Coordination of Emotion and Imagery in Saadi’s Ghazals: A Structural Analysis of the Mechanism of Emotional Objectification and the Dynamics of Imagery

Abstract

how these two components interact in shaping the coherence of Saadi’s ghazals. The central research question concerns how emotion in Saadi’s ghazals is objectified through imagistic elements and, conversely, how the structure of imagery contributes to the representation and intensification of the poem’s emotional quality. In terms of purpose, the study is fundamental research, and methodologically, it adopts a descriptive–analytical design based on qualitative content analysis. The research corpus consists of Saadi’s ghazals, from which a purposive sample of 30 ghazals was selected on the basis of the simultaneous prominence of emotional and imagistic components. In the analytical process, the selected poems were examined in terms of type of emotion, type of imagery, degree of image dynamism, and the source domain of imagery, and the relationships among these components were subsequently analyzed. The findings indicate that imagery in Saadi’s ghazals does not merely perform an ornamental function; rather, it constitutes one of the principal mechanisms for the objectification and communication of emotion. This coordination manifests itself at three levels: lexical, imagistic, and structural. Accordingly, the selection of words carrying sensory and emotional connotations directs the type and quality of imagery, while the dynamism or static quality of the image is also associated with the dominant emotional quality of the ghazal. On this basis, it may be argued that the relationship between emotion and imagery in Saadi’s ghazals is not merely one of co-occurrence; rather, it functions as a structural mechanism for establishing coherence between form and content. The findings of this study can contribute to a more precise understanding of how internal emotional states are objectified and how imagistic elements are organized in classical Persian ghazal poetry.