody or external area, main characteristics of his style were concluded into two items: 1) using rare meters, and 2) pause in meter, which is one of the main factors for making his quasidas' meters unpleasant. One reason for this could be "poetic emotions". It means that the meter of Nāser-e Khosrow's poetry is not a selective act. It is related directly to his emotions and this is one reason for his metric differences in comparison to those of other poets. His emotions are mirrored in his poetical meters and because his emotions are different from others', his used meters are different from others'. So that the reason for pauses or his unpleasant meters in his poems was related to his different emotions. Another reason for using unpleasant and difficult meters was that Nāser-e Khosrow avoided kings' courts (as an incentive for using pleasant meters for other contemporaries). Besides, attention and emphasis on such topics as advice, asceticism, and criticism influenced on the type of used meters and quality of meter selection by Nāser-e Khosrow. B) in lateral area of Nāser-e Khosrow's music of poetry, the only point to be noticed is using non-verb radifs more than his contemporaries. C) Considering the internal area of Nāser-e Khosrow's music of poetry, the most important characteristics of his poetry style is ample using of such devices as alliteration, assonance, and some types of pun. But one important point about pun in his poetry is in special use of that as a pivot for satire, criticism and lampoon.
