Pastoral Imagery in the Poetry of Nima Yushij

Nature is deemed by Romantics as a vital entity in earning insight into the status human occupies in the world. The free verse of the Persian poet Nima Yushij (1897–1960), representing the culmination of Romanticism in Persian poetry, appeared in the 1920s and experienced its efflorescence during Pahlavi I and later-Pahlavi II eras. In its discursive function the imaginative pastoral affects the serious literature, national policies, and democratic ideals. The contrast of the rural and urban is a focal structural point in Nima’s poetry and it ultimately establishes a political allegory. The utilization of a wide spectrum of visual natural imagery enables Nima to substitute the redemptive power in the pastoral world for the promise of modernization which was degenerated into tyranny and oppression. Recruiting Marx’s notion of pastoral, the special concern of this article is to evaluate how via the employment of imagery the pastoral realm has been incorporated into a powerful metaphor in Nima’s poetry. This critical reading of nature imagery would disclose how the device becomes a central symbol in conceptualizing the social and political issues associated with early modernist developments in Iran.