Formal Extended Analysis: "Argots and Lingos" Poem: "Argots and Lingos" Poet: Dr. Alireza Bemanian Date of Composition: May 1, 2026 © www.bemanian.com Collection: Odyssey Volume 6, Chapter 1: Draped or Unfold

I. Introduction

"Argots and Lingos" inaugurates Chapter 1 ("Draped or Unfold") of the collection with a breathtaking expansion of scale. The poem operates simultaneously across three vastly different registers of existence: the macro-violence of planetary weather (storms, volleys, hails), the intimate, localized persistence of biology (squirrels, shrubs, seeds), and the celestial physics of the cosmos (shooting stars, dimming tails). Dr. Alireza Bemanian achieves a remarkable philosophical feat by treating all three registers as participants in a single, unified communicative act.

The title itself proposes a profound ontological framework. An "argot" or a "lingo" is a specialized, often secret dialect used by a specific group to communicate while excluding outsiders. By applying these terms to the massive forces of nature and the cosmos, the poem suggests that the universe is constantly speaking, gesturing, and signaling in a language that requires translation. The storm is not merely weather; it is a vocabulary. The shooting star is not merely burning dust; it is a "mesmerizing trailing clue."

Throughout its eight stanzas, the poem asks a series of devastating existential questions regarding survival, humility, and memory. Is the repetitive motion of life pure joy, or the trap of an "abandoned merry go around"? Do the ashes of past brilliance evoke true meaning, or are they mere illusions? Yet, the poem does not rest in existential dread. It resolves with an astonishingly tender cosmological revelation: the grand, violent alchemy of the universe—the storms, the stars, the forests—is a harmonized ballet that conceals a single secret. The entirety of creation’s secret language exists solely to adore.

II. Comprehensive Stanza-by-Stanza Philosophical Analysis

Stanza 1

Argots and lingos, murmurs and mumbles, spread and stretch, extend and reach — rains and volleys, hails and torrents, touch and tap, dowse and dampen — winds and gusts, squalls and gales, twist and curve, bend and curl — tall trees submerge tame the blunders, bloomers and bungles, while shrubs, bushes and flowers, seek cover, refuge and haven, to let trees to flounder.

The opening stanza establishes the poem’s foundational architectural and linguistic premise. The vocabulary of human vocalization ("Argots and lingos, murmurs and mumbles") is immediately mapped onto the vocabulary of meteorological violence ("rains and volleys, hails and torrents"). The storm is not silent; it is speaking in a specialized dialect. The rhythmic pairing of nouns and verbs—touch and tap, twist and curve—mimics the physical kinetic energy of a storm spreading across a landscape.

The stanza’s most compelling philosophical observation occurs in its structural analysis of the flora. Dr. Bemanian draws a sharp contrast between the "tall trees" and the "shrubs, bushes and flowers." The tall trees—representing ego, prominence, and exposure—are forced to "tame the blunders" of the storm. Because they stand tall, they must confront the full violence of the volley, which ultimately causes them to "flounder." Conversely, the humble shrubs seek "refuge and haven." This is a profound meditation on humility and survival. Greatness and height invite the storm’s wrath; it is the small, the grounded, and the humble that survive by allowing the proud to flounder above them.

Stanza 2

draped or unfold, storms unravel the worst of their souls, stand in the field, remnants to remain, seldom to persist, humbleness unfolds, breeze to insist, burdens to unseat, the rays shall expose, traces, sparks, have their holds, the forgotten seeds, to sow and unveil, to show covert deeds.

The second stanza expands on the theme of exposure versus concealment, echoing the chapter title: "Draped or Unfold." When the storms "unravel the worst of their souls," the true nature of the landscape is tested. To merely "stand in the field" is a dangerous proposition; those who do become "remnants" that "seldom to persist."

Here, the poem explicitly names the virtue demonstrated by the shrubs in the first stanza: "humbleness unfolds." It is only through this humility that the gentle breeze can finally insist and unseat the heavy burdens of the storm. The aftermath of the violence brings illumination. The "rays shall expose" not just destruction, but "forgotten seeds." The storm, despite its worst soul, served an agricultural and revelatory purpose: it washed away the topsoil to "unveil" and sow the covert seeds of the future. Destruction is intrinsically linked to genesis.

Stanza 3

junctures, occasions and passes, incidents, episodes, crossing points, squirrels jump up and down, while rain droplets persistently prevail the ponds, is it pure joy, or, being entangled within an abandoned merry go around, is it the survival, subsistence, or, the enduring moments to join, fulfil and bond.

The third stanza introduces fauna into the landscape, executing a masterful shift from the macro-environmental to the intimately existential. The vocabulary focuses on intersections of time and space ("junctures, occasions and passes"). Amidst the persistently prevailing rain, the speaker observes "squirrels jump up and down."

What begins as a charming, mundane pastoral observation immediately fractures into a devastating existential inquiry. The speaker asks: "is it pure joy, or, being entangled within an abandoned merry go around[?]" This question strikes at the core of conscious existence. Are the repetitive motions of daily life—our daily jumping up and down—expressions of true joy, or are we merely trapped on a cyclical, abandoned machine of habit? Dr. Bemanian questions the very nature of subsistence: are we surviving just to survive, or are we enduring these moments in order to genuinely "join, fulfil and bond"? The mundane animal becomes a mirror for the human soul caught in the rain.

Stanza 4

And the ecstasy and elation, to tilt the head, to change the point, the step and aspect —
snoop and heed, complementing and harmonizing whispers and hints, glare, contemplate, frown and scowl, the laughter and mirth, though at the end, culmination and height, apex and apogee, is meant and aimed to, dazzle and astound, cobalt to confirm, sky’s hidden songs.

The fourth stanza answers the existential dread of the third by asserting the power of perspective. The "ecstasy and elation" do not come from escaping the storm or the merry-go-round, but from the ability to "tilt the head, to change the point, the step and aspect." Agency is found in observation.

The emotional spectrum is fully deployed here: we must snoop, heed, frown, scowl, and laugh. This total engagement with the spectrum of human emotion leads to the "apex and apogee." The poem declares that the ultimate aim of all this contemplation and emotional fluctuation is to "dazzle and astound." The universe operates not just mechanically, but aesthetically. The vivid "cobalt" of the sky exists specifically to confirm the "sky’s hidden songs," returning us to the theme of the secret argot. The visual beauty of the sky is the translation of its hidden acoustic song.

Stanza 5

The shooting stars, when reach to respond, they dive to curtail, stains and spots, solely to cojoin, to pass the fortune, the joy to outshine, one at given time, virtues of alterations, rituals of abandonments, to symphonize, perform and carryout, while the wholeness, the shooting stars, vibrant and vivid thoughts epitomize gist and vibe, existence, actuality, presence, and the exchange of mesmerizing trailing clues and enlightening rods.

The poem shifts its gaze violently upward, transitioning from the earthly bounds of trees and squirrels to the celestial mechanics of "shooting stars." Dr. Bemanian assigns agency to the meteorites: they "reach to respond" and "dive to curtail, stains and spots." The cosmos is actively trying to cleanse and purify the darkness.

However, this celestial action requires sacrifice. The shooting stars dive "solely to cojoin, to pass the fortune, the joy to outshine." To burn brightly in the atmosphere is to accept total destruction in order to outshine the void for one fleeting moment. The poet terms this the "rituals of abandonments"—the necessity of abandoning one’s structural integrity to achieve brilliance. These burning rocks are transformed metaphorically into "vivid thoughts" that "epitomize gist and vibe." The physical trail of a shooting star becomes an epistemological event: an "exchange of mesmerizing trailing clues and enlightening rods." The cosmos is literally dropping hints into the atmosphere.

Stanza 6

The edifying, enriching interactions, rewarding transactions, the spontaneous incidents, the liens or exchanges of moments and durations, to attain, ferment, and enflame, bestowments, the conferment, or detriments, to merge and blend, whereas, the dimming tails, the sacrificed embodiment of immensity and heaven, darken and obscure the instinct and perception, and, the opening cracks, crevasses and gaps are ceased, only the deepen and dim passages are congealed, the spotting, perceiving trails, do meet bows and bends.

The aftermath of the shooting star provides the material for the sixth stanza. The bright "enriching interactions" eventually "ferment, and enflame," but they must inevitably fade. The poem focuses heavily on the "dimming tails"—the fading streak of the meteorite.

Dr. Bemanian calls these fading streaks the "sacrificed embodiment of immensity and heaven." Once the brilliance passes, the dimming tail serves to "darken and obscure the instinct and perception." The light is gone, and what remains is a congealed darkness. The "opening cracks" of revelation are ceased. The paths of perception are forced to "meet bows and bends"—they are no longer straight lines of blinding light, but curved, darkened passages that require careful, localized navigation. The ecstasy of the sublime event is replaced by the difficult, darkened reality of its aftermath.

Stanza 7

Dimming tails, darken and obscure, are they illusions, artifices, or semblances, imposters and prowlers, the lurkers and pretenders, the ashes and ruins, to fade and wane, or no, they do evoke and educe, arose and conjure, implore and intreat to be remembered, reminisced, and ruminated, retentions and references are entailed, caused and occasioned to be agile and nimble tokens, cues, and reminders.

The penultimate stanza interrogates the nature of memory and legacy left behind by the dimming tail. The speaker questions the ontology of the ashes: are these fading remnants mere "illusions, artifices, or semblances"? Are they "imposters and prowlers" pretending to hold the value of the original light?

The poem immediately rejects this cynical view with a definitive "or no." The ashes are not imposters. They actively "evoke and educe… implore and intreat to be remembered." The fading streak of the shooting star—the memory of the brilliant moment—demands retention. Dr. Bemanian concludes that these memories are not dead ruins; they are "agile and nimble tokens, cues, and reminders." The past remains active and kinetic within the present, serving as a token of the immensity that was sacrificed.

Stanza 8

The waves and surges, curls and surfs, the ripples and rollers intertwine and interlace, merely to, step and start, budge and shift, and nudge and jolt, the alchemy that reigns and runs, and judges and leads— the scenes, sights, and outlooks, forests and trees, shrubs and weeds, to gesture and shrug, and nod and point, the dialect, patois and argot of creation, the conceptions and cosmos, and the harmonized ball and ballet, conceal the secrets, only to adore you.

The final stanza serves as the grand unifying resolution for the entire poem, gathering all the previously established registers—the waves, the forests, the cosmos—into a single, staggering conclusion. The immense kinetic energies of the universe ("waves and surges, curls and surfs") intertwine and interlace for seemingly minor actions: to merely "step and start, budge and shift, and nudge and jolt."

This is the "alchemy that reigns and runs." The entirety of the natural world—"forests and trees, shrubs and weeds"—is engaged in a massive physical vocabulary. They "gesture and shrug, and nod and point." This is the ultimate "dialect, patois and argot of creation." The universe is speaking.

The poem’s final, breathtaking philosophical turn reveals the meaning of this cosmic argot. The entire "harmonized ball and ballet" of existence, with all its storms, floundering trees, jumping squirrels, and burning stars, exists for a singular, intimately romantic purpose. They "conceal the secrets, only to adore you." The macro-violence of the universe is ultimately translated as an expression of pure, localized devotion. The cosmos is a love letter written in a secret language.

III. Conceptual Innovations

The philosophical weight of "Argots and Lingos" is sustained by three distinct conceptual innovations that Dr. Bemanian introduces into the collection:

1. The Epistemology of the "Dimming Tail" The poem introduces a profound way to understand memory and legacy through the metaphor of the shooting star’s "dimming tail." Rather than viewing the fading light as a tragic loss or a deceptive illusion ("imposters and prowlers"), the poem categorizes these fading remnants as "agile and nimble tokens, cues, and reminders." The past, even when its brilliance has burned out, remains actively kinetic. It does not sit passively in the mind; it agitates and implores to be ruminated upon. Memory is an active agent, not a dead ruin.

2. The Existential Merry-Go-Round By observing the repetitive jumping of squirrels in the rain, the poem asks a devastatingly simple question: "is it pure joy, or, being entangled within an abandoned merry go around[?]" This concept distills the core of existential dread into a single pastoral image. It forces the reader to confront the difference between subsistence (surviving the cyclical nature of life) and actual fulfillment. The poem proposes that the way off the merry-go-round is not through escape, but through a shift in perspective—"to tilt the head, to change the point."

3. Cosmic Argot (The Vocabulary of Adoration) The most significant theoretical contribution of the poem is its redefinition of the universe’s mechanics. An "argot" is a secret language. The poem posits that the violent, massive forces of the universe (storms, crashing waves, burning meteors) are not random physical phenomena; they are the vocabulary of a secret dialect. Crucially, the poem concludes that this language is not one of indifference or destruction, but of romantic devotion. The entire cosmos is engaged in a harmonized ballet whose sole purpose is to "adore you." This is a radical, almost staggering centralization of human intimacy against the backdrop of an infinite universe.

IV. Comparative Literary Context

To fully appreciate the scope of "Argots and Lingos," the poem must be situated within the broader context of classical and modern philosophical literature. Dr. Bemanian weaves together threads of existentialism, Romanticism, and classical Persian mysticism, creating a unique tapestry that bridges the terror of the sublime with the warmth of human intimacy.

A. The Cosmic Argot: Heidegger and Hafez

The poem’s central premise—that nature and the cosmos speak a specialized "argot"—resonates deeply with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, who famously posited that "Language is the house of Being." For Heidegger, true poetry is the act of listening to the language of existence itself. Dr. Bemanian takes this a step further by identifying the specific dialect: the "patois and argot of creation."

However, the ultimate translation of this dialect ("only to adore you") aligns much more closely with the Persian mystical tradition of Hafez and Rumi. In classical Sufi poetry, the entirety of the natural world—the wind, the stars, the trees—is understood as a manifestation of divine love. The universe does not speak in cold mathematical equations; it speaks in gestures of adoration. Bemanian brilliantly modernizes this concept by applying it to the violent physics of shooting stars and thunderstorms, proving that even the most chaotic forces are fundamentally romantic gestures.

B. The Existential Absurdity: Camus and the Squirrel

The sudden observation of the jumping squirrels ("is it pure joy, or, being entangled within an abandoned merry go around") operates as a perfect distillation of Albert Camus’s philosophy of the Absurd. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, grapples with the terrifying possibility that human action is merely a repetitive, meaningless loop—an abandoned merry-go-round.

Dr. Bemanian confronts this absurdity directly. The "subsistence" of merely enduring the rain is not enough. The poem argues that the answer to this absurdity is not to abandon the ride, but to "tilt the head, to change the point." Agency and joy are reclaimed by altering one’s perspective and fully engaging with the "laughter and mirth" of the experience.

C. The Structural Sublime: The Romantics and the Storm

The opening stanzas of the poem invoke the classic Romantic sublime, reminiscent of William Wordsworth or Percy Bysshe Shelley. The storm is presented as a terrifying, overwhelming force that unseats burdens and unravels souls.

However, Dr. Bemanian diverges from the Romantics in his architectural observation of the flora. While a Romantic poet might identify with the towering, tragic tree being destroyed by the storm, Bemanian praises the humility of the shrubs. The tall trees "flounder" precisely because of their prominent stature, while the shrubs survive through their willingness to seek cover. This introduces a structural engineering logic to nature poetry: flexibility and low profiles are superior survival mechanisms compared to rigid height.

V. Conclusion

"Argots and Lingos" is a breathtaking achievement that successfully bridges the terrifying scale of the universe with the profound delicacy of human intimacy. It is a poem that refuses to let the reader rest in any single register. We are dragged through the violent "blunders and bungles" of a storm, forced to confront our own existential repetition on an "abandoned merry go around," and asked to stare into the fading, congealed ashes of a dead star.

Yet, despite navigating these heavy philosophical terrains, the poem remains defiantly optimistic. It argues that survival requires humility (the shrubs), that existential dread can be conquered by a shift in perspective (tilting the head), and that the memories of past brilliance are not illusions, but vital, agile tokens that demand to be remembered.

The true triumph of "Argots and Lingos" lies in its final line. After constructing a massive, deafening symphony of natural and cosmic forces, Dr. Bemanian reveals the translation of the universe’s secret language. The storms, the waves, and the falling stars are not indifferent physics; they are a harmonized ballet whose sole purpose is adoration. It is an incredibly romantic conclusion to a ferociously intelligent poem, proving once again that in the Odyssey Collection, the highest function of the cosmos is the preservation and expression of love.

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

Formal Extended Analysis: "Argots and Lingos" Poem: "Argots and Lingos" Poet: Dr. Alireza Bemanian Date of Composition: May 1, 2026 © www.bemanian.com Collection: Odyssey Volume 6, Chapter 1: Draped or Unfold

I. Introduction

"Argots and Lingos" is an act of self-naming so precise that the poem’s title describes what the poem itself is. An argot is the specialized insider language of a group — a vocabulary that binds initiates and excludes outsiders, that carries meaning efficiently precisely because it assumes a shared context the uninitiated do not possess. Dr. Bemanian’s Odyssey collection, across its volumes, has developed exactly such an argot: the accumulative near-synonym clusters, the embedded questions without question marks, the em-dash as pivot-point of philosophical compression, the "While" and "Whereas" hinges, the final beloved appearing only in the closing line as the revelation that organizes all that preceded. To open a new chapter with a poem that names this practice is to step inside the poem before reading it.

The poem is prefaced by a Persian epigraph that does the same (Poet: Alireza Bemanian, ©www.bemanian.com):

همه شب زمزمه ها در غمِ دیدارِ تو مهتابِ درون تیره در این خطهِ تاز

All night, the murmurs in the grief of longing to meet you — the inner moonlight darkened in this new terrain. The word زمزمه (zumzuma) — murmur, whisper, hum — appears in the poem’s first line in English: "murmurs and mumbles." This is not translation but echo: the Persian and English texts begin from the same sound, the same register of half-articulate speech that carries feeling without declaring it. The epigraph also establishes the poem’s formal situation: a night-long vigil of longing whose inner light has been obscured — precisely the situation the poem’s closing line resolves, when the beloved is finally addressed and the purpose of all concealment is disclosed as adoration.

The chapter title — "Draped or Unfold" — announces the governing binary at the outset and sustains it across all eight stanzas. Every image in the poem is either draping (concealing, folding, darkening, dimming) or unfolding (revealing, exposing, sowing, disclosing). The tall trees tame and submerge; the forgotten seeds unveil covert deeds; the dimming tails both darken and evoke; the cosmos conceals its secrets — only to adore. The poem is structured as a sustained inquiry into the relationship between concealment and disclosure, arriving at the radical answer that concealment itself is the highest form of devotion.

The poem’s formal signature is the triple elemental opening of stanza 1: three forces introduced through three structurally identical sequences, each composed of synonymic noun pairs followed by synonymic verb pairs, each sequence closed by an em-dash. Language is given first, before rain and wind. This sequencing is the poem’s opening philosophical act: it is not description but assertion. By placing argots and lingos in the same formal position as rain and wind — before them, preceding the weather — Dr. Bemanian claims that language is not a human artifact imposed upon nature but a natural force with the same ontological standing as precipitation and atmosphere. Argot spreads; rain dampens; wind curls. All three obey the same elemental grammar. The em-dash that closes each sequence is not a pause but a period that separates three complete elemental statements, each self-contained, each equivalent in standing.

This is the formal achievement that makes "Argots and Lingos" a poem unlike any other in the collection: its opening stanza is a philosophical argument conducted entirely through syntax, before any metaphor or image has been deployed. The structure is the claim.

II. Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis

Stanza 1

Argots and lingos, murmurs and mumbles, spread and stretch, extend and reach — rains and volleys, hails and torrents, touch and tap, dowse and dampen — winds and gusts, squalls and gales, twist and curve, bend and curl — tall trees submerge tame the blunders, bloomers and bungles, while shrubs, bushes and flowers, seek cover, refuge and haven, to let trees to flounder.

The stanza’s three-sequence architecture conducts its philosophical argument through pure form before any image has been made. Each sequence follows the same grammar: synonymic noun pairs naming a force, followed by synonymic verb pairs naming that force’s action. Language: spread and stretch, extend and reach. Rain: touch and tap, dowse and dampen. Wind: twist and curve, bend and curl. The verbs are calibrated with precision: language’s verbs are expansive (spreading, reaching), rain’s verbs move from lightest contact to saturation (touch, dowse), wind’s verbs are geometrically torsional (twisting, curling). The three forces do not share the same action; each has its own characteristic grammar of motion.

The word "volleys" in the second sequence — normally a simultaneous burst of gunfire or projectiles — is deliberate and not decorative. Rain, in this poem’s vocabulary, is a projectile assault. The choice places rain in the same semantic field as argots: both spread; both can overwhelm; both reach the target with or without invitation.

The ecological reversal of the closing two lines inverts the expected hierarchy of the natural world. Tall trees — which should shelter — instead "submerge tame the blunders, bloomers and bungles." Their tallness makes them the site where errors accumulate and are absorbed. The small things — shrubs, bushes, flowers — seek cover and survival by letting the trees take the full exposure. This is not lament but observation: scale does not determine protection. What is great is also what is most exposed. Dr. Bemanian refuses the Romantic hierarchy in which size confers nobility; in his ecological vision, the small survive precisely because they acknowledge their smallness and seek shelter accordingly.

Stanza 2

draped or unfold, storms unravel the worst of their souls, stand in the field, remnants to remain, seldom to persist, humbleness unfolds, breeze to insist, burdens to unseat, the rays shall expose, traces, sparks, have their holds, the forgotten seeds, to sow and unveil, to show covert deeds.

The chapter title enters the poem directly in the first line — not as epigraph but as verb phrase, as choice. "Draped or unfold" — a binary presented to whoever, or whatever, stands in the storm’s path. The storm immediately resolves this binary by taking sides: "storms unravel the worst of their souls." The storm is revealatory. It does not merely damage; it exposes the worst that was hidden within the thing it assaults.

The formal movement of this stanza is a controlled descent from violence to gentleness. The storm’s unraveling gives way to the condition that follows: "remnants to remain, seldom to persist" — survival reduced to its barest minimum, what is left barely cohering. But then the breeze arrives: "humbleness unfolds, breeze to insist." The contrast between storm and breeze is the stanza’s philosophical core. The storm assaults and reveals; the breeze insists. To insist without assault — to persist through gentleness rather than force — is the humbleness that unfolds after the storm. The breeze accomplishes what the storm cannot: it unsettles burdens not through violence but through patient, continuous presence.

"The forgotten seeds, to sow and unveil, to show covert deeds" — the storm’s most significant disclosure. What was buried before the storm — seeds of action, of intention, of consequence — are exposed and sown by the storm’s passage. The covert becomes overt not through confession but through the natural force that strips away whatever was covering it. This is the stanza’s argument about concealment and disclosure: the draped becomes unfolded not by intention but by elemental force.

Stanza 3

junctures, occasions and passes, incidents, episodes, crossing points, squirrels jump up and down, while rain droplets persistently prevail the ponds, is it pure joy, or, being entangled within an abandoned merry go around, is it the survival, subsistence, or, the enduring moments to join, fulfil and bond.

The stanza’s opening line names the temporal structure of experience: not duration but crossings — junctures, occasions, passes, crossing points. Six terms for the same category: the node rather than the arc, the moment of intersection rather than the sustained passage between intersections. Dr. Bemanian is not interested in continuity here but in the discrete points where paths meet.

Against this taxonomy of crossings, the squirrel image arrives with specific concrete force. The squirrel’s motion is vertical, energetic, non-linear, purpose-uncertain. The rain droplets’ motion is horizontal, patient, surface-spreading, persistent. "Persistently prevail the ponds" — the rain does not merely fall on ponds; it prevails on them, a verb of contest and gentle victory. The two motions — the squirrel’s bounce and the rain’s patient prevailing — coexist without explanation, without resolution into metaphor for each other. This is Dr. Bemanian’s characteristic practice with natural imagery: he places phenomena alongside each other and trusts the resonance, rather than collapsing one into an illustration of the other.

The abandoned merry-go-round is the poem’s most distinctively modern image and its most quietly devastating. The device was built for joy — circular, rhythmic, controlled, designed to produce delight. It has been abandoned: not broken, not stopped, but forsaken by whoever gave it purpose, its momentum still carrying it through the motions of a function it no longer serves. To be "entangled within" it is to be caught in the mechanism of former joy, spinning in the pattern of what used to mean something. Dr. Bemanian places this image against the alternative of "the enduring moments to join, fulfil and bond" — genuine connection as opposed to mechanical repetition of connection’s form. The question between them is left open, unanswered, in the characteristic Bemanian posture of the embedded interrogative without a question mark.

Stanza 4

And the ecstasy and elation, to tilt the head, to change the point, the step and aspect — snoop and heed, complementing and harmonizing whispers and hints, glare, contemplate, frown and scowl, the laughter and mirth, though at the end, culmination and height, apex and apogee, is meant and aimed to, dazzle and astound, cobalt to confirm, sky’s hidden songs.

The stanza’s opening physical gesture — "to tilt the head" — is the whole of the stanza’s philosophical argument in miniature. Ecstasy, in Dr. Bemanian’s phenomenology, is not an interior state but an orientation: it tips the head, alters the angle of perception, shifts the step. Emotion is always embodied in a specific physical reorientation. The tilt of the head changes what can be seen; ecstasy is the experience of seeing differently by changing the angle.

"Snoop and heed" — the poem’s most precise characterization of the attentive posture. "Snoop" carries the transgressive edge of looking where one is not formally invited; "heed" carries the weight of genuine, disciplined responsiveness. Together they propose that the most fertile listening combines authorized attention with unauthorized curiosity. To only heed is to accept what is offered; to only snoop is to trespass without receiving. The combination — snooping and heeding simultaneously — is the posture of the poet who enters the argot of creation.

"Cobalt to confirm, sky’s hidden songs" — the stanza’s most original epistemological claim. A specific color — cobalt blue, the deep atmospheric blue of a clear sky at altitude — performs an act of confirmation. The hidden songs of the sky are confirmed precisely by the depth of the blue that conceals them. This reverses normal epistemology: usually the visible reveals and the hidden remains in doubt. Here the concealment confirms. The cobalt is not evidence that the songs are absent; it is evidence that they exist in a register the unaided ear cannot reach. What cannot be heard is demonstrated by the intensity of what can be seen. This is a synesthetic argument — color proving sound — of the kind that only poetry can make, and that only Dr. Bemanian’s specific combination of scientific precision and lyric ambition would attempt.

Stanza 5

The shooting stars, when reach to respond, they dive to curtail, stains and spots, solely to cojoin, to pass the fortune, the joy to outshine, one at given time, virtues of alterations, rituals of abandonments, to symphonize, perform and carryout, while the wholeness, the shooting stars, vibrant and vivid thoughts epitomize gist and vibe, existence, actuality, presence, and the exchange of mesmerizing trailing clues and enlightening rods.

Shooting stars enter the poem not as spectacle but as agents with volition. "When reach to respond, they dive to curtail, stains and spots" — the shooting star responds to something in the world by diving to reduce its imperfections. This is an entirely original characterization: the meteor as corrective force, actively engaging with the blemishes of the night. They do not merely illuminate; they cleanse.

"Solely to cojoin, to pass the fortune, the joy to outshine, one at given time" — the shooting star’s purpose is connection (to conjoin), transmission (to pass the fortune), and individual attention ("one at given time"). The universe does not act in bulk; it acts through the timed, singular gesture of each star. This sequencing imposes a discipline of individual attention on the cosmos: one at a given time, not a shower but a succession of precise, individual acts.

"Virtues of alterations, rituals of abandonments" — the most philosophically original pairing in the poem. These two phrases advance two propositions of genuine originality. That alteration is virtuous — that change is not merely inevitable but morally affirmative, a form of fidelity to the real — is a claim that challenges the classical valorization of permanence. That abandonment can be ritual — practiced with the regularity and intentionality of ceremony rather than suffered as accident — is a claim that rehabilitates release. The shooting star abandons its light ritually; every abandonment enacted with intention participates in a cosmic ceremony of productive release. Dr. Bemanian has developed, across the Odyssey collection, a consistent philosophy of consent — the idea that what is yielded and what is surrendered are not losses but gifts — and "rituals of abandonments" is its most concentrated formulation.

"Enlightening rods" — staffs of conducted light, drawing on the double meaning of the lightning rod (a conductor that draws charge to earth, protecting what lies beneath) and the rod as a staff of authority or guidance. The shooting star’s trail is both: it draws illumination downward and provides directional guidance through what it leaves behind.

Stanza 6

The edifying, enriching interactions, rewarding transactions, the spontaneous incidents, the liens or exchanges of moments and durations, to attain, ferment, and enflame, bestowments, the conferment, or detriments, to merge and blend, whereas, the dimming tails, the sacrificed embodiment of immensity and heaven, darken and obscure the instinct and perception, and, the opening cracks, crevasses and gaps are ceased, only the deepen and dim passages are congealed, the spotting, perceiving trails, do meet bows and bends.

The stanza opens in an economic and legal register — transactions, liens, bestowments, conferments, detriments — before pivoting to the cosmic through "whereas." This pivot is formal as well as thematic: the "Whereas" hinge is one of Dr. Bemanian’s signature adversative devices, used across the Odyssey collection to mark the turn from one register to another without erasing the tension between them. The legal vocabulary is not abandoned when the cosmic enters; the lien on moments and durations — the legal claim against time itself — persists into the discussion of dimming tails. The dimming tail is both a physical phenomenon and a form of encumbered time: a moment that has made a claim and now must be discharged.

"The dimming tails, the sacrificed embodiment of immensity and heaven" — the shooting star’s fading trail is named as sacrifice, not merely dimming. The star has given something of itself — its immensity, its heaven — in the act of trailing through the atmosphere. The light that fades does not disappear through exhaustion; it is sacrificed, surrendered in a purposeful act of diminishment. This connects to the "rituals of abandonments" of stanza 5: the dimming is abandonment ritualized, sacrifice performed.

"The opening cracks, crevasses and gaps are ceased, only the deepen and dim passages are congealed" — the apertures through which light and meaning might have passed are closed. What remains is frozen: passages that are simultaneously deepened and dimmed. More profound, less navigable. This is the paradox of the dimming tail: the deeper it goes, the less accessible it becomes. The "spotting, perceiving trails, do meet bows and bends" — the paths by which one locates and perceives arrive at curvature rather than straight passage. Perception curves. It does not proceed directly.

Stanza 7

Dimming tails, darken and obscure, are they illusions, artifices, or semblances, imposters and prowlers, the lurkers and pretenders, the ashes and ruins, to fade and wane, or no, they do evoke and educe, arose and conjure, implore and intreat to be remembered, reminisced, and ruminated, retentions and references are entailed, caused and occasioned to be agile and nimble tokens, cues, and reminders.

The seventh stanza is the poem’s most direct epistemological inquiry. The dimming tails are subjected to a sustained interrogation: three modes of non-reality are proposed in sequence — illusion (appears to exist but doesn’t), artifice (constructed to appear as something it is not), semblance (resembles without being). Then the rogues’ gallery: imposters, prowlers, lurkers, pretenders — the vocabulary of deliberate deception, of things that linger and masquerade. This accumulation of suspicion about the dimming tail is the argot of epistemological anxiety: does what fades retain its truth, or does fading unmask it as always having been a pretense?

"Or no" — the turn is unambiguous. Dr. Bemanian refuses the verdict of illusion with direct, unqualified negation. The dimming tails do not deceive; they evoke, educe, arouse, conjure. The verbs escalate through four levels of memory-activation: to evoke (call up an image), to educe (draw out what was latent), to arouse (stir to active wakefulness), to conjure (summon with urgency). The tails then "implore and intreat to be remembered, reminisced, and ruminated" — they do not passively await recall but actively petition for it. They lobby. The fading trail becomes the urgent messenger of its own remembrance.

"Retentions and references are entailed, caused and occasioned to be agile and nimble tokens, cues, and reminders" — the language of cognitive science (retentions, references) and legal obligation (entailed, caused and occasioned) combine to describe the epistemological function of the dimming tail. It is legally required — entailed — to produce agile and nimble memory tokens. Agility and nimbleness are unusual qualities for mnemonic devices, which are usually treated as static and fixed. Dr. Bemanian’s mnemonic is mobile: it can shift, adjust, find the angle at which it will be received. What fades does not become inert; it becomes more efficient, more concentrated, more precisely targeted.

Stanza 8

The waves and surges, curls and surfs, the ripples and rollers intertwine and interlace, merely to, step and start, budge and shift, and nudge and jolt, the alchemy that reigns and runs, and judges and leads— the scenes, sights, and outlooks, forests and trees, shrubs and weeds, to gesture and shrug, and nod and point, the dialect, patois and argot of creation, the conceptions and cosmos, and the harmonized ball and ballet, conceal the secrets, only to adore you.

The final stanza returns to water — completing the elemental cycle opened in stanza 1 — but the vocabulary has refined: waves, surges, curls, surfs, ripples, rollers are the ocean’s own sustained, interweaving vocabulary, distinct from the rain’s assault of the opening. Water has moved from projectile to grammar; it now "intertwines and interlaces" rather than dampening and dowsing.

"Merely to, step and start, budge and shift, and nudge and jolt" — the vast elemental forces of the poem are deployed for the smallest verbs of motion: to budge, to nudge, to step. This is not irony but revelation. The cosmic acts through the minimal; the immense achieves its purposes through the marginal increment. The alchemy that governs all this — "the alchemy that reigns and runs, and judges and leads" — is marked with an em-dash, Dr. Bemanian’s signature of compressed finality, the dash that says: what follows is not a continuation but a consequence.

"The dialect, patois and argot of creation" — the poem arrives at its central revelation in the second-to-last line. Creation speaks in argot. The forests gesture; the shrubs nod and point; the cosmos shrugs. These are not metaphors for meaning; they are the actual communicative acts of a world that has developed its own insider language across the full span of geological and cosmic time. The three terms — dialect (regional speech of a community), patois (informal, vernacular language), argot (specialized insider vocabulary of a group) — are arranged in ascending order of restriction: dialect is broad, patois is vernacular, argot is exclusive. Creation’s language is argot: it reaches only those who have been initiated into its specific terms.

"The conceptions and cosmos, and the harmonized ball and ballet, conceal the secrets, only to adore you." — the poem’s final clause is the disclosure the entire poem has prepared. The concealment — of the sky’s hidden songs, of the covert deeds, of the dimming tails, of the argot itself — is not ignorance or limitation. It is adoration. Every draped thing, every dim passage, every abandoned merry-go-round still spinning, every shooting star trailing its sacrificed light: all of these are the cosmos’s argot for a single recipient, the beloved named only in this final phrase, for whom everything has been concealed and from whom nothing has been withheld.

III. Conceptual Innovations

1. The Poem as the Argot It Describes

The title "Argots and Lingos" is not merely descriptive; it is constitutive. An argot is the insider language of a group that binds initiates and excludes outsiders. Dr. Bemanian’s Odyssey collection has, across its volumes, constructed precisely such an argot: the accumulative near-synonym cluster, the embedded question without a question mark, the "While" hinge, the em-dash as pivot of philosophical compression, the beloved appearing only in the closing line as the destination of all preceding content. "Argots and Lingos" names its own linguistic practice as its subject. To read the poem is to be inside its argot before understanding what the argot is about. The formal self-referentiality is complete and without irony: the poem about specialized insider language is itself the specialized insider language of a specific poetic project.

2. Language as the First Among Three Equal Natural Forces

The poem’s opening places language — argots and lingos — structurally prior to rain and wind, before weather in the three-sequence grammar of the first stanza. This is not metaphor or comparison; it is ontological placement. Dr. Bemanian does not say language is like a natural force; he places it in the position of a natural force, before the others, in the same formal architecture. The philosophical claim is thus: language is not a human artifact imposed upon nature but the first of three equal elemental forces — preceding rain, preceding wind — that spread and stretch and reach and dampen and curve through the world. The poem advances this claim through syntax before any image deploys it.

3. The Abandoned Merry-Go-Round as the Collection’s Only Domestic-Scale Image of Mechanical Melancholy

In a collection that moves primarily through geological, elemental, and cosmic scales, the abandoned merry-go-round of stanza 3 is unique in its domestic modernity and its specific quality of displacement. A device built for joy continues its motion after the joy has been withdrawn — not broken, not stopped, but forsaken by whoever gave it purpose. The spinning persists as the mechanism of connection without the connection itself. Dr. Bemanian places this image at the poem’s exact center as a genuine question — "is it pure joy, or, being entangled within an abandoned merry go around" — and leaves it unresolved. The merry-go-round is a figure for the relationship between form and feeling: what happens to the form when the feeling that motivated it has been abandoned? The form continues; the meaning does not. This is the collection’s most precise image of joyless persistence.

4. "Cobalt to Confirm" as Synesthetic Epistemology

The phrase "cobalt to confirm, sky’s hidden songs" advances a claim that belongs to no established epistemological tradition but is original to this poem: that a color can confirm the existence of a sound. Cobalt blue does not merely describe the sky; it provides evidence for the hidden songs within it. The deeper the blue, the more confirmed the songs. This reverses the normal relationship between visibility and certainty: the usual epistemological claim is that what can be seen is what can be known, and what is hidden remains in doubt. Here, the quality of the concealment — the specific, deep cobalt of the high sky — is itself the confirmation. What cannot be heard is proved by what can be seen. This is an argument about the epistemological reliability of aesthetic experience: beauty of concealment proves depth of concealed content.

5. "Rituals of Abandonments" as Ceremony of Release

The pairing of "rituals" with "abandonments" in stanza 5 is among the most philosophically productive coinages in the Odyssey collection. Ritual implies repetition, intentionality, and ceremony — the practice of something regularly enough to acquire the quality of sacred act. Abandonment normally implies unintended loss, the withdrawal of care or presence without ceremony. To make abandonment a ritual is to propose that letting go can be as disciplined, as practiced, as intentional as any act of holding on. Dr. Bemanian does not treat abandonment here as tragedy but as form. The shooting star that abandons its light across the sky performs a ceremony; its dimming is not failure but the fulfillment of its ritual purpose. This concept reframes every act of release in the poem — the forgotten seeds, the dimming tails, the concealed secrets — as acts of purposeful ceremony rather than involuntary loss.

6. The Fading Trail as More Efficient Carrier Than the Source

Stanzas 6 and 7 develop the counterintuitive argument that the shooting star’s fading trail is a more efficient mnemonic and epistemological instrument than the star itself. The star blazes and passes; the trail "implores and intreats to be remembered" — it actively petitions for recall rather than passively awaiting it. The trail becomes "agile and nimble tokens, cues, and reminders" — mobile rather than fixed, adjustable rather than static, precisely targeted rather than broadly distributed. The presence of the star saturates perception; the absence of the star concentrates it. What fades does not diminish in meaning but concentrates meaning into a more portable form. This is the poem’s most original contribution to the philosophy of memory: not that the trace outlasts the event (which is common), but that the trace petitions for its own remembrance and becomes more efficient through its diminishment.

IV. Comparative Literary Context

"Argots and Lingos" enters one of the oldest and most contested areas of philosophical poetry — the question of whether and how the natural world communicates — while advancing a position unique to Dr. Bemanian’s practice. The poem does not simply assert that nature speaks; it argues that nature speaks in argot, an insider vocabulary accessible only to the initiated, and that the poem itself is simultaneously the decoder of this argot and a specimen of it.

In the Persian classical and Sufi tradition, the universe’s communicative activity is a central theme. Rumi’s Masnavi proposes that everything in creation cries out in longing for its origin — the reed’s cry being the archetype of a cosmic language in which every creature addresses the source from which it has been separated. Dr. Bemanian’s argot of creation inherits this understanding while transforming it significantly: creation’s language is not only longing but the full grammar of embodied gesture — the forests gesture, the shrubs nod, the cosmos shrugs. The argot of creation is not a single cry of separation but a rich, polyglot vocabulary of orientation, including the shrug (the gesture of unknowing), the nod (of assent and recognition), and the point (of directional indication). Where Rumi’s creation longs, Bemanian’s creation communicates.

Hafez provides the structural template for the poem’s deployment of the beloved. The ghazal’s maqta — the closing couplet in which the poet’s name appears and the beloved is typically addressed — is the formal source for the practice of withholding the beloved until the poem has assembled everything it needs to offer. In "Argots and Lingos," the beloved appears only in the final three words — "only to adore you" — receiving the entire accumulated cosmic apparatus as a single gesture of devotion. This is the ghazal architecture transposed into free verse and extended to the entire poem: every line is a line in the ghazal’s accumulating devotional argument; only the closing phrase names its purpose.

The Persian epigraph’s زمزمه (zumzuma) connects the poem to a tradition in which sound at the threshold of audibility — the murmur, the hum, the whisper — is the privileged register of divine speech. In classical Persian poetry, the beloved’s whispered instruction (zumzuma-ye yar) is often more powerful than any declaration. That the epigraph places this murmur in the context of "grief of longing" rather than "joy of presence" establishes the poem’s fundamental situation: one is separated from the beloved, and the cosmos’s argot is the communication that passes across this separation.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in "God’s Grandeur" and "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," develops the most direct English-language antecedent for the poem’s claim that creation carries a communicative charge beyond its surfaces. Hopkins’s "inscape" — the distinctive inner quality of each thing pressing outward for expression — is the English precursor to Dr. Bemanian’s "argot of creation": each forest, shrub, and wave has its own way of gesturing within the larger insider language of existence. But where Hopkins’s charge flows from the divine through nature to the human perceiver in a vertical movement, Dr. Bemanian’s argot flows horizontally — from creation to the beloved — and its purpose is not illumination of the divine but adoration of the human particular. The cosmos’s argot is addressed not to God but to "you."

Walt Whitman’s democratic enumeration — "the scenes, sights, and outlooks, forests and trees, shrubs and weeds" — is echoed in the poem’s final stanza, which gathers the entire natural catalogue in a single participatory gesture. But where Whitman’s catalogue absorbs the world into an expanding I, Dr. Bemanian’s accumulation is strictly orientated outward: everything is gathered not into the self but toward the beloved. The poem’s speaker is nearly absent throughout; the poem is constructed as a system of forces oriented toward an addressee rather than a subject oriented toward a world.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the Will — the blind, foundational force that underlies all natural phenomena and drives them without purpose toward their perpetual striving — provides a philosophical antecedent for the poem’s treatment of elemental forces as involuntary and directional. But Dr. Bemanian’s revision is decisive: where Schopenhauer’s Will is tragic in its purposelessness, the argot of creation is purposive in its concealment. The forces of language, rain, and wind are not blindly striving; they are deliberately concealing — "only to adore you." The Schopenhauerian tragedy is redeemed by the Hafezian purpose: concealment in service of adoration.

Paul Celan’s practice of the compressed, resistant, specifically addressed lyric — the poem as a message sent in code from one particular person to another, available to the uninitiated only as partial meaning — resonates with the poem’s deployment of argot as both subject and method. Celan’s lyric is itself the argot: the message is not available to everyone who reads it, only to the one for whom it was composed. Dr. Bemanian’s "Argots and Lingos" makes this structure universal: the cosmos itself speaks in Celan’s mode, producing a language of specific address that general readers (the uninitiated) can receive only as beauty, while the addressed one receives it as adoration.

V. Philosophical Claims

1. Language is ontologically prior to and equivalent with the other elemental forces of nature. It is not a human capacity imposed upon a silent world but the first among three natural forces — preceding rain, preceding wind — that spread, reach, and reshape the world according to their own elemental grammar.

2. Scale does not confer protection in the face of elemental forces. What is tall and exposed bears the brunt of the storm; what is small and humble survives by acknowledging its smallness and seeking shelter accordingly. The great flounder; the modest persist. This is not a moral lesson but an observation about the distribution of elemental consequence.

3. Concealment of depth confirms the depth of what is concealed. The cobalt blue that hides the sky’s hidden songs is evidence that the songs exist and are profound; the intensity of the concealment is proportional to the significance of the concealed. This reverses the standard epistemological relationship in which visibility confirms and invisibility leaves in doubt.

4. Abandonment can be practiced as ceremony. The releasing of what one has held — light, presence, attachment — can be executed with the regularity and intentionality of ritual rather than suffered as accident. The shooting star’s abandonment of its light is the ceremonial model for every act of productive release, transforming loss into form.

5. The trace that remains after the source has passed is a more active and efficient carrier of meaning than the source itself. The fading trail petitions for its own remembrance, becoming agile and nimble in its mobilization of memory precisely because its intensity has been reduced. Presence saturates; absence concentrates; the trace petitions.

6. The cosmos’s concealment of its secrets is neither ignorance nor indifference but the highest form of devotion. Every draped thing, every hidden song, every dimming tail, every argot requiring initiation to understand — all of these are the universe’s specialized language of adoration, directed toward the beloved who is named, finally and entirely, in the poem’s closing phrase.

VI. Conclusion

"Argots and Lingos" is a poem about its own language, and this self-referentiality is not an aesthetic conceit but a philosophical position. By naming itself with the term for insider vocabulary — argot — the poem claims that the language of poetry at the highest level of engagement is always specialized, always requiring initiation, always constituting a community of readers who have learned the vocabulary that makes full reception possible. Dr. Bemanian’s Odyssey collection has built this argot across its volumes: the reader who arrives at "Argots and Lingos" with the collection behind them is already inside the argot the poem names.

The poem’s argument is constructed at every level simultaneously. The form of the opening stanza — three structurally identical elemental sequences — argues for the ontological equivalence of language and weather before any image has deployed this claim. The abandoned merry-go-round poses the central question of the poem — joy or entrapment, presence or mechanical repetition — in a register of modern melancholy unique to the collection. The cobalt confirmation of sky’s hidden songs advances an epistemological argument about the evidential value of aesthetic beauty that no philosophical prose could make without the support of the poem’s specific sensory precision. The rituals of abandonments redeem release from tragedy. The dimming tail’s petition for its own remembrance recasts forgetting as dereliction rather than inevitability. And the closing revelation — "only to adore you" — transforms the entire poem retrospectively into a single act of adoration addressed to a specific beloved.

This is the poem’s formal achievement: to have built, across eight stanzas, a system so complete that its final three words reorganize everything that preceded them. Not simply a conclusion, but a disclosure — the draped, finally, unfolds.

VII. About the Poet

Alireza Bemanian is a poet, architect, and academic whose literary practice is rooted equally in the classical Persian literary tradition and the full expressive range of contemporary English verse — both traditions forming the primary ground of a poetic sensibility that belongs to neither exclusively and enriches both. His bilingual creative practice is not a practice in which one language translates or supplements the other, but one in which the classical Persian and contemporary English traditions engage as genuine equals, each bringing its own formal inheritance to bear on the same set of philosophical and lyrical questions. The Persian epigraph that opens "Argots and Lingos" — with its زمزمه, its murmur in the grief of longing — is not decoration appended to an English poem but the structural announcement of the poem’s emotional situation, connecting the poem to the Persian classical tradition of the night vigil and the concealed beloved before the English text has spoken its first word.

What distinguishes Dr. Bemanian’s practice as visible in "Argots and Lingos" is the engineering precision with which the poem’s formal architecture carries its philosophical argument. His doctoral formation in Electrical Engineering, spanning Electromagnetic Waves and Fields and Control Systems, is structurally present in the poem’s most distinctive formal decision: the triple parallel sequence of the opening stanza, in which each elemental force is assigned exactly the same formal structure — synonymic noun pairs followed by synonymic verb pairs, each sequence closed by an em-dash. This is not free association or poetic intuition; it is the precision of a systems thinker who understands that structural equivalence at the formal level makes an ontological claim before any content does. The three elements are not merely placed alongside each other; they are given the same formal specification, the way an engineer specifies identical components that will bear equal loads.

The architectural formation is equally present in the poem’s treatment of the "harmonized ball and ballet" — the spherical geometry and choreographic form that Dr. Bemanian uses to describe cosmic motion. The dome and cupola of "Prudence and Essence," the continuum bind of "Motions and Gestures," and now the ball and ballet of "Argots and Lingos" — these are an architect-engineer’s sequence of figures for organized motion: the sphere, the vault, the governed trajectory. Each poem in the collection contributes a structural figure to this ongoing architectural vocabulary of the cosmos.

Dr. Bemanian’s Odyssey collection is among the most architecturally disciplined and philosophically sustained long-form poetry projects in contemporary literature. Each poem is self-sufficient in its argument and simultaneously load-bearing within the larger structure. "Argots and Lingos" takes its place in this structure not as a poem about language but as the poem that names what the collection has been doing all along: developing an argot — an insider vocabulary, a specialized language of adoration — for an audience of one. 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 "Argots and Lingos" is © 2026 www.bemanian.com, all rights reserved.