TEHRAN -- A mother returns home from Tehran’s airport after saying goodbye to her 24-year-old daughter, who has left Iran to pursue opportunities abroad. She opens Instagram, uploads a photograph and writes just two lines:
“I saw with my own eyes my soul departing from my body.”
The verse, taken from a 13th-century poem by Saadi of Shiraz, spreads rapidly across social media. Friends, relatives and strangers share it—not because they are discussing medieval Persian literature, but because the poet has articulated a feeling they struggle to express themselves.
For Mina Ramin-Sabet, a Persian literature scholar who earned her doctorate at the University of Tehran and is a researcher of Persian mythological literature at the University of Oklahoma, the episode illustrates a striking transformation. 
In an English-language essay for World Literature Today, she argues that classical Persian poetry has found an unexpected second life in the digital age, migrating from literary anthologies and university classrooms to Instagram captions, Telegram channels and TikTok videos.
The phenomenon has altered not only where poetry is read, but how it functions.
For generations, the works of Saadi, Rumi, Hafez and Ferdowsi occupied an almost sacred place in Iranian culture. Today, their verses circulate alongside selfies, travel photographs and short videos, serving as expressions of heartbreak, longing, celebration and political frustration. Many users may not know the poet’s biography—or even the poet’s name—but instinctively reach for a centuries-old couplet to articulate emotions that contemporary language seems unable to capture.
Love remains the most common theme. Rumi’s verse, “Count not the life lived without love; love is the water of life,” regularly appears beneath photographs of sunsets, weddings and quiet moments of reflection. 
Likewise, a line by the modern poet Forough Farrokhzad—”If life were given a thousand times, each time I would choose you”—has become a favorite declaration of devotion on Persian-language social media, shared on anniversaries, engagements and birthdays.
Poetry also gives voice to grief. One of the most widely circulated couplets belongs not to a household name but to the relatively obscure Shakibi Isfahani:
“We survived the nights of separation; we never imagined we possessed such endurance.”
Its author is often forgotten. The emotion is not.
That separation between poet and poem, Ramin-Sabet suggests, reveals something remarkable: the verses have become part of a shared emotional vocabulary, belonging less to literary history than to collective memory.
The same process extends beyond private feelings into public life. During moments of political tension, historical poetry frequently resurfaces online as a form of commentary. A verse by the medieval poet Saif Farghani, written during the Mongol invasions, continues to circulate whenever Iranians confront oppression:
“As the justice of the righteous did not endure forever, so too shall the tyranny of oppressors pass.”
Likewise, Aref Qazvini’s famous patriotic lyric, “Tulips have grown from the blood of the nation’s youth,” reappears during times of war and national mourning. Drawing on the ancient Persian legend of Siyavash, whose innocent death gave rise to the red tulip, the poem has become a symbol of sacrifice that transcends the historical moment in which it was written.
Why has Persian poetry adapted so naturally to social media?
Ramin-Sabet points first to form. Classical Persian verse was composed for oral performance, and its self-contained couplets fit neatly

 into the visual grammar of modern platforms, where a few lines can accompany an image or short video. A single verse often functions as a complete emotional statement.
Its language is equally important. Over more than a millennium, Persian poets developed an extraordinary vocabulary for love, exile, longing and loss. Their verses compress complex emotional experiences into a handful of words, offering a precision that ordinary conversation often cannot.
There is also a deeper cultural dimension. Poetry has long occupied a central place in Iranian identity, preserving historical memory across generations. As digital platforms reshape how people communicate, they have not displaced that tradition so much as given it a new medium.
Far from consigning classical literature to the past, social media has returned it to everyday life. Seven centuries after Saadi first composed his verses, they continue to travel—no longer by manuscript or memory alone, but at the touch of a screen, connecting strangers through emotions that remain as immediate today as when they were first written.