A Dynamic Atlas of Persian Poetic Symbolism: Families, Fields, and the Historical Rewiring of Meaning
Kourosh Shahnazari, Seyed Moein Ayyoubzadeh, Mohammadali Keshtparvar

TL;DR
This paper constructs a multi-layer graph of Persian poetic symbols from a large corpus, revealing how their relationships and prominence evolve over centuries, highlighting the dynamic nature of poetic symbolism.
Contribution
It introduces a method to organize recurrent poetic forms into families and map their relations over time, moving beyond isolated word analysis.
Findings
Symbolic core is sparse, referential component dense.
Certain families like Night, Day, and Earth remain widespread.
Graph analysis shows evolving connections and prominence of symbols over 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),…
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