Association of Meaning in Hafez's Poetry

Hafez intended to avoid repetition in the application of figures of speech which results in nonsense and so he appealed to an artistic and psychological technique; mentioned in this article as "association of meaning". In psychology, association of meaning relates to a concept which associates a series of concepts to the mind based on the principle of proximity, similarity or contrast. In Hafez's poetry, association is used in the sense that he disintegrates the component parts of a traditional image, and through substitution, he uses them in a way that each component connotes the others. For instance, in literary tradition, "ringlet" is accompanied by a series of stereotypical adjectives such as disordered, long, black, wavy, etc, or is compared to violet, hyacinth, ring, chain, musk, and so on. However, in contrast to this tradition, Hafez, when talking of ringlet, attributes length to hope and disorder to heart. In the modern Persian books, association of meaning is not observed a literary ornament and the only literary man who has mentioned the role of rhyme in the association of meaning is Dr. Shafee Kadkani, yet in the West this issue has been discussed as "stream of consciousness"; especially in story-writing classes. Once the association of meaning has been surveyed in psychology, literature and its differences with ambiguity, proportion, and ambiguous ambition are expressed, the discovered samples of this ornament in Hafez' Divan are further on discussed. The finding of the present research is that although the primary samples of this ornament are seen less in the poetry books of poets before Hafez and even his contemporary ones, and even in pioneering poets such as Rodaki, these samples are quite rare. However they have a higher frequency in Hafez' poetry and therefore due to their high repetition and variety, samples of such displacement in adjectives and their related elements are more than other works.