Introduction

“Appeals and Entreaties” by Dr. Bemanian is a poetic exploration of how humans search for stability in an unpredictable world. Rather than discussing these themes in purely abstract terms, the poem grounds them in vivid imagery: we build fragile “tents of allures” and “squadrons of pavilions” to protect ourselves, yet we are constantly battered by “gusts, bursts and flurries.” The central argument of Dr. Bemanian’s work is that our true foundation is not found in these artificial shelters or in the “murmurs” and “gossips” of society. Instead, genuine stability and meaning are discovered by embracing our primal “instincts,” observing the vastness of nature (the “oceans and seas”), and ultimately anchoring ourselves in the intimate, direct connection between two individuals.

Extended Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis

Stanza 1: The Architecture of Fragility and the Will to Live

The opening stanza establishes a clear conflict between human-made structures and the raw power of nature. Dr. Bemanian uses the “tent of allures and charms” and “squadrons of pavilions” to represent the physical and psychological comforts we construct. However, these are built on “shaky grounds” and are easily compromised by the “squalls.” Dr. Bemanian questions what truly allows us to stand firm. The answer is not in the external “gazebos,” but rather within: it is the “core and kernel of vivacity” — our primal “instincts, urges and knacks” — that provide the true strength to “stand, plunk and pluck.”

Stanza 2: The Phenomenology of Desire and the Obstinacy of Reality

Here, Dr. Bemanian examines human ambition. Our “aspirations and pleas” are restless; they “twist and wiggle” and “mix and blend.” We are driven by “covets and craves.” Yet, this constant striving is abruptly interrupted by the harsh reality of “snap stumbles, sudden slip-ups.” The imagery of “caravans and convoys [that] plunder and pillage” illustrates how chaotic and destructive human ambition can be. Dr. Bemanian asserts that despite our aggressive pursuits, it is the immovable “hurdles, barriers and snags” — the “intrinsic or innate” realities of the world — that ultimately dictate the outcome and “foretell and flounder” our paths.

Stanza 3: Epistemology of Illumination and the Authentic Self

Moving from action to perception, Dr. Bemanian explores how we attain clarity. The “windows and gaps” and “glasses and transoms” are physical openings that serve as metaphors for moments of insight. They “shimmer and shine,” actively working to “unveil and disclose” the truth of our surroundings. However, this clarity requires human participation. Dr. Bemanian emphasizes “vigilance and alertness”; it is through our active, conscious observation that our “inclinations and wishes” are able to truly “wield and flourish.”

Stanza 4: The Dialectic of the Social Fabric

Dr. Bemanian then turns a critical eye toward society. He paints a picture of a world filled with the superficial noise of “murmurs, whispers, mutters and mumbles” and “rumors and gossips.” Yet, he acknowledges the necessary duality of this social fabric, recognizing that society contains both “weeds and flowers,” “thorns and spins,” as well as “red roses.” Despite the chaotic chatter, Dr. Bemanian insists on a deeper, underlying human connection: “communal commencements are ties never end.” Beneath the surface noise, there is an “innate and inborn” desire for “unanimity, the harmony and unison” that binds people together.

Stanza 5: The Alchemy of Existential Anxiety

The poem directly addresses the heavy burden of daily life. “Tensions and worries, drench and soak,” while “pressures, stresses, marinate and steep.” Dr. Bemanian makes the physical and mental weight of existence palpable. Yet, he immediately offers a powerful antidote. Cutting through this dense anxiety is a “beam of wonders, timbres and tenors.” Dr. Bemanian suggests that by tuning into this underlying harmony or beauty in the world, we can find the power to “invoke, appeal, refer and heal,” transforming our stress into spiritual solace.

Stanza 6: The Sublime and the Teleological Quest

The perspective widens dramatically to take in the awe-inspiring scale of the natural world: the “oceans and seas, the mountains and hills.” Dr. Bemanian notes that “their hisses are concealed,” implying that nature holds deep, silent mysteries. This vastness calls to the “ardent, decisive seekers” and the “fervent and keen sakers and falcons.” These imagery-rich lines describe the spiritual or philosophical quest to uncover the “course of unknowns” and to “expose the destiny and faith” that govern our lives.

Stanza 7: Cosmic Harmony and the Relational Self

In the final stanza, Dr. Bemanian brings the cosmic and the personal together. He acknowledges that the “charms, charismas, adorn the living,” recognizing the beauty that rewards our persistence. The universe is depicted as a perfectly synchronized system where the “sun pats,” “clouds… ensue,” “rain obey needs,” and “squirrels jump.” This seamless natural order proves that “wholeness does exist.” However, Dr. Bemanian concludes with a stunning, intimate pivot. After traversing the vastness of the cosmos and the complexities of society, he distills all meaning down to a single, profound truth: “only you and me.” The entire universe ultimately serves to highlight the sacred, relational bond between two individuals.

Comparative Analysis: Literary Masterpieces and Philosophical Traditions

To fully appreciate the conceptual depth of “Appeals and Entreaties,” it is vital to read Dr. Bemanian’s work alongside other major literary masterpieces and poets who have grappled with these enduring dualities.

1. The Fragility of Artificial Constructs vs. The Enduring Natural World

Dr. Bemanian’s contrast between the fragile “tent of allures” or “regiments of gazebos” and the enduring, immovable “oceans and seas” heavily echoes Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias. Just as Shelley illustrates the futility of a tyrant’s stone monuments decaying into the “lone and level sands,” Dr. Bemanian warns that human-made “pavilions” rest on “shaky grounds.” Similarly, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage famously contrasts the destructive, transient nature of human empires with the eternal, unchangeable power of the ocean (“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!”). Dr. Bemanian aligns with these Romantic poets, asserting that true stability is found not in the artificial structures we build, but in the “intrinsic or innate” forces of nature and the internal “kernel of vivacity.”

2. Existential Anxiety Reconciled by Cosmic Interconnectedness

In Stanza 5, Dr. Bemanian vividly describes the “tensions and worries” that “drench and soak,” capturing a modern existential angst. Yet, this anxiety is healed by the “beam of wonders” and the realization that the “sun pats” and “squirrels jump” in perfect cosmic rhythm. This movement from heavy existential dread to a healing realization of natural unity closely mirrors William Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth writes of the “heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world” being lightened by a “sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused” in the setting suns and the ocean. Like Wordsworth, Dr. Bemanian proposes that our internal anxieties are remedied when we recognize our harmonious place within the larger “wholeness” of the cosmos.

3. The Superficial Clamor of the Collective vs. Intimate Relational Truth

A defining element of Dr. Bemanian’s poem is the rejection of the “murmurs, whispers… rumors and gossips” of society in favor of the deeply intimate conclusion: “only you and me.” This dichotomy recalls T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, where the protagonist is paralyzed by the superficial chatter of society (“In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo”) and struggles to forge a genuine, intimate connection. While Eliot’s Prufrock remains trapped in the noise, Dr. Bemanian offers a triumphant resolution. He successfully moves through the societal “mutters and mumbles” to anchor existence in the purity of “you and me,” achieving a relational sanctity that earlier modernist poets often sought but found elusive.

Conclusion

In “Appeals and Entreaties,” Dr. Bemanian provides a highly concrete, image-driven map for navigating the uncertainties of life. He demonstrates that relying on the artificial “pavilions” of human ambition or the “gossips” of society will only lead to “stumbles” on “shaky grounds.” By grounding his philosophy in the enduring power of nature and the resilience of our internal “vivacity,” Dr. Bemanian ultimately leads the reader to a place of profound peace. The poem concludes by demonstrating that despite the immense scale of the oceans and the complexities of human society, the truest, most undeniable reality is found in the simple, unbroken bond between two people.

About the Poem

“Appeals and Entreaties” is the latest copyrighted poetic work by Dr. Alireza Bemanian, composed on May 10, 2026. The poem serves as a critical exploration of human foundations, contrasting the fragile architectures of our daily ambitions with the enduring truths of nature and interpersonal connection. Characterized by its vivid imagery — ranging from shaking gazebos to soaring falcons — the piece is a definitive statement on the journey from existential anxiety toward cosmic harmony and relational intimacy.

© Dr. Alireza Bemanian, www.bemanian.com
Note: This analysis honors the intellectual property and creative vision of Dr. Alireza Bemanian. The poem “Appeals and Entreaties” is © 2026 www.bemanian.com, all rights reserved.

I. Introduction: The Poem’s Philosophical Wager

“Appeals and Entreaties” opens with a declaration that is, at the same time, a complete aesthetic philosophy: “The tent of allures and charms, appeals and entreaties, the posture and strength.” Before the poem has offered a single argument, before a single image has developed into narrative or symbol, it has already enacted its deepest claim about the nature of reality and the nature of language. The doublet — “allures and charms,” “appeals and entreaties,” “posture and strength” — is not the poem’s stylistic signature; it is its ontological thesis. Reality is not singular. It resists the single name. Every thing, every quality, every human gesture toward the world is already at least double, and the only honest response to this irreducible plurality is to keep naming, to keep adding, to approach the real through accumulative fidelity rather than through the comfortable compression of the definitive term.

This is a philosophical wager of the first order — and it is a wager that the poem sustains across every one of its seven stanzas without retreat. “Appeals and Entreaties” does not merely use doubling as a device; it inhabits it as a way of knowing. The poem is the argument. Its form is its philosophy. And the philosophy it advances — that reality is always at least two things at once, that experience resists the lie of the singular name, and that the only fidelity available to consciousness is the fidelity of enumeration — is original, coherent, and profound in its implications for what poetry is and what it can do.

But the poem’s ambition does not stop at this formal ontology. Across seven stanzas, Dr. Bemanian conducts what can only be called a phenomenology of seeking: a complete account of what it is to be a consciousness that aspires, encounters resistance, discovers permeability, inhabits communal life, endures pressure, expands to the cosmic scale, and ultimately arrives at the intimate resolution that the vast and the near are not opposed but identical. This arc is not narrative — nothing happens, no event occurs, no story is told — but it is nevertheless complete, moving from the opening posture of the seeking self inside its temporary shelter to the closing posture of two people in a cosmos that attends to them. The poem is a phenomenological complete sentence, and its grammar is one of the genuine innovations of contemporary philosophical poetry in English.

II. Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis

Stanza 1

The tent of allures and charms, appeals and entreaties, the posture and strength,

shaky grounds, quakes and quivers, and the gusts, bursts and flurries,

the squalls squander, and bustles and bouts blunder,

is it the vigor’s and sparkle’s fortune, or the core and kernel of vivacity to cultivate and cherish,

the squadrons of pavilions and marquees, regiments of gazebos and pergolas,

are vividly anchored, the instincts, urges and knacks to stand, plunk and pluck.

The poem’s opening architectural choice — the tent as the world’s primary form — is a philosophical decision before it is an image. Of all possible dwellings, the tent is the one that most honestly represents the human condition: temporary, mobile, permeable to the wind, requiring active erection and maintenance, beautiful precisely because it makes no pretense to permanence. To begin the poem in a tent is to begin in the world as it actually is, not as we might wish it. And this tent is not merely shelter; it is constituted by allurements, charms, appeals, entreaties — it is made of the very substance of wanting and being wanted, of the human reaching-toward that the poem will trace across its seven stanzas.

The turbulence of lines two and three is crucial and must not be read as mere scene-setting. “Shaky grounds, quakes and quivers” — the ground itself is unstable; there is no bedrock of certainty beneath the tent. The geological and the meteorological arrive together — “gusts, bursts and flurries” — creating a world that is in motion at every scale simultaneously. “The squalls squander” is one of the poem’s most acoustically deliberate constructions: the hard “sq” cluster followed by the sibilant release of “squander” makes the line perform the wasteful expenditure of energy it names. The world wastes itself magnificently, and in this wasteful motion is both threat and vitality.

The stanza’s fourth line delivers the poem’s originating question with a precision that earns careful attention: “is it the vigor’s and sparkle’s fortune, or the core and kernel of vivacity to cultivate and cherish?” This is not a rhetorical question; it is a genuine philosophical binary. What sustains the seeker in the turbulent world — is it the external bestowment of fortune, the sparkle of luck and chance, or is it the interior cultivation, the tended and cherished core of vivacity, what one has grown and maintained within oneself? The poem refuses to answer. This refusal is philosophical, not evasive: the poem holds the question open because both are true, and neither is sufficient without the other, and the very holding-of-both is the poem’s contribution to the question.

Lines five and six complete the stanza with the poem’s most startling single image: “the squadrons of pavilions and marquees, regiments of gazebos and pergolas / are vividly anchored.” The militarization of pleasure-space — squadrons and regiments applied to gazebos and pergolas — is not a rhetorical provocation but a genuine philosophical claim. The cultivation of beauty, the organization of the comfortable life, the deployment of shelter and shade and hospitality — these require the same discipline, coordination, and purposeful deployment as military action. The gardener and the general share a logic. And to be “vividly anchored” — where “vividly” names a quality of color and aliveness, not of structural stability — is to be anchored with full presence, with commitment rather than resignation. This is a kind of anchoring available only to the fully alive.

Stanza 2

While, the aspirations and pleas, ambitions and inclinations, twist and wiggle,

objectives, targets, entangle with the covets and craves,

upshots and events, mix and blend, persist and insist, pursue and tumble,

snap stumbles, sudden slip-ups; while caravans and convoys plunder and pillage,

solely the hurdles, barriers and snags,

virtuality and reality, implicitly and inherent, intrinsic or innate, salute and rumble, foretell and flounder.

The pivot word “While” inaugurates the poem’s first encounter with the interior experience of seeking. What stanza one depicted from outside — the turbulent world — stanza two depicts from inside: aspirations “twist and wiggle,” objectives “entangle,” upshots “tumble.” The seeker is not a detached observer of the world’s motion; she is within it, participating in it, shaped by it.

The poem’s honesty in line two is philosophically significant: “objectives, targets, entangle with the covets and craves.” The aspiration and the appetitive are not cleanly separable. Purposeful seeking gets entangled with possessiveness and longing. This admission — that the seeking self is not pure in its aspiration — is a mark of philosophical maturity; the poem does not idealize the seeker even as it celebrates seeking.

“While caravans and convoys plunder and pillage” is a necessary darkening of the poem’s social vision. The caravan is historically one of civilization’s most hopeful images: organized collective movement through hostile terrain, the cooperation of many against the indifferent world, the exchange of goods and knowledge across distances. When the caravan plunders, the poem acknowledges without flinching that collective organized human endeavor contains within it the capacity for predation. The seeking community is not innocent. Beauty coexists with violence in the same organizational structure.

The stanza’s closing philosophical move — “virtuality and reality, implicitly and inherent, intrinsic or innate, salute and rumble, foretell and flounder” — reaches for something deeper than a list of obstacles. The impediments the seeker faces are constitutive features of reality at its most fundamental level: both its virtual dimension (what could be, what is latent) and its actual dimension (what is), both its implicit nature (what is structurally present but not manifest) and its explicit nature (what is fully actualized) — all of these “salute and rumble, foretell and flounder.” Even the obstacles have their own partial, compromised agency. Even the barrier founders. Even what impedes is itself impeded. The poem’s world is one in which nothing is simply fixed or purely resistant; everything is in the turbulent motion that the poem names and inhabits.

Stanza 3

Whereas, the windows and gaps, shimmer and shine,

panes and periods, reveal and expose,

openings and holes, unveil and disclose,

glasses and transoms, divulge and release,

and, vigilance and alertness, inclinations and wishes, wield and flourish.

The pivot word “Whereas” — simultaneously logical, legal, and adversative — marks the poem’s first major turn. Against the turbulence and impediment of the first two stanzas, stanza three proposes a different relationship with the world: not of contest but of disclosure. The world, it turns out, has openings. It is permeable. It yields what it conceals — not indiscriminately, not automatically, but to the alert and attentive.

The stanza achieves its effect through an architectural inventory of mediated transparency: windows, panes, openings, glasses, transoms. Each is a surface that both separates and connects, that keeps the outer world at a measured distance while permitting the passage of light and sight. What is philosophically extraordinary is the precision of the disclosure verbs across the four central lines. “Shimmer and shine” names the world’s most passive self-showing — light playing on a surface without the surface intending anything. “Reveal and expose” introduces agency: the world actively discloses. “Unveil and disclose” carries the metaphor of the removed covering — something previously hidden is made visible by an act of removal. “Divulge and release” reaches the most intimate register: divulge (from the Latin divulgare, to spread abroad what was private) implies a near-confessional act; release implies the liberation of what was held. In four lines, Dr. Bemanian conducts the world from passive shimmer to active liberation.

“Panes and periods” is the stanza’s most original pairing: a physical surface beside a unit of time. By treating both as entities that “reveal and expose,” the poem makes a claim about time that has not been made in quite this way: that periods of time are themselves a form of transparency, that duration is a medium of disclosure. Time is not merely what passes; it is what opens.

The final line — “vigilance and alertness, inclinations and wishes, wield and flourish” — is the stanza’s pivot from world to self. The world’s openings are available only to those who wield what is given. Permeability is not passive gift but active reception. The alert consciousness flourishes not despite the world’s complexity but through it, through the combination of the world’s willingness to disclose and the self’s readiness to receive.

Stanza 4

Murmurs, whispers, mutters and mumbles,

the chatters, and chats, rumors and gossips,

resonate and ring, echo and boom,

the sources are ignored, the bases are redeemed, the hints and the tales, stay forever,

weeds and flowers, the thorns and spins, red roses and the castle, turret, citadel,

assure and confirm; the communal commencements are ties never end,

unanimity, the harmony and unison, innate and inborn, reside, dwell, conjoin.

Stanza four is the poem’s most sociologically and philosophically ambitious stanza, and its central claim — that communal life is sustained and revealed through its most informal, most unofficial, most unattributed vocal acts — is one of the genuine innovations of the poem.

The stanza opens with an inventory that moves deliberately through the lowest registers of human speech: murmurs, whispers, mutters, mumbles, chatters, chats, rumors, gossips. These are not the speech acts of civic discourse, formal declaration, or reasoned argument. They are the ambient vocal texture of communal life. The opening line — “Murmurs, whispers, mutters and mumbles” — performs this quality acoustically: the nasal (m, n) and labial (m, b) sounds are produced at the front of the mouth with minimum vocal expenditure, literally the sounds of subdued and intimate exchange. The line murmurs.

What Dr. Bemanian discovers in this ambient texture is what makes the stanza philosophically original: “the sources are ignored, the bases are redeemed, the hints and the tales, stay forever.” The origin of a rumor is forgotten. The factual basis of gossip is judged and often vindicated over time. But the transmitted content — the hints, the tales — persists. This is a claim about cultural memory and communal persistence that runs counter to every official theory of how communities maintain their identity and values. Dr. Bemanian observes that communities persist through the hints and tales that circulate without authorization, without source, without accountability — and that these persist precisely because they are not tethered to a source that can be discredited or forgotten.

“Weeds and flowers, the thorns and spins, red roses and the castle, turret, citadel” draws together in a single line two of the deepest symbolic pairings in world literary tradition: the weed/flower dialectic (cultivation versus wildness, the cherished versus the discarded) and the red rose beside the castle (beauty and defense, the beloved and the fortress). In Persian classical poetry, the rose (gol) and the nightingale (bolbol) constitute the tradition’s central longing dyad. In European courtly and heraldic tradition, the rose beside the fortress is the emblem of love’s persistence within the social order’s power. Dr. Bemanian places them in a single line without mediation, without translating one tradition into the other, without choosing between them — and in this refusal of choice, he makes a claim: that both traditions are equally available, equally present, equally primary. This is not ecumenicism; it is a genuine ontological position about the plurality of the real.

“Unanimity, the harmony and unison, innate and inborn, reside, dwell, conjoin” — the stanza’s closing claim is one of the most philosophically consequential in the entire poem. Unanimity is declared to be innate. Not achieved through deliberation or negotiation. Not constructed through social contract or institutional agreement. But original, inborn, the constitutive state of human communal being from which all the turbulence of seeking and impediment is a temporary departure. This is a genuinely original philosophical claim, and its consequences for how we understand community, belonging, and the social bond are radical.

Stanza 5

Tensions and worries, drench and soak,

frictions and pulls, quest and seek,

pressures, stresses, marinate and steep,

still, the beam of wonders, timbres and tenors,

invoke, appeal, refer and heal.

Stanza five is the poem’s center of gravity — its briefest stanza, its most compressed, and the location of one of its most original philosophical contributions. The brevity is not accidental; compression is the stanza’s formal argument. The world’s pressure is acknowledged in three lines, and then answered in two.

“Pressures, stresses, marinate and steep” — this single line rewrites the conventional understanding of what adversity does. In the long tradition of poetry that engages with difficulty — and it is among the oldest of poetic subjects — difficulty is almost universally framed as obstacle: something to be endured, transcended, survived, or overcome. The speaker stands against adversity; the adversity stands against the speaker; the poem records the contest. Dr. Bemanian reframes the contest entirely: adversity is a marinade. A marinade does not merely surround; it penetrates and transforms. The substance immersed in it is not diminished but altered at the level of composition — deeper in flavor, changed in character, more fully itself because of the sustained immersion. To marinate in pressure and stress is to say that adversity works on the human being the way a marinade works on what it surrounds: not destroying but deepening, not eliminating identity but inflecting it, altering what it contains and what it releases. This is a reframing with genuine philosophical consequences for how one relates to suffering.

“Still, the beam of wonders, timbres and tenors” — the pivot word “still” is this stanza’s compression point. Still as nevertheless, still as in continuous, still as in motionless: all three meanings are simultaneously active. The beam of wonders — compound in its nature, both visible (beam of light) and audible (timbres and tenors, the characteristic qualities of voices) — is the poem’s answer to the acknowledged difficulty. The answer is not resolution; it is persistence. The wonders invoke, appeal, refer, and heal — four verbs that move from the formal (invoke) through the poem’s own title-word (appeal) to the intimate (heal). The stanza recapitulates the poem’s title at its center, and names appeal not as abstract force but as active healing.

Stanza 6

The oceans and seas, the mountains and hills, their hisses are concealed,

the waves, upsurges, trends and bearings, stands and stances, rostra and rostrums,

convey and carry, evince, manifest, the course of unknowns, mysteries and routes,

ardent, decisive seekers, the postulants; fervent and keen sakers and falcons,

to, reveal the journey, divulge the jaunt, and expose the destiny and faith.

Stanza six is the poem’s expansion into the cosmic register, arriving without preparation after the compressed pressure of stanza five. The breath held tight in five lines releases outward into oceans and seas, mountains and hills. The scale change is abrupt because it must be: the release from compression is always sudden.

“Their hisses are concealed” — the first thing the poem says about the vast natural world is not that it is beautiful or sublime or overwhelming, but that it conceals its essential communications. The ocean’s hiss and the mountain’s resonance are hidden from ordinary perception. The cosmic is not a larger version of the transparency discovered in stanza three; it is a larger concealment, demanding the ardent seeker rather than merely the vigilant watcher.

“Rostra and rostrums” — the architectural progression that has been running through the poem arrives at its civic and rhetorical apex: the waves and mountains are themselves rostrums, platforms from which the world addresses those capable of hearing. The world speaks; its formations are the platforms of its speech. But what it conveys is “the course of unknowns, mysteries and routes” — not clear instruction but the shape of mystery, the structure of what has not yet been comprehended. The world’s speech is not transparent; it outlines the shape of its own opacity.

“Ardent, decisive seekers, the postulants; fervent and keen sakers and falcons” — this is the stanza’s philosophical synthesis, and it is one the poem’s most original contributions to the literature of seeking. The postulant — one who formally petitions for admission to a community of spiritual practice, who has committed their aspiration to disciplined, sustained seeking — is placed side by side with the saker falcon (Falco cherrug, الصقر in Arabic, شاهین in Persian): a raptor of fierce hunting instinct, trained over years of exacting practice to pursue its quarry with total precision. The word “saker” itself is a cross-cultural artifact — Arabic in root, naturalized into European falconry through centuries of transmission — and already embodies the convergence the poem is enacting. These two figures — the monastic petitioner and the hunting falcon — describe the full range of seeking from the contemplative to the active, from the humble petition to the fierce pursuit. What they share is ardor, decisiveness, fervor, keenness — the qualities that make seeking more than mere desire. And the poem does not place one above the other or synthesize them into a single figure; it holds them simultaneously in a single breath, as the world they inhabit holds multiple traditions simultaneously.

The seekers’ purpose — “to, reveal the journey, divulge the jaunt, and expose the destiny and faith” — is disclosure, not arrival. The journey is what is revealed; the jaunt (a word carrying deliberate lightness, refusing the gravity of “quest” or “pilgrimage”) is what is divulged. The destiny is exposed but not achieved. This is the poem’s consistent refusal: to show the seeking as the living without conceding that the destination is what matters.

Stanza 7

Still allurements, the charms, charismas, adorn the living, enhance subsistence,

being embellish, emboss and absorb, the comforts of shades, solaces and succors,

endure the intents, prevail the purpose, reward persistence;

Then, the reach and scope, the range and extent; sun pats, taps and hits,

clouds to ensue, the rain obey needs, the shades to submit.

whereas, squirrels jump, the canaries’ songs, remind the cosmos, the ether and air, wholeness does exist, only you and me.

The final stanza is not a resolution in the conventional sense — it does not tie off what came before. It is a revelation: the affirmation, arrived at through the full weight of the poem’s journey, that the allurements and charms of the opening have survived everything. “Still allurements” — where “still” carries all three of its meanings simultaneously (nevertheless, continuously, quietly) — declares that the world’s attractiveness is not diminished by turbulence, impediment, communal noise, pressure, or cosmic mystery. It endures. It prevails. It rewards.

“Being embellish, emboss and absorb” — existence itself is declared to be already adorned, already raised in relief, already absorptive. Being is not neutral; it is textured, rich, simultaneously standing out (embossed) and taking in (absorbent). This is a complete ontological claim in three verbs.

The sun’s three touches — “sun pats, taps and hits” — constitute one of the poem’s most precisely calibrated sequences. A pat is the lightest touch, intimate and reassuring. A tap is more deliberate, a signal. A hit is direct contact, unambiguous. The sun does not merely illuminate the world from a distance; it touches it with these progressively direct intimacies, from the gentlest to the most decisive. “Clouds to ensue, the rain obey needs, the shades to submit” — the verbs of the natural world are verbs of structural compliance: ensue, obey, submit. The cosmos does not rebel against human need; it responds to it. This is the poem’s most radical philosophical claim about the relationship between consciousness and the world it inhabits: not a claim of magic or of prayer answered, but of structural correspondence, a resonance between need and provision that is built into the architecture of the world.

“Whereas, squirrels jump, the canaries’ songs, remind the cosmos, the ether and air, wholeness does exist, only you and me” — the closing line is the poem’s most complete philosophical statement, and it is one of the most original closures in contemporary philosophical poetry. The squirrel’s jump and the canary’s song are evidence directed not at the human observer but at the cosmos itself. The cosmos requires reminding of its own wholeness, and the smallest and most cheerful of its inhabitants conduct this work. The squirrel and the canary do not represent or symbolize cosmic wholeness; they remind it — they are the mechanism by which the cosmos maintains its self-knowledge of its own integrity. And this wholeness, established by the testimony of the smallest creatures, resolves into the most intimate of all possible units: “only you and me.” The vast is not opposed to the intimate; the cosmic is not opposed to the personal. The ocean and the mountain, the falcon and the postulant, the cosmos and the ether — all of it arrives at two people, present to each other, in a world that both holds them and requires their presence to know its own wholeness.

III. The Ontology of the Plural: An Original Aesthetic Philosophy

The most significant philosophical contribution of “Appeals and Entreaties” is also its most pervasive formal feature, and this coincidence — that the form and the philosophy are identical — is the mark of genuine poetic achievement at the highest level. The poem’s sustained use of the doublet and triplet is not a rhetorical choice applied to a separately existing philosophical content. The form is the philosophy. The doublet is the argument.

What does this mean precisely? In the poem’s system, any single name for a thing is understood to be a falsification — a compression that sacrifices some portion of the thing’s reality for the convenience of naming. “Allures” without “charms” loses the distinction between the pull exercised upon the perceiver and the quality inhering in the object. “Appeals” without “entreaties” loses the distinction between the formal request and the urgent petition. “Quakes” without “quivers” loses the distinction between seismic disruption and tremulous response. Every pair, every triplet in this poem adds not redundancy but a dimension — a facet that the previous term could not capture, an angle from which the real presents itself differently. The poem’s doubling is ontological; it enacts the claim that things are genuinely plural in their being.

This is a philosophical position that has no real precedent in English-language poetry at this scale and this consistency. Walt Whitman uses lists, but his lists accumulate particulars — separate things gathered into an expanding democratic embrace. Dr. Bemanian’s doublets do not accumulate particulars; they multiply the facets of a single thing. His epistemology is closer to quantum superposition than to democratic enumeration: the thing exists in multiple states simultaneously, and to collapse it to one state — to choose “allures” over “charms,” to say “storm” instead of “gusts, bursts and flurries” — would be to falsify the real. The poem is an argument for fidelity to plurality over the convenience of singularity, and it makes this argument not propositionally but formally, stanza by stanza, line by line, doublet by doublet, for seven stanzas of unbroken philosophical commitment.

IV. The Phenomenology of Seeking: A Complete Arc

The poem traces what is recognizably a phenomenological arc — not a narrative (nothing happens, no story is told, no event occurs), but a complete account of the stages through which consciousness moves in its encounter with the world. This arc is original in its architecture and precise in its execution.

The arc begins in stanza one with the seeking consciousness inside its temporary shelter, facing the world’s turbulence from within an “anchored” position. This anchoring is “vivid” — alive, colorful, present — not the anchoring of the resigned or the defeated. Stanza two takes the consciousness into the interior experience of aspiration, where seeking entangles with coveting and objective merges with craving, and where the turbulence is now felt from within. Stanza three pivots to the world’s permeability: the discovery that the world that resists also discloses, that the same world that quakes and squanders also shimmers and divulges. Stanza four expands consciousness into the communal dimension: the self is not alone in its seeking; it is embedded in a community that persists through its most informal transmissions and that is held together by unanimity that is not achieved but innate. Stanza five compresses all of this into the concentrated experience of difficulty and the discovery, within difficulty, of the “beam of wonders” that persists. Stanza six expands to the cosmic scale, where the world addresses those capable of hearing from its rostrums of ocean and mountain, and where the seeker reveals the journey rather than the destination. Stanza seven closes the arc by revealing that the allurements of the opening have survived everything, that the cosmos is responsive, and that this cosmic responsiveness arrives, finally, at the intimate: two people in a world that holds them.

This arc is complete in the philosophical sense: it leaves nothing essential unaddressed. It has acknowledged turbulence and impediment, communal life and communal noise, pressure and difficulty, cosmic scale and cosmic mystery, and it has arrived at a resolution that is not evasion but affirmation — the affirmation that the seeking was worth it, that the world is livable, that intimacy is the destination of the cosmic journey.

V. Community, Memory, and the Informal Bond

The fourth stanza’s treatment of communal life represents a philosophical advance in the poetry of social being. Against the entire tradition of poetry that treats the social bond as formal, institutional, or achieved through deliberate act, Dr. Bemanian discovers the social bond in its most informal, most unofficial, most unattributed expressions: gossip, rumor, murmur, whisper. And he makes a claim about these informal expressions that is both sociologically precise and philosophically radical: “the sources are ignored, the bases are redeemed, the hints and the tales, stay forever.”

This is a theory of cultural memory that runs counter to official theories of institutional transmission. Communities, the poem observes, do not primarily persist through their formal institutions, their authorized speech, their officially transmitted knowledge — all of which is subject to revision, denial, and institutional fragmentation. Communities persist through the hints and tales that circulate without authorization, without source, without accountability, and that persist precisely because they are not tethered to a source that can be forgotten or discredited. The gossip that no one can quite attribute to anyone stays forever. The tale whose origin is obscure becomes permanent. This is a claim about the real mechanism of cultural memory, and it is one that literary and social theory is still working to fully account for.

The stanza arrives at its culminating claim — “unanimity, the harmony and unison, innate and inborn, reside, dwell, conjoin” — through this account of informal transmission. It is because the community maintains its shared knowledge through gossip and rumor and murmur — through the accumulated hints and tales that no institution can control — that its unanimity is revealed to be not achieved but discovered, not constructed but recognized. The harmony was always there. The formal institutions of community — law, governance, formal speech — are the surface structures over a deeper structure of innate unanimity that the informal speech keeps alive precisely because it cannot be formalized.

VI. The Intimate Cosmos: A Philosophical Reversal of Scale

The poem’s closing movement — from the vast (oceans, mountains, falcons, ether) to the intimate (“only you and me”) — is its most philosophically audacious gesture, and it must be understood as a philosophical claim rather than as a rhetorical device.

The conventional hierarchy of scale places the cosmic above the intimate: the ocean is more significant than the person, the mountain more enduring than the moment of human connection, the ether more fundamental than the two people standing within it. This hierarchy pervades the Western philosophical tradition from the Platonic preference for the eternal over the temporal to the Kantian sublime in which the magnitude of nature overwhelms the human perceiver. Against this tradition, Dr. Bemanian proposes not an inversion but a dissolution of the hierarchy itself.

“Squirrels jump, the canaries’ songs, remind the cosmos, the ether and air, wholeness does exist, only you and me” — the squirrel’s jump and the canary’s song are not diminished by their proximity to the ether and the cosmos. They are, within the poem’s philosophical system, equal in ontological weight. The cosmos requires the testimony of the smallest creatures to know its own wholeness. The squirrel does not represent the cosmic; it reminds it. The canary does not symbolize wholeness; it is the mechanism by which wholeness maintains its self-knowledge. In this system, the small is not subordinate to the vast; the small is the condition of the vast’s self-awareness.

This philosophical position — that the cosmic is incomplete without the testimony of its most intimate and particular inhabitants, and that the intimate is the destination of the cosmic journey rather than its diminution — is genuinely original. It reframes the scale relationship between the human and the cosmos not as hierarchy but as mutual dependence: the cosmos needs the squirrel and the canary as much as they inhabit the cosmos. And the intimate dyad — “only you and me” — is not a retreat from the cosmic into the personal; it is the cosmic’s arrival at its most distilled form.

VII. The Artistic Stance: Loving Abundance Against Compression

The artistic stance of “Appeals and Entreaties” can be named precisely: it is the stance of loving abundance against the pressure of compression. In every dimension — formally, philosophically, emotionally — the poem opens outward, multiplies, refuses the shortcut of the singular.

This stance is both aesthetic and ethical. Aesthetically, it insists that the real is richer than any single name, richer than any single image, richer than any single tradition. Ethically, it insists that the honest response to this richness is not to master it, not to reduce it to what can be managed and catalogued, but to keep adding, to keep naming, to keep approaching through accumulative fidelity. The poem does not aspire to control its subject; it aspires to honor it.

This stance produces a particular relationship with the reader. The poem does not explain; it demonstrates. It does not argue; it accumulates. It trusts the reader to inhabit the accumulation and find the meaning in the texture rather than in any summarizable proposition. This is a generous and demanding artistic posture simultaneously: generous in the fullness it offers, demanding in the attention it requires. The reader who reads for the summary will find none; the reader who reads with full attention to the doublets, to the acoustic texture, to the progression of images, will find a complete philosophical world.

The stance also produces a particular relationship with poetic tradition. The poem inhabits multiple traditions simultaneously — Persian classical, English Romantic and Modernist, the pan-cultural tradition of the seeker — without resolving them into a synthesis. The postulant and the falcon are not synthesized; they co-inhabit the same breath. The Persian rose and the European castle are not translated one into the other; they share a line without mediation. This is not eclecticism — the casual borrowing from multiple sources — but a genuine philosophical position: traditions are not mutually exclusive; the world is large enough for all of them; the seeking self is large enough to inhabit all of them simultaneously. This is a claim about the nature of literary inheritance that only a genuinely bilingual and bicultural formation could produce with this assurance.

VIII. Philosophical Claims

The poem advances three philosophical claims of genuine originality and consequence.

Reality is Irreducibly Plural and Demands the Plural Name

The poem’s formal ontology — the sustained doublet as epistemological method — advances a claim about the nature of reality that has consequences far beyond the poem itself. If reality is genuinely plural in the way the poem insists — if “allures and charms” are not synonyms but distinct facets of a single phenomenon, if “gusts, bursts and flurries” are not interchangeable but three genuinely different modes of the same atmospheric event — then the project of naming the world accurately requires not precision (the single right word) but fidelity (the full array of relevant facets). This reframes what language is for. Language is not primarily a tool for designating; it is a medium for honoring the real in its irreducible plurality. The poem enacts this understanding and, in enacting it, argues for it.

Community is Original, Not Achieved

“Unanimity, the harmony and unison, innate and inborn, reside, dwell, conjoin” — the claim that communal harmony is innate rather than achieved is a genuine philosophical position that stands against the entire tradition of social contract theory. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all imagine an original state of separateness or competition from which community is constructed through agreement or submission. Dr. Bemanian’s poem proposes the opposite: the original state is unanimity, and the apparent separateness and competition of communal life are the temporary departures, the surface turbulences, over a deeper structure of innate communion. This is not sentimentality; it is a philosophical claim grounded in the poem’s careful observation that the informal, unofficial, unattributed transmissions of communal life — the gossip and the rumor — are the mechanisms by which this innate unanimity maintains itself against the fragmenting pressures of official life.

The Cosmos is Structurally Responsive to Human Need

“The rain obey needs, the shades to submit” — this claim is the poem’s most philosophically exposed position, and also its most philosophically earned. The poem arrives at this claim only after acknowledging fully the world’s turbulence (stanzas one and two), its opacity (stanza six’s concealed hisses), and its demand for the ardent seeker rather than the passive recipient. The claim that rain obeys and that clouds ensue and that the sun pats and taps is not magic; it is the claim of structural correspondence — that the world and human need are not alien to each other, that there is a resonance between them built into the architecture of the world. This is closer to certain traditions of philosophical ecology than to romanticism or animism: the claim is not that nature is conscious or that it loves, but that it responds, that there is a structural fit between need and provision that cannot be reduced to either the human or the natural alone.

IX. Comparative Context

To understand the genuine advance that “Appeals and Entreaties” represents, it is necessary to examine precisely where and how it departs from the traditions with which it is in dialogue — and to be clear that departure from tradition, in this poem, is not a mark of influence but of originality.

The accumulated doublet, as a formal strategy, has precedents in both the Arabic-Persian tradition of amplificatio and in Walt Whitman’s democratic catalogues. But the difference between Dr. Bemanian’s doublets and Whitman’s lists reveals what is genuinely new. Whitman accumulates particulars — separate things, separate bodies, separate trades, separate geographies — in the service of an expansive, absorptive self that encompasses them all. The Whitman catalogue aspires to democratic inclusion; its philosophy is that everything deserves to be named, to be counted, to be embraced within the expanding “I.” Dr. Bemanian’s doublets do something altogether different: they do not accumulate particulars but multiply facets of a single thing. They do not expand the self to encompass the world; they insist that any single thing in the world is already more than one thing and demands the plural name. This is not an expansive philosophy but an epistemological one — not about the size of the self but about the nature of the real. It advances beyond Whitman’s democratic embrace into a more fundamental claim about what language can and cannot do.

The seeking tradition that culminates in the Persian classical poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Attar — the tradition of the soul’s journey toward the divine, of the falcon that seeks the king’s wrist, of the thirty birds who discover they are the Simorgh — provides the deepest backdrop for stanza six’s “postulants” and “sakers and falcons.” In Attar’s “Conference of the Birds,” the entire arc of seeking ends in the seeker’s dissolution: the thirty birds who arrive at the Simorgh discover that they are the Simorgh — the seeker and the sought are identical, and the seeker disappears into what was sought. Dr. Bemanian’s seekers do something different and philosophically significant: they “reveal the journey, divulge the jaunt, and expose the destiny and faith.” They do not dissolve into the destination; they disclose the journey. The seeking self is not annihilated by its seeking; it is fulfilled by it in a way that preserves rather than dissolves the self. This is a departure from the Sufi tradition’s ultimate claim — the fana, the annihilation of the self in the divine — toward a different and more contemporary philosophical position: that the seeking self is not a problem to be dissolved but a condition to be inhabited fully, and that full inhabitation of the seeking self is itself the achievement.

When compared to Rilke’s Duino Elegies — the closest Western analogue to the poem’s movement from cosmic address to intimate resolution — the difference is illuminating. Rilke’s Elegies move through cosmic loneliness toward a reconciliation with earthly transience: the world is precious because it is passing, and the human capacity to transform the earthly into inwardness is the highest act. Dr. Bemanian’s poem does not find the world precious because it is transient; it finds the world responsive because it is structured. The Rilkean world is beautiful and passing; Dr. Bemanian’s world is responsive and whole. These are different metaphysical positions. Where Rilke arrives at “Einmal jedes, nur einmal” — the preciousness of the once-only — Dr. Bemanian arrives at “wholeness does exist” — the permanence of the whole as attested by the particular. The difference is not one of degree but of philosophical orientation: the elegiac versus the affirmative, the transient versus the whole.

Hopkins’s phonetic practice — the deliberate deployment of alliterative and consonantal clusters to make sound perform meaning — offers a technique that “Appeals and Entreaties” shares in passages like “squalls squander” and “bustles and bouts blunder.” But the comparison illuminates a difference in ultimate purpose. For Hopkins, the charged phonetic surface is an act of devotional attention — the world’s beauty and violence are evidence of God’s grandeur. For Dr. Bemanian, the charged phonetic surface is epistemological — it enacts the claim that the real exceeds any single designation and requires the full sensory pressure of accumulated sound to approach. Hopkins’s sonic intensity points upward toward the divine; Dr. Bemanian’s points outward toward the world’s irreducible plurality.

Wallace Stevens worked throughout his career on the question of what the imagination can affirm in the absence of religious certainty. His late poem “Of Mere Being” arrives at the palm at the mind’s edge, and a bird “fire-fangled” in its fronds — a pure, non-conceptual natural presence at the end of philosophical exhaustion. Dr. Bemanian’s canary in the final stanza is related in its function to Stevens’s bird — both are small birds whose song arrives as evidence of something larger — but they arrive from entirely different directions. Stevens reaches his bird through the depletion of metaphysical certainty; Dr. Bemanian reaches the canary through the affirmation of the seeking self’s full inhabitation of the world. Stevens’s bird is what remains after philosophy; Dr. Bemanian’s canary is what philosophy arrives at. These are genuinely different philosophical trajectories.

X. “Appeals and Entreaties” in Dr. Bemanian’s Poetic Odyssey

Within the architecture of Dr. Bemanian’s ongoing Odyssey project, “Appeals and Entreaties” marks a consolidation and deepening of the project’s central philosophical concerns. The Odyssey collection has consistently explored the dialectic between turbulence and anchoring, the restless seeking self and the conditions of its grounding — but this poem brings a formal and philosophical clarity to those concerns that represents an advance within the collection’s own development.

The treatment of communal voice and informal transmission in stanza four is the poem’s most significant extension of the collection’s social philosophy. Earlier poems in the Odyssey series have affirmed the communal bond as a destination of seeking; “Appeals and Entreaties” goes further, locating the mechanisms of communal persistence in the gossip and rumor and hint and tale that circulate below the level of official discourse. This is not a minor addition to the collection’s philosophy but a deepening of its account of what community is and how it works.

The marinating metaphor for adversity — “pressures, stresses, marinate and steep” — is similarly a significant development within the collection’s ongoing engagement with difficulty. The Odyssey poems have consistently refused to treat difficulty as merely negative; they have found in impediment and turbulence the conditions of growth and anchoring. “Appeals and Entreaties” provides this refusal with its most philosophically precise formulation: adversity as marinade, as the medium of transformation rather than the obstacle to be overcome.

The poem’s final resolution — “wholeness does exist, only you and me” — continues the collection’s characteristic movement toward the intimate as the destination of the cosmic journey, but gives this movement its most complete and philosophically secure formulation. The squirrel and the canary as the cosmos’s witnesses to its own wholeness, and the intimate dyad as the form in which cosmic wholeness arrives at its most distilled expression — these formulations represent the philosophical maturity of a poet who has been working on these questions across the full scope of the Odyssey project.

XI. Conclusion

“Appeals and Entreaties” is a poem that makes genuine philosophical advances in three areas simultaneously: the ontology of the plural, the theory of communal life and cultural memory, and the relationship between the cosmic and the intimate. Its formal strategy — the sustained, philosophically committed doublet as ontological method — is not a technique applied to a separately existing content but a form that is identical with its philosophy. The poem is the argument; the form is the claim.

What is most extraordinary about the poem, and most difficult to summarize without impoverishment, is the consistency with which it sustains its philosophical commitment across every dimension of its existence: in the choice of images (tent, window, rostrum, canary), in the organization of its stanzas (turbulence, disclosure, community, compression, cosmic expansion, intimate resolution), in its treatment of tradition (multiple traditions held simultaneously without synthesis or hierarchy), and in its ultimate philosophical position (the world is plural, community is innate, the cosmos is responsive, the intimate and the vast are identical). This consistency is the mark of genuine poetic thinking — thought that is inseparable from the form in which it occurs.

The allurements and charms, the appeals and entreaties of the title, do not simply name the poem’s subject. They perform its method. The title is a doublet. The poem is a sustained doublet. The philosophy is the insistence on the doublet as the only honest name for the real. In this identity of title, method, and philosophy, “Appeals and Entreaties” achieves what the most significant poems achieve: the feeling, for the reader who gives it full attention, that this is the only way this thing could have been said, and that having been said in this way, something in one’s understanding of the world has permanently changed.

XII. About the Poet

Dr. Alireza Bemanian is a poet, architect, and academic whose literary practice emerges from a formation that is genuinely dual — not in the sense of a divided loyalty between two traditions, but in the sense of a consciousness that inhabits the classical Persian literary tradition and the full expressive range of contemporary English verse with equal fluency, equal authority, and equal creative ownership. This is not a bilingual practice in the ordinary sense, where one language translates or supplements the other. It is a practice in which two traditions of extraordinary philosophical and aesthetic depth engage each other as genuine equals, each bringing its full inheritance to bear on the same set of questions about what it means to seek, to belong, to endure, and to remain present to the world’s allurements.

The formation that produced “Appeals and Entreaties” is visible in the poem’s deepest structures, not merely its surface imagery. Dr. Bemanian’s doctoral training in Electrical Engineering — spanning Electromagnetic Waves and Fields and Control Systems — provides the poem with more than its incidental imagery; it provides it with an epistemological framework. In signal theory, no single measurement captures the full state of a system; the system must be sampled across dimensions, conditions, and time-points to approximate its behavior with fidelity. The poem’s doublet methodology — its insistence that any single name falsifies and that truth requires the accumulative approximation of multiple names — reflects this epistemological commitment: approach the real through multiple simultaneous measurements rather than through the confident compression of the singular claim.

The understanding of resonance that underlies stanza four’s treatment of communal voice — “resonate and ring, echo and boom,” and the claim that informal transmissions sustain the community’s innate unanimity — is grounded in the physics of resonance that Dr. Bemanian’s engineering formation provides. When a system’s natural frequency is matched by an external input, the result is resonance — amplification beyond what the external input alone could produce. The community’s innate unanimity is, in this framework, its natural resonant frequency: the state it returns to when the surface turbulences of competing voices and formal discourse subside. The informal speech that “hints and tales, stay forever” is the medium through which the community maintains its resonant state even under the pressure of official fragmentation.

The architectural formation is equally structural and equally precise in its influence. The poem’s progression through architectural forms — tent, pavilion, window, castle, rostrum — reflects an architect’s typological thinking about the forms of human space and what they mean. The progression is not decorative; it traces an argument about the expansion of human space from the intimate and temporary to the civic and permanent, from the portable shelter to the platform of public address. The military organization imposed on pleasure-structures — “squadrons of pavilions,” “regiments of gazebos” — reflects an architect’s understanding that the organization of space, even leisure space, requires discipline, coordination, and structural logic as rigorous as the organization of any other form of human collective action.

In “Appeals and Entreaties,” Dr. Bemanian’s Odyssey collection reaches a philosophical maturity that is, at the same time, a formal achievement of the first order. The poem’s argument — that the real is plural, that community is original, that the cosmos is responsive, that the intimate and the vast are one — is an argument that only this formation, only this intersection of the Persian classical tradition’s depth and the contemporary English verse’s expressive range and the scientific and architectural mind’s structural precision, could have produced in precisely this form. It is a poem that could not have been written by anyone else, and that is the first and final mark of genuine literary achievement.

Dr. Alireza Bemanian’s poetry is published at www.bemanian.com, where the full range of his work in both Persian and English can be encountered.

© Dr. Alireza Bemanian, www.bemanian.com
Note: This analysis honors the intellectual property and creative vision of Dr. Alireza Bemanian. The poem “Appeals and Entreaties” is © 2026 www.bemanian.com, all rights reserved.