A Dynamic Atlas of Persian Poetic Symbolism: Families, Fields, and the Historical Rewiring of Meaning

Meaning in Persian poetry is both historical and relational. Words persist through literary tradition while shifting their force through changing constellations of neighbors, rhetorical frames, and poetic voices. This study examines that process using aligned Word2Vec spaces combined with graph-based neighborhood analysis across centuries and major poets. Rather than modeling semantic change as vector displacement alone, it treats lexical history as the rewiring of local semantic graphs: the gain and loss of neighbors, shifts in bridge roles, and movement across communities. The analysis centers on twenty target words, anchored by five recurrent reference terms: Earth, Night, two wine terms, and Heart. Surrounding them are affective, courtly, elemental, and Sufi concepts such as Love, Sorrow, Dervish, King, Annihilation, and Truth. These words exhibit distinct patterns of change. Night is more time-sensitive, Earth more poet-sensitive, and Heart shows continuity despite graph-role mobility. The two wine terms highlight probe sensitivity: one is broad and semantically diffuse, while the other is narrower and more stable. A lexical audit confirms that the corpus contains historically driven terms, poet-specific usages, and sparsely attested mystical vocabulary requiring caution. Overall, semantic change in Persian poetry is better captured as neighborhood rewiring than as abstract drift. For Digital Humanities, this approach restores local structure to computational analysis and supports interpretations closer to literary practice: persistence, migration, mediation, and selective transformation.

This study examines phonetic texture in Persian poetry as a literary-historical phenomenon rather than a by-product of meter or a feature used only for classification. The analysis draws on a large corpus of 1,116,306 mesras from 31,988 poems written by 83 poets, restricted to five major classical meters to enable controlled comparison. Each line is converted into a grapheme-to-phoneme representation and analyzed using six phonetic metrics: hardness, sonority, sibilance, vowel ratio, phoneme entropy, and consonant-cluster ratio. Statistical models estimate poet-level differences while controlling for meter, poetic form, and line length. The results show that although meter and form explain a substantial portion of phonetic variation, they do not eliminate systematic differences between poets. Persian poetic sound therefore appears as conditioned variation within shared prosodic structures rather than as either purely individual style or simple metrical residue. A multidimensional stylistic map reveals several recurrent phonetic profiles, including high-sonority lyric styles, hardness-driven rhetorical or epic styles, sibilant mystical contours, and high-entropy complex textures. Historical analysis indicates that phonetic distributions shift across centuries, reflecting changes in genre prominence, literary institutions, and performance contexts rather than abrupt stylistic breaks. The study establishes a corpus-scale framework for phonetic analysis in Persian poetry and demonstrates how computational phonetics can contribute to literary-historical interpretation while remaining attentive to the formal structures that shape Persian verse.

Classical Persian poetry is a historically sustained archive in which affective life is expressed through metaphor, intertextual convention, and rhetorical indirection. These properties make close reading indispensable while limiting reproducible comparison at scale. We present an uncertainty-aware computational framework for poet-level psychological analysis based on large-scale automatic multi-label annotation. Each verse is associated with a set of psychological concepts, per-label confidence scores, and an abstention flag that signals insufficient evidence. We aggregate confidence-weighted evidence into a Poet $\times$ Concept matrix, interpret each poet as a probability distribution over concepts, and quantify poetic individuality as divergence from a corpus baseline using Jensen--Shannon divergence and Kullback--Leibler divergence. To capture relational structure beyond marginals, we build a confidence-weighted co-occurrence graph over concepts and define an Eigenmood embedding through Laplacian spectral decomposition. On a corpus of 61{,}573 verses across 10 poets, 22.2% of verses are abstained, underscoring the analytical importance of uncertainty. We further report sensitivity analysis under confidence thresholding, selection-bias diagnostics that treat abstention as a category, and a distant-to-close workflow that retrieves verse-level exemplars along Eigenmood axes. The resulting framework supports scalable, auditable digital-humanities analysis while preserving interpretive caution by propagating uncertainty from verse-level evidence to poet-level inference.