The Significance of Settings as Poem Starters in Sherko Bekas’ The Chair and The Butterfly Strait

Abstract

This paper explores setting as a literary device in two poems authored by a modern Kurdish poet, these are The Chair and the Butterfly Strait. The setting represents the poet’s experiences to interact with the themes of the two poems. Sherko Bekas, a Kurdish poet whose poems popularized in the 1960s, used settings to signify different themes in the first lines of most his poems. The poet used these setting-specific lines to raise different issues, including the Kurdish cause, personal experiences, and other objects. In the Chair and the Butterfly Strait, the poet manipulated these themes by implying them in the first lines. The poem starter is the first line of a poem where the poet introduces the topic narratively then he proceeds to the remaining issues.

while the second axis deals with the effectiveness of the place in the beginning of the poetic scene in the poem (The Strait of Butterflies).