A Study and an Analysis of Didactic Foundations in Saadi's Quatrains

Subject Areas : شاهنامه

Hamzeh  Akbarizadeh ¹ (Ph.D. Student of Persian Language and Literature Department, Jiroft Branch, Islamic Azad University, Jiroft, Iran)
Nemat  Isfahani omran ² (Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature Department, Jiroft Branch, Islamic Azad University, Jiroft, Iran (corresponding author))
Hamid  Tabasi ³ (Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature Department, Jiroft Branch, Islamic Azad University, Jiroft, Iran)

Received: 2022-04-19 Accepted : 2022-04-19 Published : 2022-05-22

Keywords: Saadi, Quatrains, Didactic Foundations, Philosophical-Moral Themes,

Abstract :

The high frequency of some ethical themes in the text indicates the educational foundations in the author's thinking. Didactic foundations are more ostensible in a coherent and short literary form like quatrains, because the poet tries to depict his instructive thoughts with the shortest form of thought, in order to be more effective. Saadi is one of the poets who has portrayed his didactic concerns in various forms of poetry, including his quatrains. These concerns and didactic foundations are more pronounced in Saadi's quatrains than in his other works due to the brevity of form and structure of the quatrains. Doing this research could be significant and necessary because literary researches did not paid enough attention to Saadi's didactic quatrains. Furthermore, the quatrains have a special capacity to find Saadi's didactic foundations. Accordingly, in this article, an attempt has been done to examine in a descriptive and analytical manner, the didactic foundations of Saadi's quatrains, which have not been explored so far. Numerous themes, including death, unreliability of the world, love, predestination, free will, justice, and morality (special behavioral hints), form the profound didactic structure of Saadi's quatrains. Understanding these didactic themes requires classification and genealogical view to discover the intellectual and ideological origin of the poet's thoughts. The research findings show that the didactic foundations in Saadi's quatrains are influenced by the jurisprudential and theological ideas of his time and the philosophical ideas of ancient Iran. In fact, the poet composed his quatrains according to the unsettled situation of the society of his time. He has given didactic and instructive quatrains, so that he can teach the audience a set of moral good deeds.