A Dynamic Atlas of Persian Poetic Symbolism: Families, Fields, and the Historical Rewiring of Meaning

2026-04-01

AI Summary

This study addresses the limitations of traditional approaches that reduce Persian poetic symbols to isolated lexical items or generalized semantic categories, thereby overlooking their transmission as familial clusters and their meaning-making through relational networks. Leveraging a corpus of 129,451 Persian poems, this work proposes the first dynamic systems model of the Persian symbolic repertoire. By applying large-scale text clustering, it identifies three symbol families—imagistic, sacred, and courtly—and combines diachronic binning across eleven Hijri centuries with multilayer network analysis to trace their historical evolution and structural reconfiguration. Findings reveal a sparse symbolic core surrounded by a dense referential periphery; enduring prevalence of families such as “night,” “day,” and “earth”; intensification of “wine vessel” and “garden” imagery in later periods; declining courtly associations alongside rising sacred linkages; and the persistent centrality of the “wine cup,” with the “Sufi robe” emerging prominently in late centuries.

Abstract

Persian poetry is often remembered through recurrent symbols before it is remembered through plot. Wine vessels, gardens, flames, sacred titles, bodily beauty, and courtly names return across centuries, yet computational work still tends to flatten this material into isolated words or broad document semantics. That misses a practical unit of organization in Persian poetics: related forms travel as families and gain force through recurring relations. Using a corpus of 129,451 poems, we consolidate recurrent forms into traceable families, separate imagistic material from sacred and courtly reference, and map their relations in a multi-layer graph. The symbolic core is relatively sparse, the referential component much denser, and the attachment zone between them selective rather than diffuse. Across 11 Hijri-century bins, some families remain widely distributed, especially Shab (Night), Ruz (Day), and Khaak (Earth). Wine vessels, garden space, flame, and lyric sound strengthen later, while prestige-coded and heroic-courtly vocabulary is weighted earlier. Century-specific graphs show change in arrangement as well as membership. Modularity rises, cross-scope linkage declines, courtly bridges weaken, and sacred bridges strengthen. Hub positions shift too: Kherqe (Sufi Robe) gains late prominence, Farkhondeh {Blessed} and Banafsheh (Violet) recede, and Saaghar (Wine Cup) stays central across the chronology. In this corpus, Persian symbolism appears less as a fixed repertory than as a long-lived system whose internal weights and connections change over time.

Problem

• Persian poetry
• symbolic families
• historical semantics
• poetic symbolism
• computational literary analysis

Innovation

• symbolic families
• multi-layer graph
• historical semantics
• Persian poetics
• dynamic atlas