Atoyi’s lyrics: devices of depiction

The textbook calls Atoyi a master of delicate imagination and unexpected exaggerated images. By making the beloved a “shah” and himself a “slave”, he expresses both the loyalty of love and its inequality. In the ghazal “Jamoling vasfini qildim chamanda” the flowers blush with shame before the beloved’s beauty: this is tashxis, giving human traits to a lifeless thing. The fifth bayt has talmeh, an allusion to the story of Yusuf and Ya’qub – the brothers threw Yusuf into a well and told their father a wolf had eaten him, and Ya’qub lost his sight from weeping for his son. In the sixth bayt the words “uzun” and “uzmasmen” share one root, the device of ishtiqoq; the contrast of “sarvi ozod” (free cypress) and “banda” (slave) is tazod. In the ghazal with the refrain “Ey do‘st” antithesis is used a lot, and so is tanosib (a chain of logically related words). In some ghazals a Sufi spirit is felt: the poet calls preferring paradise to union with the beloved “foolish”.