Structural Linguistic Analysis of Sohrab Sepehri's Romantic Poem

Structural linguistic analysis, one of the first approaches of new criticism, studies the text by using data from the science of linguistics, regardless of any hypertext elements. Such an approach was first used in the analyses of Russian formalists, in particular Jacobsen, and then in the studies of various structuralists. According to structuralists, a literary text is composed of, first and foremost, a set of special linguistic phenomena that distinguish it from other texts; this distinction can be seen at all structural levels of the text. This article aims to examine the poem "Smoke is Rising" by Sohrab Sepehri, a Persian poet whose poems are a reflection of the elements of the school of Romanticism, by making use of Jacobsen's theories. According to Jacobsen's method, structural elements of the poem are described on three levels: phonetic, lexical, and syntactic. A careful reading on this basis leads us to understand the hidden network of meaning in the poem. In fact, the purpose of this article is to answer questions such as how linguistic functions in the geometric form of poetry are effective in conveying meanings and how the system of words governing the external structures of the poem contain concepts related to the mood and the main theme of the poem. A study of phonetic, grammatical, and lexical-semantic elements shows that the hidden layers of meaning are closely related to the form of poetry, and play a role in the creation of beauty.