Reading Forugh Farrokhzād’s ‘Panjareh’ (The Window) Poetically

“Reading Forugh Farrokhzād’s ‘Panjareh’ ([The] Window)’ Poetically” offers an American formalist analysis of her well-known later poem. The essay begins with a brief description of what Wilber Scott calls “The Formalist Approach: Literature as Aesthetic Structure” in Five Approaches of Literary Criticism (1962) and presents cursory analyses of Farrokhzād’s “Joft” ([The] Couple) and “Jom‘eh (Friday[s]) illustrating formalist attention to the texts as amalgam of sense and sound, not unlike analyses in Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introductin to Poetry (9th edition, 1999) and in the first chapter of Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015). The essay proceeds to a line-by-line, stanza-by-stanza appreciation of potentially poetic features of Farrokhzad’s “(The) Window)” read in vacuo and a sui generis text. The analysis engages imagery, figurative language, repetition and rhetorical patterns, and aural elements. The essay concludes with a contrast between Farrokhzād’s use of the image of (the) sun in “The Window” and “suns” in Nimā Yushij’s “Dar Kenār-e Rudkhāneh” (By the Riverbank) and a comparison of the meaning of “…is enough (kāfi and bas for me” in Farrokhzād’s poem and in the Hāfezian ghazal that begins “gol‘ezāri az golestān-e jahān mā-rā bas” (a flower-face from the rose garden of the world is enough for me).