Ahmad Shamlu’s poetic vision is shaped by his subjective perceptions and experiences as well as his informed appreciation of the external world as being incomprehensible, evasive, and vast. His poems, often intensely personal and resonating with yearning, loss, and love, give voice to the complicated dynamics of individual desire for meaning in life and a disconsolate, unresponsive universe. His short poem “Nocturnal IX” (1964-65) is preoccupied with the idea of desire and death, which makes it an apt subject matter for psychoanalytical critical study. This qualitative, library-based research aims to provide a novel critical reading of this lyrical poem from a Lacanian perspective. First, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic fundamental ideas, including the relationship between language and subjectivity, the structure of human psyche and its development, and jouissance and sexual difference will be explicated. Then, these concepts will be traced in thematic structure of the poem at issue. The results of the study indicate that death drive formulates the speaker’s life, and that is the reason why he is left disappointed by ordinary satisfactions of objet petit a, seeking for Other jouissance. Therefore, he has become aware of the Real order and attempts to reach it, but ultimately to no avail, since Other jouissance belongs to the realm of the Real, which renders it elusive and inaccessible. The findings of this study can be adopted in teaching contemporary poetry with a psychoanalytical approach and a focus on the interplay between literary discourse and the author’s psychological processes.
