From the House of Nature . . .

The alley of the friend is the place of freedom, that is, the place of the freedom of the soul, an arena in which the soul finds itself free. Man, however, is of the world: He comes into the world, spends time in the world, and lives within its time. His soul and body travel in the world, and the world travels within his soul and body. This human who has fallen into the world hurls himself beyond the corrosive revolving of the world to the alley of the friend in order to free himself from the enslavement of its inevitable laws. This same enslavement drives him toward freedom. Because he is in darkness, he longs for light: with the radiance of the face of the friend, he lights the lamp of his heart. Thus, since humans come together at the crossroads of this world and since they become aware of the creator through the blessing of creation, they are lovers and beloveds, whether in the world or through the world, and they rediscover each other, or better stated, each other in themselves. Man is of the world, and in order to attain the lofty and ideal space, the poet constantly measures himself in terms of actual terrestrial space; and once he has tested and perceived that space, he is more aware of his worldliness within this space.

This space, however, is not far and is near geographic lands, plains, and meadows. In epic poetry, space is expansive and “horizontal.” Battles and feasting, victory and defeat, joy and sorrow occur on battlegrounds and in banquet halls, in crossing rivers and mountains, and as a result of traversing countries. The battle chronicle of the champions of the Sage of Tus¹ takes place under the sky, on land, or at sea. In epics, the life force is an ideal force, and because of its uncontrollable and restless driving force, the champion fights any obstacle to his will, including the ruggedness of nature, vast distances, the difficulties of the road, and the travails of travel. This rebelliousness of the will in the champion, or the poet, at times gallops so far ahead that it breaks through the boundaries of any horizon and disregards the limitations of natural distances and human endurance and ability. Champions navigate at sea for forty days, charge from this end of the world to the other, and overcome the seven perilous feats.²

In the mystical and love ghazals, however, space is compressed and “vertical.” The gaze of the Bard of Shiraz soars from observing the earth and the sky to the other side of the world, to the desert of darkness and light, to the realm of separation and union. And if he mentions a city or a clime, it is to express a mood, not to tell a story. For example, he laments the memory of the beloved and a forlorn land; yet still, in such a situation, he rarely mentions a place by name. Rather, he metaphorically expresses the mood that a place creates in him: Yazd as “Alexander’s prison,”³ a strange forlorn city, and Shiraz as the “kingdom of Solomon”⁴ and the “country of the beloved.”⁵

With his spiritual travel provisions, the poet of love songs flows in existing and external spaces and makes a spiritual journey in the visible, material world. He does not seek a “scientific” understanding of the external world and its empirical laws. He does not observe, but contemplates the world spiritually. His observation is internal, because, on the one hand, he entrusts the image of the physical eye to the heart’s eye and sees his own world from beyond his senses; and, on the other, he is in search of the “internal” aspect of the world, its hidden meaning and mystery. He inhabits the external world, measures it within himself, and externalizes it. Hence, even external space assumes an inner hue.

Space is not an abstract concept; rather, it assumes existence in nature, or in other words, nature is the creation of space. Hence, the poet’s “space” is the same as the world of creation. On the other hand, creation occurs in time and is itself the beginning of this-worldly time. Creation allows space and time to exist, and “nonexistence” becomes “existence” in time and space. Hence, the world holds within itself the unique perception and conception of nature and time and space. For this reason, the revolving dome⁶ is the wheel and firmament, the turning sphere, and time, and they are represented by symbols that evoke in the mind a form of movement and an image of change.

The universe is subject to time. It is in motion, revolving; and with the traveling of its stars, with its moon and sun and sunset and dawn, it gives birth to time within itself and brings it into the world and takes it out of the world, night and day. This is universal and “external” time, since it is measurable and quantitative due to the change in the external world and alongside it; and our lives pass within its days, weeks, months, and years. “This chaotic passage”⁷ is a stage or an opportunity of but the few days that the universe has given us. At “the time when time is so short,” we are moving hurriedly toward “the sea of oblivion.”⁸ The poet anxiously observes this invisible pilferer who constantly robs his present and drives it to the past, to make him one of those who have passed away. The offspring of the world are the prey of time, because anyone who falls into the caravanserai of the world moves along with the caravan of time. Time and space are of the same essence, and rarely does one enter the mind of the poet without the other, as though space is the design and body of time, and time is the essence and soul of space.

Nevertheless, oblivious to us, the world revolves; but its revolving is our time. As it finishes its task, in fact, it is finishing us off. The denizens of the world have a unilateral, mediated, and “negative” relationship with the world: Its revolving is our fate, but our fate counts for naught in its revolving. Time finds its way in between, and its revolving becomes our fate. Without this mediator, it has no access to us. The world is unconsciously impactful, and humans are consciously impacted; and this makes the relationship negative. Since the two sides of the relationship are unequal, as a result, they are not free of each other, and because they are not free of each other, neither are they free within themselves. The world without volition has engulfed man, and man without volition has appeared in the world. Two sides that are neither of the same essence nor equal, in a relationship without volition, are entwined together, or one has fallen into the rotating mill of the other, like grain. Such a relationship is fatalistic and, from the perspective of humans (that is, the conscious side of this relationship), unjust. As it builds our time, the firmament also determines our fate, because fate in time changes from potential into actual and comes into existence, because it is the firmament that “shuts the door of free will to you and me.”⁹ Is it not true that everyone has a star that is born with him and dies with him? Hence, destiny descends on us from the revolving of spheres and stars from the supreme wheel. The world takes our destiny away from us, separates it from us, organizes it on the basis of its own indiscernible wish, and in this way, changes destiny to accident and chance in accordance with the ruling of fate.

The world’s time, like an invisible and visible blight, destroys us and disregards our will and wishes. The poet shuns this characteristic of existence, which like a chronic and deadly disease is hidden at the core of life, and he cannot locate its cause. That is why he says, “dangerous times” and “the upturned heavens / like some bloody colander”¹⁰ are “a vicious circle,”¹¹ and this adversity is contrary to reason, that is, it is blind, mad, and goes against our wishes; in other words, it is hardhearted and destructive. This vicious circle is charging in a certain direction and doing something that it should not.

From this perspective, man’s unilateral relationship with the world is existential and “internal,” because he views the world through the ugliness and beauty of emotions and the good and bad of ideas, from behind the colorful screen of his imagination, and expresses love and hatred for it: The time-infested world nurtures like a nanny and kills callously. Every sweet nectar and sweet smile of hers has a bitter sting and a bitter bite. She is the trap we cannot escape, the sharp-shooting hunter of our wishes, and the lasso that impedes our steps and our flight. In the complex design of the turning spheres, the death-conscious poet sees “the deceitful hag”¹² and the bride of a thousand grooms¹³ that sends each and every one unaware to the bed of dust and oblivion, the frenzied game of madmen in a slumber house set in a mirage!¹⁴

In the thinking of Hafez, society is also part of the system of the firmament, not an independent phenomenon with its own processes and procedures. His society is universal; and its good and bad not only hinge on the behavior of the people but also on the journey of the stars to the higher realm. Hence, the darkness of social life: Rule by oppression and deceit also stems from the revolving of the firmament. The auspicious and the sinister in the horoscope also affect the fate of the members of the society.

Nevertheless, this same world is born from love, and “all this colorful design is a light from the face of the cupbearer,”¹⁵ and “the lover and beloved rediscover their own other because of it.” From a general perspective, the world is a divine truth; but in the course of life, it often appears to be a reality devoid of truth and the field of death and separation.

All ideological systems that consider the good to be the source of existence become entangled in a destructive contradiction in the face of the workings of the world. If the whole world stems from the same source, then what is the purpose of this avaricious plunder that does not allow respite for anything, this pointless torment? “Oh the injustice and plunder in this trap.”¹⁶ In Hafez, as well, this incurable contradiction raises its head involuntarily. His world is at times devoid of virtue and hostile to moral values, and tyrannically does whatever it wants. It does not even treat the noble and the ignoble equally, but is often kinder to the latter. The revolving of the firmament that fosters the inferior “is the enemy of the good, is after the killing of the wise heart, and puts the reins of aspired goals in the hands of the ignorant.”¹⁷

Shifting the blame for human ill fortune, suffering, and calamities to the heavens, to the raw material that blindly continues on its unknowable path, keeps the kind and just God safe from the inquisitive eyes and bothersome questions of the faithful. They have set up separate accounts for God and the firmament to avert any harm to their faith. But since God is almighty and has absolute knowledge, and without his will nothing is stored in the mind, the path to infiltrating the beliefs of faithful Muslims remains open, “the mystery behind the veil”¹⁸ remains unsolved, and the seekers of secrets traverse the roads of blasphemy and faith.

In confronting such a world, a poet who has suffered oppression is conscious in the face of an unconscious oppressor, a victim of the arrow of the firmament who has sought but not found justice, and who has lost revenues and capital! The world is the valley of bewilderment, the faraway desert,¹⁹ and the house of mirage.²⁰

No matter which way I went, my fear only increased

Protect me from this desert, this road without end.²¹

It seems as though the pessimism of the Manicheans regarding the prison of the world and the belief of the Muslims in the transience and untrustworthiness of the world, coupled with the painful experience and observation of the poet, have crystalized as the image of the world in his mind.

The world is what it is; but that rose-colored elder in his various moods is not always what he was. I had said that he, among other things, is also “enchanted by the world.”²² After all, he is a clever libertine, not a pious ascetic, and he loves this very “trap of troubles.”²³ The mere fact of being in this “illusory state”²⁴ and the ability to make love and hold a cup of wine should be considered a chance to take advantage, “since time has many incapacities in store beneath the ground.”²⁵ The picture of the world in the mind of the poet is bitter and despairing, but also beautiful and heartwarming.

arise and let us dedicate our lives

to the pen of that great artist

who has created all these marvelous images

within the compass of this earthly circle²⁶

The world is a colorful canvas with the “sound of the words of love”²⁷ and the high and low voices of lovers. Hafez laments the unkindness of the world because of the great love he has for it. If “some leisure time, a book, and the corner of a meadow”²⁸ were not a better state than this and the next world, why would one be sad about the transience of the world? Everything because of which the poet is overflowing with the fascination for life—in step with his this-worldly existence—in the moving chariot of the world is hastily moving toward death. He has just arrived at the beloved’s stopping place and not yet shaken off the dust of the road “when every instant now the bell / Cries, ‘Load up to depart!’”²⁹ The love of the poet for the world is the one-sided love of an unequivocal lover for an inconstant beloved who follows her own path, bewildered, and does not intend to cast a glance—not even a loveless one—at the one who needs her. In the end, the enamored lover casts his lot over to fate and washes his hands of both: of the loving heart and the beloved world! A will that cannot accept existence and go further than a failed dream, out of helplessness and anger, rises against itself to negate both the desirer and the desired.

How long shall our hearts grieve

at the passage of time

imaginehow it would be

if there were no heart and no such thing as time³⁰

Of course, the poet tries to come out from under the rubble of this contradiction—this heart-rending vacillation between wanting and not wanting, love and hatred, and affirming and negating the world—and open a window in the dead end of hopelessness, albeit not in the manner of the faithful or philosophers, not through faith and reason, but in the manner of poets and through the blessing of beauty. His salvation is in beauty (goodness). The oneness of absolute goodness and beauty annihilates absolute evil and ugliness: total light versus total darkness!

O knowing hearthow long will you have to know

the pain of this mean existence

how sad that the fair should come to love the foul³¹

Space and time are twins, and for one to come to be is dependent on the existence of the other. Dawn and evening, midday and midnight, all pass in the sleep and wakefulness of space, and they always change its perpetual soul and body. Because of time, the world is continuously the same and not the same as it was; it is a motionless runner and an eternal transient. Every cycle, every day, season, and year, permeates another change in space, confronts it with new denizens of the world and existential conditions, and transforms it into something other than it was. On the other hand, the world is always the same, and every circle returns to its beginning. Spring and autumn pass each other to reach themselves and, like the links of a chain, to be locked in themselves and in each other. Every beginning through its end and every birth through its death is on its way toward another beginning, another birth.

This repeated cycle—like earth that simultaneously revolves around itself and the sun—is also moving in some direction. But the unidirectional travel of time in the world cannot be sensed and observed, because it is so long and faraway. Only by way of science can one conceive of what the passage of innumerable times does, not with the world but with the bodies of the firmament that are its components. However, this unidirectional time of our “world” takes the denizens of the world to an end that is not followed by another beginning. It passes by the this-worldly “I” and annihilates it forever. The revolving of the world binds itself to the life of the body, which is my particular world, like a bud that can never open. “The affairs of the world are clenched like a bud.”³² They bind man with a chain the links of which are moments and hours, and man tears apart these links to find an opening in the closed cocoon of the world. Their poison finds its way into our soul through this opening. Hence, one must fly out of that same opening to prevent the arrow from piercing the heart, so that, should it cause a wound, it would not, in any case, kill at once. The antidote of time is also in time: in being “knowledgeable of one’s time,”³³ seeing the passing of this rapid water flow with the eye of the heart, drinking a sip from it and wetting one’s lips! The world plunders everything, even its own time. In the midst of this, a mere instant belongs to us. If we appreciate and take advantage of it, we will have taken booty from a plunderer; otherwise, we will have lost and suffered losses.

Appreciate the preciousness of time as much as you can,

This moment is the sum of life, dear one, if you understand.³⁴

If you are not poisoned by regret for the happiness that is gone and fears that have not yet come, and if the bitter experiences of the past and preoccupations with the future have not made your present burden heavier, if you have not forgotten yourself under the rubble of daily—meddlesome but inevitable—problems, you have rescued the moment you are in, and from the world, you have demanded your “right to joyfulness.”³⁵ Compared to the valuable life that a human being loses, being happy for a few instants or moments is neither an excessive nor a simple reward; rather, it is a claim to his right and regaining a bit of his lost destiny. A person who values a night of companionship with a soulmate has taken possession of the chance of a mere few days from infinite formless time, from universal time that flows in the endless space of the firmament, and he has become the owner of his own time. This amount of time is negligible, personal, and as a result, possible; it is fused with life’s incidents and experiences, and regarding the past as memories and regarding the future as wishes and all together—subjectively—will become destiny. Everyone’s life is his passive and active time, “his special opportunity in universal time”; however, “appreciating precious time,”³⁶ means getting out of the monotonous, indifferent, and overall routine of universal time, taking a part of it, shaping it, and making it exclusively one’s own.

In this way, man permeates time that, tyrannical and alien to him, traverses the path of the world, and he is no longer a vessel without resolve, a helpless bed for a flood to pass over; rather, falling and rising, he himself drives along the line of time and, in the darkness of night, becomes a fellow traveler of the star of his own destiny. “As much as he can,”³⁷ he implements his will in time.

Since time and space, like day and light, are together and intertwined, anyone who can take advantage of time also acquires space. Any possessor of time also possesses space, or that thing in which time passes. Nature and its phenomena are the space or thing that the poet gains, because the general idea of the world becomes specific, attainable, and tangible in nature. On the other hand, the world in the phenomena of nature—in the blooming and withering of flowers and plants, in the purple Judas tree of spring and the white poplar of autumn, in the fleeing cloud and the night-prowling star, and in the poet with expectant eyes—turns into things that are the container of time. Things of this kind (that themselves possess place and space), because they possess time, acquire a common aspect with man and in revolving time become fellow travelers with him, “share the same destiny,” and share his joy and sorrow. They too come into the world and depart; they grow, bloom, and wither. From this perspective, their coming and going is no longer a reality that is external to the mind, alien and independent from ours; it is also a truth that is internal to the mind, made up and created by our existence, which acquires its characteristics from our sensory thinking and thinking sense, and takes on the state and quality of our soul. “Every leaf in the meadow is a book about a different disposition.”³⁸

In the same way that existential time shows the way to such a space, inevitably, from existential space we reach such a time. The two sides of this current are not two lights or lines that run into each other, one of which can always be distinguished from the other, especially since nature’s phenomena—each of which is the place of the linkage of time and space—eliminate the separation of the two. These phenomena shine in the two-sided mirrors of time and space, reflect in them, and take form, and those mirrors that are reflected in each other show the phenomena.

In any case, even though it seems astonishing, liberation from the world is also in the world, in nature’s phenomena that are the crystallization of time and space, and from this perspective the most “universal” things in the world. Among all nature’s phenomena, because of his awareness of time and space, man is himself a time in time, a space in space, and a world in the world. And liberation from the world without the help of this “phenomenon” merely by taking refuge in nature’s phenomena is impossible. The friend is a this-worldly being, and friendship reconciles and acquaints us with the world that is his home and that is his place of birth and being.

I never paid attention to the workings of the world,

Your face made me see it as so beautifully adorned.³⁹

The beloved bestows vision to the eyes of the lover, compels him to see beauty, changes his vision, and entrusts him to the wind with a heart that sings in unison with nature. The soul that crawled in dust from loneliness now flies in the air with the scent of the beloved.

What is the heart’s purpose

in viewing the garden of the world?

To pick flowers from your face

as with the hand that is the pupil of the eye.⁴⁰

The moon and the sun are the turning mirrors, and the eye of the lover, the place of the manifestation of the face of the friend; and the flower of her face transforms the world into a pleasant garden, and life into a fruitful excursion. And an eye that is the place of the manifestation of the face of love is not merely capable of seeing the external world; it also has an internal vision by which one can not only see the soul of the world, but also one’s own soul, which is one with the soul of the world.

Whenever I desire to see my soul,

I envision the image of your beautiful face.⁴¹

Envisioning the image of the beloved’s face means recreating it as the face that the lover nurtures in the workshop of his imagination and views with the eyes of the heart. Nonetheless, the beautiful face of the friend is both the soul and the manifestation of the world. Hence, these two, the soul and the world, come together somewhere and become one: “Your mole is the pivotal point of my vision.”⁴² The lover’s eyes see the world from this perspective: from the mirror of the moon of the beloved’s face, which is our nocturnal light under the rays of which the beauty of things becomes visible. And should a new flower appear, it “is the gift of the color and scent of her companionship.”⁴³

On the other hand, the world without the friend is an unlit lamp, a silent garden, a night the stars of which have dissolved in darkness, the mass of ashes of the days that have fallen heavily on the blowing wind, the flowing water, and the tired earth! In this alien desert, the forlorn poet cannot find his way, and as a result, he knows not what to do with himself: “What can I do with the rose and the rose garden without you, oh cypress in motion?”⁴⁴

Hence, inevitably, once again we return to love. Since love is the core and the shell, the soul and the face, the center and the circle, and the sun and the sky of the thinking of that poet in love, no matter where we begin, we are in it and with it. The ultimate human salvation is in universal love: may “love come to your rescue!”⁴⁵ But human freedom within the circle of servitude, the freedom of a man seeking success who is waiting “on the shores of the sea of oblivion,”⁴⁶ taking advantage of a moment in a transient world, is dependent on this-worldly love. If there is a friend, the world is deserving of goodness and beauty, deserving of friendship; otherwise, its existence and nonexistence are one and the same. “Without the beauty of the beloved, the soul does not desire the world.”⁴⁷

Compared to that world, which is involved in its own tasks—with its seven celestial domes and nine thrones of the firmament, from the moon to the fish, unfeeling and heedless—this one is a familiar human world with life and death, and the this-worldly friend is the link that connects a person with such a world and makes both compatible and harmonious.

If one night

you light up our seclusion with your face

I will raise my head

like morning over the horizons of the world.⁴⁸

All is possible with the blessing of love. Like morning, the lover dawns from the depths of himself and of the world and goes beyond both. And he bestows to the world the morning of brightness, a bright mood and disposition: In his love song as well, because the poet sees the world through his own human nature, he grants to the world the beauty of the friend and his own moods. And because nature’s phenomena resemble humans more than anything else, they acquire their characteristics from the story of mankind.

Be my beloved,

since heaven’s ornaments and the world’s adornment

Stem from the moon of your face

and my Pleiades-like tears.⁴⁹

“The loveliness of the faces of the tulip and the rose is blessed” by the beauty⁵⁰ of the beloved, and the cup is the skull of the powerful (Jamshid, Bahman, and Qobad),⁵¹ not clay and dust. “Yearning for Shirin’s lips, tulips bloom from the blood of Farhad’s eyes”;⁵² hence, the tulip is the result of man’s failing in love and, like people who have failed in love, it “never lets the cup leave its hand, from birth to death.”⁵³ Entangled in its affairs, the bud is saddened,⁵⁴ and the nightingale, “wretched like me, is afflicted by love for a rose,”⁵⁵ the violet is happy,⁵⁶ the zephyr listens to what Hafez says and hears it from the distraught nightingale and comes “sprinkling amber to gaze at the scented florae.”⁵⁷ In this way, the manifestations of nature—not as external entities, things in and of themselves and alien to us, but, rather, as external manifestations and phenomena of our thinking and inner sense—are perceived and displayed.

In this give and take, the poet also borrows the manifestations of nature to rebuild the mood and desires of his soul. He nurtures the colorful garden of his imagination with the felicitous inspiration of trees and light, fire and water, flowers and stars, plains and sky; and before nature’s spring, whose involuntary witnesses we are, he creates the spring of his own life by simultaneously sprouting and withering in one place, and he paints new images in this vernal garden with magical colors and aromas.

I uprooted the silhouette of that spruce fir

from the garden of my sight,

For the fruit of every flower that blossomed

was the anguish of longing for her.⁵⁸

He has seen a tall-statured beauty in the garden of his sight and flowers that blossom from sorrow and cause suffering! The birds of thought fly off the branches of words, and the manifestation of the face of the beloved in view is moonlight in the workshop of sleepless eyes that all night long paint the illusory image of your face.⁵⁹ The eye is a picture gallery, with more diverse moods than the picture gallery of spring. “Life is a pleasant tulip garden from the brightness of the face” of a beloved without whom the lover’s soul withers.⁶⁰

Wish for the spring of life, oh heart,

as, every year this meadow

Will bring a hundred flowers like the daffodil

and a thousand song birds, like the nightingale.⁶¹

He entrusts himself to nature, internalizes it, and converts it into “the spring of life”⁶² in the workshop of his imagination. This spring of life, however, is the spring of the soul, not of youth, because being young in years does not come about by our wishing it, and similar to the spring of the meadow, it comes and goes on its own. That which can be wished for and gained is the spring of the soul. In the poet, nature’s spring is converted to the spring of the soul. With this spring of the soul, he then returns to all the seasons of nature, and resides in the eternally spring garden of the friend.

From the alley of the friend,

the spring breeze blows,

If you ask this wind for help,

you can light the lamp of your heart.⁶³

The spring breeze no longer blows from meadows and streams, from plains and mountains, and it does not bring fragrance to the soul; rather, it comes like a harbinger of good news from the alley of the friend and lights up the lamp of the heart that is the private place of secrets, which is the house of the friend, which is the garden of light. Any form of nature that shines on this garden and is seen in its rays is transformed into a flower garden.

In this give and take between man and nature, nature’s phenomena are not passive entities that are let loose in the world unconscious and unaware, and for man to perceive and treat as he wishes. In a different arena and state of knowledge, nature’s phenomena are bound together by spiritual ties and compassion. By observing, the poet contemplates their human dispositions, and finds they have the same joys, pains, unions, and separations of lovers and the good and ill fortune of humans. Not that he likens the manifestations of nature to human dispositions and then expresses this resemblance; rather, in his view, nature appears with human dispositions. In the creative imagination of the poet, nature’s phenomena have human characteristics of their own. “The birds of the garden are rhyme critics and humorists.”⁶⁴ The nightingale thinks of his love for the rose, and the rose engages in robbing the heart and coquettishness. Similar to us, they also engage in pleading, coquetry, generosity, munificence, and abstinence. In “the modes of composing a love song,” Hafez learns eloquence from the sweet-tongued beloved with “incomparable words,”⁶⁵ similar to the nightingale, who learns language through the bounty of the rose.⁶⁶ And the poet goes “like the bud with a melancholy heart to the garden” to learn from nightingales the secret of making love.⁶⁷ Thus, the breeze shares hidden secrets with the rose⁶⁸ and is sacrificed for the face of the daffodil and the eyes of the narcissus.⁶⁹

The Judas tree will offer its purple cup

to the jasmine

and the narcissus’ gaze fall on the anemone⁷⁰

and the remedy for the tulip’s wounded heart is sweet wine.⁷¹ The nightingale who has suffered separation goes to the private pavilion of the rose in loud lament.⁷² The ruby’s heart bleeds because the potter’s market is thriving,⁷³ and the unfulfilled heart of the poet is sad because “the firmament puts the reigns of aspired goals in the hands of the ignorant.”⁷⁴ This unknowing nature, among other things, is also a frequent visitor to the tavern. “The tulip is the cupbearer and the narcissus is drunk, yet I am blamed for debauchery.”⁷⁵ The sad cloud weeps for the short life of flowers,⁷⁶ as though someone is lamenting the shortness of sweet life.

When the spring cloud saw

the world’s habit of breaking promises

It wept over the jasmine,

the hyacinth, and the daffodil.⁷⁷

On the one hand, the poet attributes his own dispositions to nature, and on the other, he assumes the attributes of nature. Moreover, the phenomena in relationship to one another have human characteristics. Obviously, distancing ourselves from a poem and looking at it each time subjectively from different angles might be of some value, as long as the poem is looked at as an object before us, and we view it objectively from outside the poem. We look at the poem from outside to perceive its various components and its context and shape. We distance ourselves from the poem to get close to it. Otherwise, by its very nature, a poem is an intertwined skein the components of which we might find in unraveling it, but we will then lose its wholeness. In the bard’s Divan, this tripartite give-and-take is like a colorful warp and weft that is interwoven and works together to create a singular image. Sometimes even in a single ghazal,ⁱ one can identify the focusing of this intertwined outlook: the beloved’s eyebrow is the feast’s crescent, and the new moon is the eyebrow of the feast to which the world applies woad; the breeze coming from the beloved’s direction opens the robe of the rose; the rose, like morning, tears the dress off its body; and the moon of the face and the night-like dark tresses of the friend brighten the poet’s dark night like day.⁷⁸ In another ghazal,ⁱⁱ each manifestation of spring, from flowers and plants to birds and water, transforms his soul and body and creates a different disposition in him. Spring breaks one’s repentance and brings joy; in other words, it affects both a person’s beliefs and actions as well as his disposition. And then nature (the zephyr) does the same thing to itself (the bud) that it had done to man.⁷⁹ Free-spiritedness, which should be a characteristic of humans, can be learned from nature (the cypress). The wind robs the rose, and the “frenzied nightingale” cries out, yearning for “the bud bride and union with the rose.”⁸⁰

With your scent, like the rose, at every moment

I tear open my garment from top to bottom.

It seems as if the rose, upon seeing your body in the garden,

Like the drunkard, has torn open the garment covering its body.

Yearning for you, I can barely save my life,

Yet you so easily stole my heart from me.⁸¹

I, too, have the disposition of the rose and do exactly the same. The rose blooms in its own body with its own scent, and I open because of your scent. The rose, too, when it sees you, has the same disposition as I and does the same thing as I: it opens. And then, that which was between humans and nature and nature and humans comes back to humans and humans, to the lover giving his heart and the beloved stealing his heart.

In this love poem, without losing his singularity and wholeness, the self-conscious poet has melded with nature. Time, as it flows in him, also allows time-bound nature in him, or like a thread, interweaves the various images of man and nature. The poet does not merely observe the manifestations of the world as a stranger from outside; rather, he lives with them in a harmonious and congruent system. In other words, he joins them, changes in step with them, and shares in their destiny.

The poet places himself in the evolution, in the process of evolving, of the phenomena of nature, and by participating in their life and death, he becomes of the same heart and tongue as they. It is some sort of dialogue, born from having the same destiny, that blossoms like a bud, a spring, a dawn between them:

At dawn, I was telling the wind the story of my longing,

A voice alerted me that I should trust divine favors.⁸²

Standing like the deer in the ephemeral realm of dawn, the poet looks into far expanses with his penetrating eyes. He tells of his longing—the fulfillment of which is too far-flung because it is a longing—to the far-flying wind, and he finds a voice, entirely hopeful good news. This dawn is not merely a place near the sun or a benefit of the turning of time. It is the field of wakefulness and the east of vision; it is the spring of light and the light of the eye; it is beauty and the mirror, the observer and the observed, that gushes from the heart of darkness, splits the earth, the boundaries, and the confinement, and spouts in the sky, far away, and in infinity. And this wind is not a vagrant hubbub, but the good tidings of union, the message from the friend, and a messenger from him.

From the alley of the friend,

the spring breeze blows,

If you ask this wind for help,

you can light the lamp of your heart.⁸³

This wind does not come from mountains and mountainous regions, from the traveling seasons and from beyond distant bare lands. This wind comes from the alley of the friend, from the spring of the soul.

Dawn and the wind, the rose and the nightingale, the cloud and spring, these comprise the nature with which the poet is in harmony; and because he is in it, he finds his way to “that which is beyond nature”—and as a result becomes in harmony with himself. It is a sublime nature, the manifestations of which are things beyond and more uncommon than external objects or symbols and signs; they are various parts of a singular soul, a unity that has assumed existence in plurality.

To be in such a dawn, telling the story of longing to such a breeze, takes the poet beyond nature and returns him to the house of the heart, to “good fortune”!⁸⁴ To speak the same language as this nature is lofty; it links the conversation to the true lofty position that is within the soul and outside the field of vision of the earth and the firmament.

In a give-and-take between himself and nature, the poet “humanizes” nature; and on this journey, he is able to speak the same language as and share the heart of lofty nature. Hence, a human being who constantly goes beyond himself and further in the other direction of reaching the truth of himself, in the stages of his relationship with a nature that opens a path, attains a new perfection. “He abandons the house of nature to pass through the alley of the spiritual way.”⁸⁵ And once the world, which is the cage of the soul, changes into the sky for the flight of the soul and captivity changes to freedom, nature becomes an ideal, perfection, in which and by which the poet lives; and as he lives, an ideal, perfection, comes into existence, like a plant that in the process of growing awakens the sleeping soil and brings forth its colors. This ideal nature is the utopia of love in which the wayfarer lover finds the alley of the friend.

Hafez’s nature, before it is put into words, is nurtured and changed in his soul, and it then begins to flow in language’s river of ideas. Ferdowsi’s nature, by way of contrast, is neither the alley of the friend nor a manifestation of his face; rather, it is the chronicle of the work of “the Lord of the soul and the intellect.”⁸⁶ As a chronicler of the world, he sets his eyes on the external world, which he describes through perceiving it and coloring it with his own perceptions and thoughts. For him, nature (similar to the world) stands before him without mediation, both friendly and hostile, and he sets in motion language’s river of ideas within its phenomena and links them together.

Our qasideh⁸⁷ versifiers, since they are chroniclers of the “external” world, and since with two or three exceptions they are all eulogists, are not among the true chroniclers of the world. Among them, a poet like Manuchehri⁸⁸ is so enamored with life and nature that at times he achieves the status of poet and explains some portion of the world.ⁱⁱⁱ In his poetry, nature is the amazing workshop of a master magician, who has provided various things with a certain intent, and with an astonishing order and arrangement. The fundamental relationship is between cause and effect, between God and things, and as a result, it is unidirectional: God is the impactor and things are the impacted, one is the will and the other where that will materializes. Things in the world do not have an open path to the being of the creator, their existence is accidental, and ultimately they are merely signs of his omnipotent being: images painted by a skillful painter, the connection of which is mediated and only through the painter. Here, we do not see unmediated human relations among the phenomena of nature. The poet sees the flowers color by color, drinks the wine of sorrow sip by sip, and perceives the moments of love. Things of the world are beneficial, and they have been created for the benefit of man. In this case, the poet pursues God’s work: he has given me the world, like wine, as a gift, and by enjoying it, I do as he wishes. Existence is not the singular truth of the same essence and harmoniousness, such that God, man, and man’s world belong together. The mystics’ unity of existence here is by degrees, from the earth to the heavens, from below to above, one belonging to another.

Since the existence of things in the world is not inherent but the result of the will of another, the universal system and law of their lives is an external matter that—based on some unknown wisdom—has been bestowed on the world; another has destined it for the world. This world does not have the same fate as God and man; but on the basis of some external—not inherent—fate, it is God’s dominion and a realm in which a connected set of unique rarities are placed side by side or follow one another. Flowers in spring, birds in autumn, and fruits in summer; horses and fire; clusters of grapes and the daughter of the vine; and wine, the same wine of compassion that is described at the beginning of most of Manuchehri-Damghani’s qasidehs. And the use of the simile is the same method that is generally used for description. In other words, something is shown through its similarity to other things: autumn leaves are likened to dyers’ shirts; the color of the face of the sick lover to the marigold; breasts to lemons, oranges, the silver plate of the scale, pears, or a bird chick with its head dropped down; the night to a black woman and Bizhan’s well;⁸⁹ and the Persian New Year to Mani’s book!⁹⁰ In one qasideh,^iv the raindrop is likened to and described as a gem, a precious pearl, an egg-shaped clump of camphor, rosewater, the nipple of the breast, a fever blister, a teardrop, mercury, wine, a drop of ceruse, an extinguished ember, the Pleiades, and a drop of sweat. Things are measured and illustrated with the help of other things. They are the means for identifying one another. The imagination of the poet illustrates the external world through the external world. In observing nature, he arranges its manifestations side by side like an exhibition; he spreads them before the eyes and explains the body of nature by gathering and reconnecting its organs.

The organs of nature, however, do not have an organic relationship among them and are not alive contingent on one another. Since the poet mostly uses similes to help him explain an object or disposition, the relationship between the objects is mostly unidirectional and unequal: Something functions as the main source and origin, and an aura of secondary things, as fleeting images, surrounds it! These peripheral things come to the poet’s mind and are mentioned not because of themselves, but to enhance the central point. We just witnessed the things to which a drop of rain is likened. Elsewhere, a horse is likened to a bird, a snake, a partridge, a whale, a leopard, a crane, a peacock, and a duck; or every component of the beautiful face of the beloved is likened to many things, and so on.

In his mind, nature is a balanced set of phenomena, a colorful mass of things that are pleasing to the eye and the heart. The world is no other reality and totality than this set. The spring garden consists of the color and scent of flowers and the singing of the birds, with the characteristics and beauty of each, rather than a garden that emerged from these things and beyond all of these: a spiritual and universal garden in the poet’s life force and soul. The beauty of the beloved lies in the features of the face, eyes, eyelashes, lips, teeth, hair, and waist, not in “that” other thing; and the character of wine is in the moods that it creates in us. Regarding the concept of the world, the principle consists of these components (things), not a sublime totality. Things exist for us, not in and of themselves. They are special because they are especially for us, not in and of themselves, and their sublime value is the extent to which they benefit us.

According to the chronicler poet, time and space, as well, rarely attain universal and abstract meanings. To Manuchehri, time merely means spring and autumn, the Persian New Year,⁹¹ the feast of Mehregan in autumn, and the feast of Sadeh in winter, or sleeping and being awake, last night’s wine and tomorrow’s hangover, young age and youth. Instead of considering the abstract concept of time, he mostly thinks about the vessel of time: about a season of the year or a feast and the celebration of it. Time acquires a specific meaning and quality or is about a period of life, such as young age, which is full of vitality, about moments of drunkenness and making love! Hence, the “space” of his time involves the phenomena of nature and society or is within man—in other words, in the actual world. His perception of space is also devoid of imagination and abstract images; it is the same Balkh and Bokhara and Basra and Baghdad, the same battlefield and hunting ground of the patrons he eulogizes, the same banquet halls of princes and poets, the same plains and meadows of everyone, the same wine house and wine cellar. Hence, time and space for Manuchehri—in contrast to those of Hafez—remain within the boundaries of the world and do not extend beyond that.

The world itself, however—as if separate from nature—for Manuchehri has a different meaning. He sees that the world, beyond man and facing man, is always that which it is: nature and time and space, the components that make up the world, are constant. On the other hand, he knows that this constancy and continuity is contingent on a law. The truth and spirit of the law of the world, however, is the unknowable wisdom of the creator.^v That which the limited intellect of the poet seeks in the world is precisely the opposite of what he finds: injustice and maniacal chaos, which is neither from God nor from nature nor the rulers whom he eulogizes and who are the good or bad officials in charge of the society. Hence, the evil of life that engulfs us, like the world, is there like the world, is from the world, from the strange and mysterious unknowable world within us and beyond us.^vi

Despite all this frustration at the vexing world, however, because Manuchehri loves life, and because living means “to be in the world,” he asks for impossible kindness from the same unkind world:

No matter how heinously you treat us,

We will treat you with more kindness.

Do you not know that we are lovers who have lost our hearts?

You are the slender, tall-statured beloved of us lovers.⁹²

In Manuchehri’s thinking, existence is not a single and consistent concept. “The world and all that is in it”⁹³ is created by God. The existence of the creator is inherent, absolute, and eternal; and the existence of the created is accidental, relative, and transient. In essence, the creator and the created are separate in the same way that, because of knowing God, man is inherently separate from the world. Because of this separation in existence, God, the servant, and the world cannot share one another’s destiny, since when they are melded in the destiny of another, they are no longer themselves. If the servant joins God, his existence is no longer accidental, relative, and transitory; he is no longer the servant. The same is true of God, and of the world.

The same diversity and plurality also exist in the world. Time and space and nature’s phenomena are placed in a revolving sphere; and the law that connects them stems from the will of the creator, not the result of an inherent need in them. And God has created the world with a purpose. He has created it from nonexistence to carry out his purpose. Hence, the law and the purpose of the world have been given to it willfully from outside, since God is free and superior to the world.

To the extent that Manuchehri is the creator of his own incomplete world, we see the same worldview in the creation and in the form and substance of his poetry. He is a composer of qasidehs and, like others, he composes poetry in order to receive a reward. He wants to have possessions, a high position, or something. The purpose of the qasideh—even when, for instance, it is composed with the intention of giving advice and counsel, elegizing, expressing the disloyalty of the world, giving a didactic lesson, and so on—does not arise of its own accord. Rather, it is imposed on it intentionally, from outside, and at the hands of the poet.

The form of the qasideh, too, is not self-motivated, and it does not—like a living body—stem from necessity and the workings of its internal elements; rather, its separate pieces have been arranged side by side. For example, in a qasideh in praise of Khajeh Taher,^vii these things have been arranged one after the other: the beauty of the beloved, praise for the patron, description of a horse, and once again, praise and prayers. Neither are the content and themes employed out of necessity, nor is there any logical arrangement in them. One can compose a complete qasideh without speaking about the beloved, or a horse, as many have; or one can shift the position of the praised patron and the horse and lead from the latter to the former, as Manuchehri has done in another qasideh. But in most qasidehs, through rhetorical sleight of hand and poetic acrobatics, the composer takes the reader from the beloved, spring, and wine to horses, princes, and viziers and back, and finishes the job.

This is the form of arbitrary and autocratic poetry; since, based on some subjective agreement, the two hemistiches of the opening couplet must rhyme, and the poem must exceed sixteen couplets, first must come recollections about young age or about love, then praise for the patron, and so on and so forth. But it is autocratic, because such agreements have been implemented without any poetic or aesthetic necessity. Hence, the purpose and form of Manuchehri’s poetry (similar to his world) are external and diverse, not internal and singular. The qasideh is an aggregate disarray that has no form, only the appearance of form.

Now, regarding the substance of the qasideh, he reports on man and the world, and he has nothing to do with anything beyond these. He is engulfed internally and externally by the undeniable self-evidence of the tree and the star, the fervor and disposition from wine and love, and the exhilarating joy of living. Nature and man are the main two topics for his senses and his thinking, and in the same way that his outlook regarding nature is partial, his report on man is also incomplete and is about a part of man. Manuchehri’s man, the beloved or the praised patron, is social, not universal, and as a result, partial and incomplete. To Manuchehri, love is consciously a social bond. The lover and the beloved, or at least the lover—as far as we know, from the words of the poet—are aware of his and the beloved’s social standing, and he does not forget their differences: the lover is a free man who is a crony of the monarchical and ministerial establishment, and the beloved is a slave girl or slave boy who, evidently and practically, is of a lower rank and perhaps in need of the lover, because she or he is the property of and belongs to the master “lover,” even if the beloved is a free woman, again, according to religious beliefs and in social life—in other words, from the perspective of religion and the world. Flaunting his wealth, the poet tells her:⁹⁴

I will gently soften your heart, and in the end,

I will soften it with dirhams, if gentleness does not work.^viii

A qasideh composer who has enjoyed the taste of a patron’s reward knows well that if gold is placed on the top of a stone, the stone will melt. The amorous need of such a wealthy lover is of course for the joy of union, not out of the passion and pain of those who lose their hearts. “Anyone who yearns for you will get the fruits from you.”⁹⁵ It is not for naught that in the mind of the poet, “playing at love is like playing chess,”⁹⁶ a two-directional battle with pawns and knights, the tactics and strategies of fighting, castling and breaking through the castle, attacking, and check and checkmate! The lover who seeks gratification is wealthy, can provide shelter, and is able to provide for the needs of the beloved and make her safe; and the beloved, with her beauty and heart-robbing coquetry, is able to conquer the heart of the lover and gratify him.

In the fever and heat of this game, the winner is the lover who can capture the beloved, like wine, the garden, and the lamp, like a fruitful sown field, and harvest her; because in an unequal relationship, the beloved ultimately is the source of pleasure and for the comfort of the body and the soul of the lover,^ix a divine gift that God has bestowed upon him, which must be of use to the possessor, like anything else.

Since you do not make more of an effort to serve me,

Even though you are mine, in fact, you are not mine.⁹⁷

Since the lover wants a beloved to serve him, he desires and seeks that which pleases him, not oneness with another. He seeks someone in whom he can find what he desires, and through her, to reconnect with himself. In the same way that in Manuchehri, nature does not have a path to that which is beyond nature, love as well does not go beyond the level of natural and physical exhilaration, and means and portends nothing more than the joyful pleasure of the body. And the poet who lacks the flight and union of love remains in the happy house of his own soul. A lover and a beloved, each of whom has a separate status and role, will not achieve union in the bazaar of love. This profiteering give and take, in which one is free and the other a captive, one is the buyer and the other the seller,^x this ownership and submission, remains in the trap of limited social relationships, and only a minor aspect of love comes to be.

Love for Manuchehri is partial, plural, and profiteering, and fundamentally and generally, it is no different from his poetry and his world. This poet does not understand mystical and lyrical love. His physical love, however, is not at all similar to the perception of the Bard of Shiraz regarding that same love. Hafez understands pure physical love with a different sense. Even though Hafez’s beloveds are also evidently and practically at a lower rank than he, a reality regarding which the poet is also aware, he pays no attention to this awareness; he does not look at the beloved through this glass and never makes any mention of the beloved being a slave girl or slave boy. In a relationship based on feelings and emotion, the passion for union replaces a social relationship, and at least in the seclusion of lovers, love is an antidote to such social inequalities and regains its powers. Here, the thought of taking advantage of one’s abilities and the limitations of the other occurs accidentally and very rarely.^xi In this manner, he pushes back “awareness” and drives away the logic of reality from the sanctuary of the heart. Undoubtedly, the social reality continues to be in place, and its logic objects to and questions the affairs of love. The effect of such logic—any profit and loss and social acceptance and rejection—on love, however, is not by the lover’s choice but rather, despite what he wants. Hence, the social treatment of the beloved by Manuchehri is precisely the opposite of that of Hafez. One knowingly allows the logic of social life to interfere in the domain of love, and the other shuts the gates of the city of love to such intrusion. One employs social relations, and the other disregards them.

In Hafez’s ghazals, the emotional relationship of the lover with the beloved, even in pure physical love, is the reverse of the relationship between them in Manuchehri’s qasidehs. The need of the beloved turns into the lover’s coquettishness, and the bewilderment of the lover into need.

There is a vast difference between the lover and the beloved,

When the beloved displays her coquettishness,

you show your need.⁹⁸

In contrast to Manuchehri and his rich-man’s arrogance toward the beloved as a result of his wealth and social status, the composer of love songs from Shiraz—not in a mystical or lyrical ghazal but, rather, in a poem he himself categorizes as “cleverly libertine,” the entirety of which concerns his desire for physical intimacy—says:

To use the lashes of my eyes, for honor’s sake,

To sweep the dust before your gate

is what I long for.⁹⁹

In the heart of hearts of the lyrical poet, even a beloved who is praised for the pleasure of the body has such a status. The intensity of his inner feelings forces the poet in the opposite direction, and sometimes, toward negating reality to the point that love’s subconscious passion and disposition erases it from conscious “logic” and law. In Manuchehri, the love relationship—an internal and spiritual matter—is compatible with social reality. Love for him is “external.” In Hafez, this compatibility does not exist, even regarding physical love. Even his external love is “internalized.”

Beloveds and praised patrons are two groups to whom the composers of the qasideh essentially pay attention. Others, even if they occasionally appear in a qasideh, are not of concern in the profession of such poets. Regarding the praised patron, since he must have the ability to fulfill the wishes and needs of the poet, he is inevitably chosen from among the rulers or the wealthy, in other words, those with higher social status. This very limited choice makes the so-called poem paltry, because these characters do not shed their class-based shell and do not go beyond the roles they play in their actual lives. Here, as well, they are the same ruler, prince, or master they are in their daily lives.^xii And since the purpose of this choice is not poetic, the poem becomes devoid of its truth. In dealing with nature, in contrast to many qasideh composers, Manuchehri expresses his personal emotional experiences and feelings, not the usual clichés of the literati. In eulogies, however, because truth is pushed aside from the very start and because personal experience is replaced with personal expedience, his words, as well, similar to those of others, are mundane, not personal. In qasidehs, the patron is usually praised for his bravery, religious faith, justice, generosity, joyous drinking, unrestrained lovemaking and pleasure seeking, even his merciless killing of enemies and opponents, and things of this sort, with which we are familiar. The model for these composers in fabricating these characteristics is the usual “ethics of the aristocracy”¹⁰⁰ and their motivation, the usual pursuit of profit. The law of ethics, which must be universal and acceptable to all, is replaced with a profit-seeking and private “rule” as a result of which the composer praises the patron in an unethical manner since, heedless of the truth, the poet attributes to him the characteristics that he should have, and not those he has.

The one praised by the poet is not a real man with good and evil in his soul and the dark and light of Satan and God. He is a bagful of “admirable” and often incompatible attributes bestowed upon him by someone else, attributes that are not inherent but are external and fortuitous. The poet wants to create an image of a perfect human being, but without intending to, he places side by side torn-off pieces and fragments of perfect human virtues. As a result, the human he creates is lifeless, and the qasideh, alien to the reader, disintegrates on its own. The so-called poem loses its wholeness, and in the best case, drops to the level of a historical literary source of information. The whole becomes a part. With a poem the form and content of which are incomplete, Manuchehri provides an incomplete report on the world. In his poetry, his contact with the society is through the praised patrons. Of the entire body of the society, he can only see the leaders and rulers, and for that matter, in the way we have seen. His report on the society and social man is so superficial and profit-driven that it is not of much use. Similar to his cohorts, he does not see the possibility of deliverance from the cocoon of the society, of going higher, of the rise and flight of aspiration; he does not see the essence of the universal man in the specific man. He keeps the beloved and the praised patron in the same confinement of the society, where they are like prey in a trap, and he uses them.

Precisely contrary to Manuchehri, Hafez changes the social individual to a universal man. We know that he rarely mentions the social status of his praised patrons, the prince, the vizier, the ruler, and so forth; rather, he mostly refers to them as the companion, beloved, friend, king of the beauties, and so on. For instance, in celebrating the return of Shah Shoja’ to Shiraz,¹⁰¹ he does not call him a king with specific attributes, but “the beloved king, beauty, musk-scented deer, and friend.”^xiii Hence, while Manuchehri places each person within a social confinement to speak about him, in Hafez’s thinking, such restrictive social boundaries are broken open before he speaks. With the strategy of disregarding the social status of the patron and mentioning him as a beloved one, a poem composed because of a specific incident or about a specific person becomes a universal poem. On the morrow, when that incident or that person, Khajeh X or Y, is forgotten, since love remains, the poem also remains. Moreover, with this strategy, a social relationship contaminated by calculations of a practical life is transformed into an emotional bond. The beloved replaces the praised patron, and the bond with the beloved (in contrast to that with the patron) is not merely a social relationship, because even though love is a social matter and belongs to social man, in its essence, it passes beyond both the boundaries and shackles of the society as well as the lover and the beloved! In this manner, a poet who elevates the praised patron to the status of the beloved pulls him out of his humble social shell and releases him in the arena of the world. Since love changes man’s relationship not merely with the society but also with existence, the lover and the beloved are no longer merely social individuals; they are universal human beings. And he who changes the praised patron to the beloved elevates the social individual to the status of a universal human being. Moreover, by making the subject matter of the poem universal, he frees it from collapsing into nothingness, the certain fate of the qasideh.

This strategy of the Bard of Shiraz is not a poetic technique or even a magical sleight of hand. This long flight from particular to universal and from below to above is the result of the singular worldview and the product of the power of a love that perceives existence as an interconnected and harmonious whole. To lyrical poets, especially our Hafez, since nature and man are present in each other, any discussion about one may wind up with the other. Nature is not the tool for the poet’s work and a prelude to addressing the issue of man; rather, it comes to the mind of the composer on its own terms and by its own credence. Since in its essence, however, this nature is not separate from man and the supernatural, it is not only of mankind and sublime, but it also has in it the potential for human existence and the supernatural. In the same way that the consequence of the limited nature of the composers of the qasideh is the limited (social) man, Hafez’s universal nature inevitably is coupled with the universal man. The same perception of man also influences the relationship of the poet with the praised patron, to the extent that the poet sees the human and universal essence of the praised patron, not his particular social status.

In eulogizing, as well, similar to love, in contrast to the qasideh composer who is inclined to “externalize,” our ghazal composer is inclined to “internalize,” because the reality of the praised patron is his social status, and usually universal characteristics—love and friendship, or justice and honesty—fade in the encounter. The social status of the praised patron, based on its own law, usually nurtures and utilizes his nature and behavior. He is a slave to his social status, and for the most part, he is no more than a limited individual. The poet who is present in the alley of the friend, however, shines his light on things in the world, including the praised patron, and sees them again reflected in the mirror of his own heart. In exchange for what he receives from the praised patron, the poet bestows upon him something else, friendship. The shortchanged poet sees the praised patron as friendly to this extent when he views him from the alley of the friend; otherwise, when he is not in this mood and disposition, when receiving a reward is the motivation for speaking, the praised patron is that same prince and vizier of the qasideh composers, and the words of the poet deteriorate. Hafez has merely a few ghazals and three or four qasidehs that were composed with the sole intention of praising patrons. In these, because the poet wants to profit from his encounter with an individual, on the one hand, he has broken apart the universal man and merely deals with a part of him, and on the other, he has lost his oneness with the universe and has stood outside the alley of the friend. In this case, Hafez is no longer the poet of love songs whose story of the universe and the story of his self are the same, because the universe is no longer within his soul, and he is standing outside the universe, beside it, and in front of it. Hence, inevitably, he reports to some other audience on the phenomena of the universe and man as external and alien things, with the same hollow descriptions and distasteful hyperboles.^xiv The world is perceived through a different sort of worldview. The change in the perception of the poet regarding man (or the world) not only changes the subject matter, but his poetic method as well. The poet has lost himself; and consequently, we are also deprived of benefitting from him. He has fallen outside the alley of the friend.

But where is the alley of the friend outside of my rose-colored elder? The alley of the friend is he himself. A poet who breaks asunder the social structure of the praised patron and releases him outside so that he can be the beloved and not the praised patron is also himself in facing the world and things in it, a bird and a deer, flying and fleeing. In passing beyond things and perceiving their further truth, he journeys through the house of nature in order to be able to pass beyond his own nature and perceive a truth loftier than himself: going beyond and loftiness!

but if you are not prepared

to abandon the house of nature

how can you embark on the spiritual way¹⁰²

The person who remains in the small house of his nature, in the same “four opposing humors,”¹⁰³ is no more than the discordant composition of blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. Such a person in the great house of nature is a blind knot of entanglement in a sealed prison and muddy water at the bottom of a well.^xv May he dawn and rise from an east.

Even though the affairs of the world are clenched like a bud

Like the wind in spring, be an opener of knotted buds.¹⁰⁴

And the bud longs for a wind that would undo entanglements, a wind that thrusts its spread talons into the air like a fountain, and wanders halfway up the slope of the mountain, on the breast of the plain, and on the shivering body of water. The wind that would undo entanglements: the breeze, the whirlwind, the storm, slippery, whirling, uprooting! A willful stray vagrant that comes from some strange place and moves on to somewhere else far away. A homeless traveler in the seasons of earth that is exploring the heat and cold playfully drops the wings and feathers of autumn, awakens the empty-handed soil, and takes the scattered color and scent of spring to remote and isolated roads and crossroads; it pulls the rose petals open from the entanglement of the bud. The spring wind is the messenger of blossoming and growth. It comes with an open, liberated body to unfold the intertwined and hibernating organs of nature.

It has been said that the zephyr is a celestial wind, and that it blows at dawn from beneath the heavens or from the opening of the Pleiades. It has been said that this wind is divine breath that comes from the spiritual east.^xvi In the world of the poet’s imagination, however, the wind is the flowing spirit of nature; it is the “messenger of the sanctuary of secrets”¹⁰⁵ of lovers, and a liaison between entities in the world.

At dawn, the nightingale told the zephyr the story

Of all that love for the rose’s face has done to him.¹⁰⁶

The blowing of the zephyr is the message of one friend to another that brings the “fragrant scent of friendship,”¹⁰⁷ brings fragrance to the soul,¹⁰⁸ and plants the tree of friendship.¹⁰⁹ For this reason, “in bringing good news, the zephyr is Solomon’s hoopoe.”¹¹⁰ And the zephyr [saba] brings to mind the land of Sheba¹¹¹ and Solomon, King Solomon, prosperous Solomon, by whose command the wind blew and whose command blew in the world like the wind. In the domain of a poet in which Solomon is the realm of light, there is a connection between the zephyr and dawn, the wind and morning, the breeze and morning. Dawn blossoms like a rose, and the wind opens the bud like dawn. The morning breeze removes the veil of the rose, and the tresses of the hyacinth are the remedy for the pain of vigil keepers, because the “breeze of the morning of happiness”¹¹² is coupled with light, coupled with freedom.

O morning breeze, abet me now, tonight, because

To blossom as dawn lies in wait

is what I long for.¹¹³

The musk-releasing wind that releases the color and scent of spring from the prison of the soil, and when it passes over the tomb of Hafez, “a hundred thousand tulips” bloom, is the “zephyr Christ,” it has the breath of Christ.¹¹⁴ It comes from the alley of the friend, blows in the friendly natural world, and brings the scent of the voice of the lover nightingale—that recounts the voice of the poet—to the colorful fragrant beloved and, like a lover, “destitute, inept, wandering” and intoxicated by the scent of the friend’s tresses,¹¹⁵ continues falling and rising. The plain and the meadow, the flowers and plants, the nightingale and the poet, all have much to tell this globetrotting messenger. “I have many tales of the heart to tell the morning breeze.”¹¹⁶ Oh wind, longing for “a breath of air removed from the dust of the road or a subtle point that refreshes the soul, a letter of good tidings from the secret world, and a waft of the breath of my friend,”¹¹⁷ oh spreader of sorrow and harbinger of the good news of seeing, come and

give my futile heart the elixir it craves

what I mean is

bring me a trace of the dust from my loved one’s door.¹¹⁸

The heart-to-heart conversation of my elder with the zephyr is the “story of longing”:¹¹⁹ now that I have remained in place in the heaviness of my own body, now that heartless and without a sign I know not of the friend’s house, oh free one, oh light-winged one who is passing by like a moving soul, bring me some good news to make my closed soul blossom.

On the one hand, the Bard of Shiraz is eager for the union of man and nature, and on the other, as a part of nature, he is himself entangled in all its natural limitations. He is a restless soul and, nonetheless, a rested body. The “shackled frame of the body”¹²⁰ does not give him respite to test man and nature with his soul, as he so longs to do, nor to live. Heaviness, immobility, and the needs of the body are the dreadful walls between him and that which he longs for; and he can only pass over them on the wings of his imagination. He entrusts his imagination to the wind to attain what he longs for. Among the pleasing phenomena of nature, it is only the wind that is free, and the free and liberating spring wind frees the bird from sleep and liberates the voice from the silence of winter. In his journey of longing, the poet seats his long-flying imagination on the wings of this same free wind that is unencumbered by time and space; and aided by it, the poet forgets the limitations of the body momentarily. Accompanied by it, he rages like a river on the riverbed of nature, entrusts himself to the various currents of “being and becoming,” and finds his way through the darkness of the hypocritically pious to wine, truth, and light. The free movement of the wind that not only cannot be contained in any cage but also opens the doors of any cage is the symbol of freedom and a reflection of the desire of the poet regarding nature: to be the undoer of entanglements, like the spring wind, to be free of time and space, to be the breeze that is the zephyr!

i. “With woad, the world drew a crescent on the eyebrow of the feast / The crescent of the feast should be seen on the eyebrow of the beloved.” [From ghazal 238.]

ii. “Spring and the rose became joyful and repentance-breaking / With the happiness of the rose’s face, uproot sorrow from your heart.” [From ghazal 388.]

iii. Moreover, his understanding of nature is meaningful and is a representative of a certain period and the perception of a group of our poets regarding nature. The approaches of the Bard of Shiraz and Manuchehri regarding nature are so different that comparing them can reveal some signs of two different worldviews in Persian poetry.

iv. “It is springtime, and the world, like a thorn bush / Rise, oh thorn bush, and bring the rose with no thorns.” Cited from the Divan of Manuchehri, edited by Mohammad Dabir-Siyaqi [(Tehran: Zavvar, 1984); From qasideh 29.]

v. In Hafez’s thinking, as well, the wisdom of the “firmamental architect” is an unknowable puzzle [from ghazal 299]; but love liberates man from the trap of any puzzle.

vi. Oh world, how unkind and ill-tempered you are,

You are like the chaotic bazaar of tradesmen.

By every means that I tested you,

You are all deception, you are all injurious.

You ruin our affairs every day,

You are not afraid that you will be ruined one day.

This is all the work of madmen.

Are you mad intentionally or unknowingly?

(From the Divan of Manuchehri)

[These couplets seem to be chosen randomly from a qasideh in praise of Ali ebn Omran.]

vii. Ibid., 122.

viii. Farrokhi’s beloved is “dearer than life, and more beautiful than the beauties of Turkestan, drinks wine and offers wine, and gives kisses and takes kisses.”

If God will it, I will buy an idol

With a gift from the king, and in time give my heart to her.

The Divan of Ali ebn Julugh Farrokhi-Sistani, edited by Ali Abdolrasuli (Tehran: Matba’eh-ye Majles, 1932), 440. [The couplet is from qasideh 48 in praise of Mohammad ebn Mahmud ebn Nasereddin.]

ix. If you love me, oh Turk with the beautiful face,

You must want me more than you do.

I entrusted my heart to you so that you could measure my entanglement,

I entrusted my heart to you so that you would do right by me.

(From the Divan of Manuchehri-Damghani, edited by Mohammad Dabir-Siyaqi [Tehran: Pakatchi, 1947])

[The couplets are from Manuchehri’s qasideh 60 in praise of Sultan Mas’ud Ghaznavi.]

x. If the beloved is a slave girl or boy, she or he is not even a seller. Rather, she or he is bought and sold.

xi. Throughout the Divan, only in a few instances, mentions of this sort are found: “You must pay all you have in your purse full of gold and silver / For your covetousness of beautiful bodies.” [From ghazal 450].

xii. The champions in Book of Kings (with the exception of Kaveh) are also from among the leaders and notables of the society. Sometimes, however, those such as Rostam and Piran play a national role, and their heroic acts are tied to the fate of their people, and sometimes those such as Siyavosh and Keykhosrow play a universal role, and the fate of the world is dependent on their actions. In any case, their lives break apart the narrow class, social, and on occasions national molds.

xiii. “At dawn, my good fortune came to my bedside / And told me, arise, the beloved king has come.” [From ghazal 176.] Also see Qasem Ghani, Bahs dar Asar va Afkar va Ahval-e Hafez (Tehran: Zavvar, 1961), 242.

xiv. See the qasidehs in the Divan and the following ghazals: “Last night a messenger of good tidings came from His Excellency Asef / His Holiness Solomon issued a decree for feasting.” [From ghazal 171.]

The standard of the prince of flowers

has been raised at the edge of the field

O Lord, may his arrival

bring blessings to cypress and jasmine.

[From ghazal 390; the translation is from Geoffrey Squires, trans. Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals (Miami: Miami University Press, 2014), 176.] “How fitting is the royal robe on your tall figure, / Your lofty essence is adornment for crowns and signets.” [From ghazal 410.] “The radiance of kingship is visible on your face, / Your mind conceals a hundred divine words of wisdom.” [From ghazal 489.]

Sometimes Hafez employs a different method: A ghazal is composed to the end with poetic purpose, and then the poet makes a digression and somehow patches the name of the patron into the ghazal. In such cases, the attaching of the closing couplet of the ghazal to the rest of it seems forced. For example, see the following ghazals in the Divan of Hafez, edited by Qazvini and Ghani [(Tehran: Zarrin-o Simin Books, 2002)], 11, 48, 49, 112, 130, and 355.

xv. “Clean and purify yourself and climb out of the well of nature / For muddy water provides no refreshing pleasure.” [From ghazal 423; Squires translates the couplet as follows:

purify yourself

climb out of nature’s deep well

for foul water will not make you clean.

(Squires, Hafez, 93)

Bly and Lewisohn translate the couplet as:

Become clean and pure; come up

Out of nature’s well! How could purity ever

Be found in well water stained with mud?

(Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn, trans. The Angels Knocking at the Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez [New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008], 6.)]

xvi. Loghatnameh-ye Dehkhoda [Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, Loghatnameh, vol. 10, eds. Mohammad Mo’in and Ja’far Shahidi (Tehran: Loghatnameh-ye Dehkhoda Institute, 1966), 14838–14839], see under “saba.”