Hâfiz of Shîrâz

MUHAMMAD SHAMSIT’DDIN, better known by the nom de plume of Hâfiz, was born early in the fourteenth century of the Christian era. It is impossible to determine the exact date of his birth, but the chronogram on his tombstone states that he died at an advanced age in the year of the Hijrah 791, corresponding to A. D. 1388. Muhammad (praiseworthy) was his real name (’alam) ; Shamsu’ddin (sun of faith) was his honorary title (lakab) ; and Hâfiz (keeper, that is, rememberer, of the Kur’ân) was his poetic surname, the so-called makhlas (asylum) or takhallus (refuge), both significant terms for the disguise under which an author may mask and shield his personality.

Most Persian poets are known to us solely by their noms de plume, which commonly have a double meaning, and are all the more highly prized on this account. Sa’dî (fortunate) probably assumed this name out of respect for Sa‘d bin Zangî, the fifth of the Atâbak sovereigns, in whose reign he flourished, and to whom he dedicated the Gulistan. Firdausî (Paradisical) signifies also gardener, which was the occupation of the poet’s father, and doubtless, too, his own in early life. Jâmî (goblet) means likewise native of Jâm, a small town near Herat, in Khurâsân. Nizâmi (stringer of pearls) may also be interpreted as reformer of religion. In all such cases the more commonplace signification may safely be assumed to be the correct one, the other explanation being merely a witty conceit of complimentary afterthought, the origin of which is usually illustrated by an anecdote. Thus it is said that at the first interview of Abu‘l Kasim Mansûr with the Sultân Mahmud the monarch was so charmed with the poet that he exclaimed, “ This man has made our palace a paradise” (firdaus) ; hence the epithet al Firdausî, the Paradisical. It would be superfluous to warn philologists against the questionable and quicksaudy nature of anecdotal etymologies. ’Umar al Khayyâm (the tent-maker) took his nom de plume from the trade which he learned from his father, and practiced whilst pursuing his astronomical studies in his native village, near Nishâpûr. But it must be remembered that bayt means tent and verse ; and in Persian poetics the analogy between tent-making and verse-making is carried out to the fullest extent, and curious functional correspondences are discovered between the parts of the respective structures. The pavilion is a poem, and the simple epithet al Khayyâm appeals to the Persian imagination as a suggestive equivoque.

Hâfiz frequently puns on his own name. Thus he says, “ Whether I am a reverend doctor or a debauchee, what is that to thee ? I am the keeper (Jâfiz) of my own secrets and the knower of my own times.” Again he alludes to it in the following self-praise : “ By the Kur’ân which thou keepest in thy heart, I have never heard sweeter strains than thine, O Hâfiz ! ” In one of the idyls he boasts that of all the Hâfizes of the earth (hâfizâni jahân) not one has equaled him in interweaving worldly wit and wisdom with the sententious truths of the Kur’ân ; and he concludes one of his odes with the assertion that

“ ’Neath the vaulted sky, no Hâfiz has obtained Such wealth of grace as I have from the Kur’ân gained.”

But notwithstanding the lofty import of his name and the pride with which he alludes to it, it is evident from his poems that he drew fuller and more frequent draughts of inspiration from the kharâbât (tavern) than from the Kur’an.

Native records and traditions furnish very little positive information concerning the comparatively uneventful life of Hâfiz. His intense devotion to study and to literary pursuits rendered him averse to travel, or to a residence at any of the courts of them any petty and rival dynasties which had sprung up out of the ruins of the great Mogul empire, and which, while diminishing the political power of Persia by dismembering it, favored the cultivation of poetry and polite learning through the ambition and emulation of each princedom to become the chief centre and nursery of the arts and sciences. Hâfiz was held in high honor by these sovereigns, who sent him repeated invitations to visit them, and sought in vain, by splendid gifts and offers of patronage, to draw him away from the quiet and retired life of a scholar. Sultân Ahmad tried to prevail upon him to come to Baghdâd ; but the poet prudently declined to become the pensioner of a monarch who, although a man of elegant tastes and fine accomplishments, a connoisseur of gems and an amateur in keramics and bricahrac, was a terror to his subjects, a tyrant whose cruel and capricious temper was aggravated by an excessive use of opium. Hâfiz, however, wrote him a letter of thanks and an ode which is quite as eulogistic as this sovereign’s notorious character would permit.

Once, at the urgent solicitation of Mahmud Shâh Bahmanî, Hâfiz set out on a journey to the south of India; but on arriving at Hurmuz and embarking on the ship sent for his conveyance, he became so alarmed and nauseated by the sea that he made some excuse for going ashore, and returned forthwith to Shîrâz. He then addressed to the Shâll an ode in which he recalled the stormy horrors of the sea, which he would not encounter for all the pearly treasures in its depths. Mahmud was much amused at this apology, and rewarded the poet for his good intentions with a purse of a thousand pieces of gold.

Very different was the treatment he received from Yahyâ, Shâh of Yazd, whom he actually visited, but who does not appear to have been especially liberal in largesses. Hâfiz always alludes with some bitterness to this monarch, and ascribes his niggardliness to the envy and ill-will of courtiers, whose heads he would fain see beaten and bandied in the game of golf. In the fourth fragment he contrasts this meanness with the munificence of other princes : —

“From Hurmûz’s king, unsung, unseen, a hundred gifts I won;I saw and sung the king of Yazd, but left his courts with none.”

Now and then Hâfiz complains of his native land, and even expresses a desire to turn his steps towards Baghdâd; the rose of Persia puts forth no bud of joy for him; Shîrâz does not appreciate his poesy ; and he takes no pleasure in envious Fârs. But these were only the passing moods of a fine-strung and sensitive nature. In reality he was strongly attached to the place of his birth, and, during his short sojourn in Yazd, experienced, like his contemporary Dante, when banished from Florence,

“ sì come sa di saleIl pane altrui, e come è duro calleLo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale.”

In the sixty-eighth quatrain he paints in vivid and realistic colors the consuming pains and emaciating effects of nostalgia. His love of Shîrâz finds utterance in several odes, in one of which, written during his stay at Yazd, he vows that, on his return, he will go straight to the wine-shop, and there relate his adventures to the music of the barbiton and the merry clink of beakers.

Touching the domestic life of Hâfiz, we know only that he was married and had a son, who died December 23, 1362, as we learn from the twenty-fifth fragment, where the exact date is given according to the Muhammadan era : —

“On Rabi‘ ul-Awwal’s sixth, one Friday morn,My moon-faced darling from my heart was torn.Seven hundred sixty-four years since the FlightThis hardship on me came as water light.Can sighs and plaints and tears my peace restoreWhen now my life as empty sport is o’er ? ”

The sad event is sorrowfully recalled in a characteristic ode ; and the thirty-third fragment shows how tenderly the bereaved father clung to the memory of his child: —

“The days of sweet spring have come; the damask and wild roses now,With tulips, from earth arise: oh, why in the dust then art thou ?My tears I will shed in streams, as pour from the spring clouds in rain ;These tears on thy dust shall fall, until thou art risen again.”

In another ode Hâfiz deplores the decease and praises the virtues of his wife. In the first verse he says, —

“The friend who made my house a home where peris well might be,Was, peri-like, from head to foot from ever blemish free.”

“ In her face refinement blended with the sweet endearments of love,” and “ she wore the richest crown in the ample realm of beauty.” Hammer and Rosenzweig both assume that this ode was written on the death of an intimate friend. But the couplet above quoted seems inconsistent with such a supposition. The word yâr, here translated “ friend,” means literally helpmeet, and, like the French ami or amie, is used, as a term of affection, to denote spouse. In Persian, however, yâr may be either masculine or feminine, and the personal pronoun û signifies either he or she, there being only one form for both genders. This epicenity adds much to the indefiniteness and gives great latitude to the interpretation of Persian poetry, both in a natural and in a mystical sense. The line of demarcation between the literal and the allegorical, the sensual and the spiritual, is thus rendered faint and not easily definable. This vagueness possesses a peculiar charm for the Oriental, and by the opportunity it affords of juxtapositing incongruities and giving a fantastic turn to ideas furnishes a cheap surrogate for humor. Sometimes the poet celebrates an abstract ideal, rather than a concrete embodiment of beauty. Again, the beloved object is the Divine Being, a prince, a patron, a teacher, a boon companion, or a friend.

It is highly probable that many of the odes, which are repugnant to us because they are supposed to describe a too ardent affection for men, really express a tender attachment to women. The so-called mulamma’ or party-colored ode, of which every alternate line is Arabic, tends to confirm this hypothesis, since the Arabic pronoun, which has a distinct form for each gender, is here feminine. The same is true of another ode written in a medley of Arabic, pure Persian, and the dialect of Shîrâz. In his youth Hâfiz fell passionately in love with a maiden who was known by the pet-name of Shâkhi Nabât (shoot of sugar-cane, or stick of candy), and who seems to have preferred him even to his formidable rival, the Prince of Shîrâz. Later in life he became deeply and desperately enamored of a beautiful heiress surnamed ’Arûsi Jahân (bride of the world), and sought her hand in marriage ; but the young lady, though admiring his genius and esteeming his character, did not return his affection, and declined a nearer union in the bonds of wedlock. In view of these tender experiences, and perhaps many others of a similar kind, it is hardly credible that Hâfiz, whose native city is still celebrated for its charming women, should have wasted all his sweet lyrics upon cup-bearers, minstrels, strolling Lûliân, musk-scented dandies with corkscrew love-locks, fruity-faced wine-bibbers, and tulip-cheeked boys.

Muhammadan law and custom, it is true, place all sorts of absurd restrictions upon the free and friendly intercourse of the sexes, and the unnatural state of society thus produced fosters unnatural vices. Strong, manly love degenerates into puling sentimentalism and pederastic passion, tainting erotic poetry, and destroying whatever pleasure we might otherwise take in the genial conceptions and graceful diction of the writer. Only a vitiated taste can relish the putrescent piquancy of this kind of literary haut gout.

Nevertheless, there is good reason for believing that Eastern poets have been greatly misunderstood and misrepresented on this point, and that the disgusting theme is treated by them less frequently than is usually supposed. Oriental, and especially Persian, women of the middle class enjoy far greater freedom than Europeans generally imagine. Although it would be a sin against decency and decorum for them to appear in public unveiled, except in cases where extreme ugliness or the wrinkles of old age might sullice as a mask, yet it is a mistake to suppose that they pass their lives jealously immured within the walls of a harêm. The witty and spirited satire entitled Kitâbi Kulsûm Nana (Book of Kulsûm Nana), ostensibly composed by a conclave of Persian matrons for the guidance of their sex in domestic and social.affairs and in the general conduct of life, gives ample proof that the dames and damsels of Iran are quite tenacious enough of their prescriptive rights and traditional prerogatives, and fully competent to maintain them against all marital and paternal encroachments. The manner in which they may assert their liberty and pursue their pleasure in entertaining guests, receiving and returning visits, frequenting the hath, or paying their devotions in the mosque is set forth with sufficient explicitness to satisfy the most advanced advocate of “woman’s rights” in the Western world.

Despite all her apparent languor and love of luxurious ease, the Persian woman is un esprit fort in her own sphere. In habits of thought and tone of feeling she has much iu common with the French woman. Making due allowance for the generic difference between Oriental and Occidental culture, the ladies of gay Shîrâz and grave Ispâhân are strikingly akin to those of Paris in all the salient traits of character and qualities of mind. The same exquisite taste and native grace; the same tact in asserting their independence in all matters touching les petites morales ; the same wit-craft and witchcraft, which Firdausi declared to be “ matchless and supreme ” in his countrywomen, — in short, the same savoir fairs and savoir vivre are peculiar to both.

Oriental convenance would hardly permit a poet to blazon in his verse the name of his lady-love, or in any way to give prominence and publicity to her personality. Indeed, the proper thing for him to do would be to disguise so far as possible the object of his attachment, and to dissemble the real source of his “thought’s unrest.” For this purpose, the aforementioned sexual ambiguity of the Persian language would stand him in good stead, and offer a most convenient covert under which to conceal his passion from the ordinary reader, whilst revealing it to her who. knowing his secret, could read it between the lines. Occasionally, too, he might let it peep out, as Hâfiz does in the thirtyfifth ode, where he refers to the miracle of love which has transformed his dry writing-reed into a succulent shoot of sugar-cane (Shâkhi Nabât), yielding sweetness more delicious than honey. The magic which wrought this metamorphosis, and put sap and savor into his hard and hollow kilk, was the powerful spell of the tender sentiment, which Shakespeare declares to be the hidden spring and inspiration of all lyric song : —

“ Never durst poet touch a pen to writeUntil his ink were tempered with love’s sighs.”

A reminiscence of this event and of the experiences attending it is contained in a ghazal where the name of sugar candy is said to excite the jealous taunts of the “ sweets ” (shîrînân) of Shiraz.

One of the best known and most popular of Hâfiz’s odes is the eighth, which begins as follows : —

“ If that Shîrâzian Turk would deign to take my heart within his hand,To make his Indian mole my own I’d give Bukhârâ and Samarkand.”

Bicknell and all the German translators, except Nesselmann, assume that it was addressed to some young man ; but there is really no ground whatever for this assumption. The Turk of Shîrâz evidently refers to one of those wandering Lûliân, famous for their skill in singing and dancing, and for the beauty of their maidens, who, in the third couplet, are said to embroil the town by their blandishments, and, true to the predatory habits of their tribe, prey upon and spoil the “ heart’s content ” of the Shîrâzian youth. “ Turk,” as we have already observed, is the synonym of capricious charmer or cruel coquette. In the fourth couplet the poet contrasts the unadorned loveliness of the Lûlî maid with the meretricious embellishments of the city ladies, who would fain enhance their fading fascinations by cosmetics and cold cream. There is a glamour of love which makes John see the golden halo of a Madonna in the carroty hair of Mary Jane ; but the poet declares his vision to be untinged by any such beneficent illusions and illuminations of personal affection, of which the fair girl is as independent as a fine complexion is of rouge or pearl powder.

“ My loved one’s beauty has no need of an imperfect love like mine:By paint or powder, mole or streak, can a fair face more brightly shine ? ”

Persian women adorn their faces with artificial moles or beauty spots of a permanent character by tattooing themselves with a mixture of chelidonium (zard-chub, yellow wood) and charcoal. Erasible moles are made with pitch or oxide of antimony, put on by means of a wooden pin (khati khattdâ). Pulverized antimony is also used to form streaks on the eyelids, and a paste of indigo to pencil the eyebrows. Such streaks or lines are called khat, which Rosenzweig incorrectly translates Flaum (down). Muhammadan scholiasts of the mystical school interpret the powder, paint, moles, and streaks symbolically, as referring to the ink, color, dots, and lines of the Kur’ân, the face of beauty being typical of the sacred page. In all the dry and dusty tomes of Christian hermeneutics it would be difficult to find absurder specimens of far-fetched, finespun, and fantastic exegesis and subtlety of scriptural exposition than are constantly met with in the writings of Musulmanic doctors and commentators on the prophet’s word.

An interesting and characteristic anecdote is related in connection with this ode. When, in 1387, Tîmûr conquered Fârs and captured Shîrâz, he summoned the aged Hâfiz into his presence, and said, “ I have destroyed the mightiest kingdoms of the earth with the edge of my sword, in order to enrich and enlarge the two chief cities of my native land, Bukhârâ and Samarkand ; and you presume to offer them both for a black mole on your Beloved’s cheek! ” “ Sire,” replied the poet, “ it is by such acts of reckless generosity that I am reduced to the state of poverty in which you now behold me.” This witty retort so pleased the Tatâr chief that he immediately relieved the hypothetical poverty so artfully hinted at, and showed the poet many marks of favor.

Hâfiz died, as we have already stated, A. H. 791, corresponding to A. D. 1388. In the chronogram engraved on the alabaster slab which covers his tomb, the reader is told to seek the date in the Earth of Musallâ (Khaki Musallâ) ; and by summing up the numerical value of the letters in this phrase, kh 600 + a 1 +k 20+m 40+s 90 +130 â (ye) 10 = 791, we ascertain the year of his decease. Bicknell englishes this chronogram very ingeniously as follows : —

“On spiritual men the lamp of Hâfiz gleamed;’Mid rays from Glory’s Light his brilliant taper beamed;Musallâ was his home: a mournful date to gain,Thrice take thou from Musallâ’s Earth Its Richest Grain.”

The numerical value of the letters contained in Musallâ’s Earth is M 1000 —(— L 50 + L 50:= 1100; from this sum take three times the numerical value of the letters in Its Richest Grain : I 1 + I 1 + C 100 + 1 1 = 103 X 3 = 309, and the result is 791. Mediæval writers were very fond of composing eteostics, especially for inscriptions and epitaphs ; but Latin, having only seven numerical letters, did not afford them much scope for the exhibition of their skill; whereas, in Persian and Arabic, every letter of the alphabet has a numerical value. Hâfiz wrote quite a number of chronograms for the purpose of commemorating the virtues and recording the deathdate of his friends and patrons. These monumental verses have been translated by Bicknell in a most ingenious and felicitous manner. Indeed, his version is tlie only one in which any attempt is made to preserve the chronogrammatic character of the original ; and it is in this peculiar feature that the whole point of the poem centres and consists. Nesselmann omits them entirely as untranslatable.

In consequence of Hâfiz’s outspoken antagonism to the popular religion, and the skeptical and scoffing tone which pervades his poems, the priests refused to give him religious burial. This bigotry naturally excited the indignation of his friends and admirers, and a serious strife arose between them and the orthodox party. After much bitter altercation, it was agreed to consult his Divân as an oracle, and to accept the result as a divine decision. The volume opened at the following couplet : — “Wish not to turn thy foot from Hâfiz on his bier;He shall ascend to Paradise, though steeped in sin while here.”

Accordingly the customary prayers were perfunctorily recited at his grave, in the little cemetery in the northern suburb of Shîrâz, where his body lies surrounded by the flowers and shaded by the cypresses so often celebrated in his songs. There, too, the youth of his native city still meet, in the cool of the day, to read his verses and quaff to his memory

“that cup of ruby sheen,Which opens wide the gates of times serene.”

On his tombstone are embossed two odes from the Dîvân, in one of which he enjoins upon those who come to sit at his tomb to bring with them minstrels and the wine-cup.

The wide popularity of Hâfiz’s writings, and the deep root they had taken in the hearts of all classes and conditions of men, from the king to the cottager, futilized all efforts to eradicate their influence. The only alternative, then, was to direct it into safe channels, and to make the well-springs of his poesy serviceable in irrigating and fertilizing the arid fields of Islâm. The very bigots, who had raised such a storm about his interment, now endeavored to convert him into an upholder of the faith and a champion of the established religion, by giving to his poems a symbolical and spiritual interpretation, such as our biblical expositors have given to Solomon’s passion for the beautiful Shulamite. The confessed wine-bibber is thus transformed into a seer ; and his admiration of musky locks and dark moles, of dimpled chins and cypress forms, is explained as an ardent aspiration of the soul after divine and eternal beauty. Even when the poet declares that the wine he prizes is “ real, and not symbolic,” the cunning exegete is not to be deceived by such plain statements ; for if the only realities are spiritualities, which none can deny, real wine must mean spiritual wine.

“Well said, old mole! canst work i’ the earth so fast ?”

The more one would force him into day by thrusting sharp-pointed facts under his nose, the deeper he burrows under them, losing himself in mazes of his own making. Where Hâfiz frankly admits Ids extreme and fatal susceptibility to tender emotions by comparing himself to “the taper made to burn and melt,” the keen-eyed and subtle scholiast discerns the fervent piety and consuming devotion of an ecstatically religious nature. It was in this style that Hâfiz’s works continued to be expounded and perverted for two centuries after his death, the commentators Shami and Surûrî having attained especial distinction for their exegetical ingenuity and temerity. In the latter half of the sixteenth century the Bosnian grammarian Sûdî annotated the Dîvân, and explained the ghazals in a sober, rational manner, without seeking to refine away every carnal element and every confession of natural feeling, and to subtilize the glowing sensuousness of these lyrics into vapid and vaporous allegory. Sûdi, on the other hand, with all his sturdy sense and the real aid he affords in the solution of grammatical and lexical difficulties, often carries his literalism too far, and is prone, as he plods along, to stumble upon mare’s nests of quite an opposite kind ; as, for example, when he infers from the following quatrain that Hâfiz was afflicted with blear eyes: —

“ My tear, like my friend’s cheek, had rose-red grown;In my eye’s orbit was my heart’s blood shown:Said then my loved in most endearing tone,‘ Dear friend, what makes thine eye this ailment own ?’ ”

It is always interesting to discover hints of an author’s life and personality in his writings ; but in reconstructing the man out of such materials, imagery must not be mistaken for incident, nor tropes converted into individual traits ; otherwise we shall get a mere patchwork of metaphors, — a creature fantastically put together out of the airy nothings which his own imagination has bodied forth, and in whom psychical affections are confounded with physical disorders, and the tearful humor of unrequited love identified with rheumy eyes. Elsewhere Hâafiz ascribes his “ bloody tear ” to “ love’s smart,” the only remedy for which, say the physicians, is cautery, “ the burning of thy heart.” In another verse the poet complains of “a giddy head must we therefore infer that he was subject to vertigo or epilepsy ?

Jâmî, in bis sketches of eminent men, written early in the fifteenth century, numbers Hâfiz among the great doctors of theology, and gives him such complimentary and characteristic titles as Lisân al Sliaib (tongue of the unseen) and Tarjaman al Asrar (interpreter of secrets). His Hâfiz is hâfizu kalamu’llah, the keeper of the word of God. But the rigid representatives of Muhammadan orthodoxy refused to recognize this claim. Ottoman zealots were particularly severe and uncompromising in their condemnation of the Dîvân, and wished to have the reading of it prohibited by a decree of the Sliaikhu ’1 Islam. As the result of this agitation, the case was submitted to the celebrated Muftî, Abû Su’ûd, who, in a grave and perfunctory manner, framed his decision so equivocally as to save his own reputation for soundness in the faith, and at the same time, prevent the interdiction of the poet’s works and rebuke the fanaticism of his Turkish persecutors.

In later life, Hâfiz was associated with the Sûfîs, whose ascetic practices and saintly pretensions he never ceased to ridicule, but with whose speculative opinions he strongly sympathized. This sect derived its name from the coarse garments of wool (suf) worn by its members. Sufi has no radical connection either with the Greek (wise) or the Arabic sCtfi (pure) ; its relation to these words is that of a pun rather than of an etymology. It is now used chiefly in the sense of “ wise ” or “spiritual ; ” but this is really a secondary signification, originating in the presumed character of those who bore the name. “ Wool-clad ” came to be synonymous with “ sage,” as in England “ gownsman ” is equivalent to “ scholar.”

Hâfiz was also, at one time, a professor of exegesis, and lectured ou Zamakhsharî’s commentary on the Ivur’an in a college founded by his friend and patron, the Vazîr Kivâm ud Din Hasan, whose virtues he commemorates in several odes. The Vazir had himself annotated Zamakhshari, and doubtless overpersuaded the poet to undertake the same task. But Hâfiz found little relish in ruminating the dry subtilties of hermeneutics, whose sapless husks yielded him the scantiest supply of nutriment. He was not one of those dryasdust organisms that can keep up the intellectual life by chewing on scholia, as an ass thrives on thistles ; but a real child of Nature, bound umbilically to her everthrobbing and all-sustaining heart. Thus he exclaims, —

“Ask for a song-hook, seek the wild, no time is this for knowledge;The Comment of the Comments spurn, and learning of the college.”

And again, —

“ Where hides the minstrel ? For at once my zeal and learning’s meedI offer for the harp and lyre, and the melodious reed.Of the nice points the school propounds my heart has weary grown ;My service for a while I ’d give to wine and love alone.”

In one of the fragments he suggests the propriety of a stipend for his professional services, a point which the Vazir, in his zeal for sacred exposition, seems to have overlooked. Nevertheless, Hâfiz’s lyric muse did not disdain to visit him even in his chair of hermeneutics. It was in the quiet retirement of this school that he recited many of his poems to his pupils, to whose youthful enthusiasm and care we owe the first collection of them in a Dîvân.

Hâfiz never tires of denouncing the pietists and devotees of his day. He compares them to jugglers, who live by imposture, and prey upon the credulous and simple-minded, and characterizes them as “ men with short sleeves and long fingers.” The robe of the dervish is the raiment of deceit, and the monk’s cowl the covert of guile. The winebibber is uniformly set in favorable contrast to these sanctimonious hypocrites.

“ Better the drunkard void of fraud and wilesThan virtue’s braggart who by fraud beguiles.”

Since indulgence in wine is opposed by religious fanatics, who make a mask of sobriety, it becomes associated with the honest and generous qualities in which the blue-clad bigot is notoriously wanting.

“ My heart abhors the cloister and the false cowl, its sign:Where is the Magian’s cloister, and where is his pure wine ? ”

According to Persian tradition, Jamskid, the founder of Persepplis, was the

“ Bacchus that first from out the purple grapeCrushed the sweet poison of misused wine,”

This famous monarch was excessively fond of grapes, and always kept a quantity in a jar. One day, on returning from the hunt, he found his favorite fruit in a state of fermentation. The pungent flavor of the juice excited his suspicions of foul play : he therefore poured it into a demijohn labeled “ Poison,” and placed it aside until he should discover the author of the misdeed. Soon afterwards, a lady of the court, who suffered severely from chronic nervous headache, resolved, in a fit of desperation, to put an end to her existence. As she wandered about, “ distraught and full of pain,” she found the demijohn, and drank freely of its contents. Thereupon she fell into a deep sleep, from which she awoke so refreshed that she continued from time to time to sip the beneficent bane, until it was all gone. The complete recovery of the lady from her inveterate ailment led to an investigation of the cause, and she finally confessed by what delicious potion her health had been restored. Orders were immediately given for the fermentation of more grapes, and the king and his courtiers grew merry ami mellow, as they imbibed the wonderful beverage, which was henceforth known as zahri khûsh, or sweet poison.

The fondness of the Persians for wine has always been a great and scandalous offense to rigorous Musulmâns. Thus Hâfiz, in The Cupbearer’s Book exclaims, —

” If lives the body when the soul is gone,The heart bereft of wine can still live on.”

The loveliest forms and phenomena of earth and sky, the dawn, the dewdrop on the tulip, the hues and fragrance of flowers, all suggest the cheering and inebriating cup, and invite to indulgence. When his last hour comes, he hopes that he may be found with a goblet in his band, and be borne straight from the tavern to the sky; and desires that after death his clay may he fashioned into flagons, and his skull, in the form of a beaker, continue to be a source of inspiring and elevating influence. In this wish ’Umar al Khayyâm anticipated Hafiz by three centuries, when he declared that at the sound of the “ wakeful trump ” his dust would rise up before the door of the wine-shop; and the old Anglo-Latin poet, Walter Mappes, a contemporary of Khayyâm, begins his well-known drinking-song with the same conceit: —

“Mihi est propositum in taberna mori;Vinura sit apposition morienlis ori.”

Persian vintners are usually infidels, sometimes Christians, but chiefly Magians, since no true believer would vend a drink denounced by the Prophet as the mother of woes. Under love of wine, therefore, might be easily concealed a tendency to heresy, and especially an attachment to old Persian fireworship. Drinking the blood of the grape, under such circumstances, would have a sacramental significance. It would be not merely a physical enjoyment, a pleasure of the palate, but also a religious act, a protest of the conscience, a solemn declaration of devotion to the faith of the fathers. Thus the tavern becomes a temple of the Magi, a place filled witli the light of God; the vintner is a high-priest of the Magi, whose wisdom is superior in kind to that of “ mine host of the Garter Inn,” as the ministrations of the Sâkî, differ essentially from those of a “ drawer in the Boar’s Head Tavern.”

In every country where there is a state religion, all deviations from it, all sects and schisms, are regarded as so many revolts against spiritual tyranny, and so many assertions of intellectual liberty. This is the position held in Muhammadan Persia by Christianity and Magianism, both of which are inclined to strain a point in praise of wine, merely because the Kur’ân prohibits it. Thus wine-bibbing becomes a synonym of free-thinking. The wine-shop is something more than a common taproom, and combines the cabaret with the chapel of dissent. The reader who fails to perceive this esoteric significance and underlying symbolism will naturally wonder at the poet’s constant and rather monotonous glorification of wine, and soon weary of it.

The intimate connection between fireworship and wine-drinking is suggested by Hâfiz when he speaks of wine as the “ fulgent fire,” which Zarathushtra sought in the depths below ; and in the same poem he exclaims, —

’O Sâkî, give me that imperial bowl,Which opes the heart, exhilarates the soul.By ‘ bowl ’ I image the eternal wine ;By ‘ wine ’ I signify a trance divine.”

In the vocabulary of Sûfism, the Sâkî (cup-bearer) stands for the Holy Ghost, the source of spiritual enlightenment and inspiration ; and to “ stain the prayer-mat with wine” is to imbue the heart with divine love. Indeed, this symbolism is not confined to Persia and the East, but pervades, though less effusively, the poetry and religion of every people. Bread and wine, the cornfield and the vineyard, Demeter and Dionysus, are universal emblems and personifications of human sustenance and cheer, Religious exaltation and enthusiasm, the rapture of the sibyl and the ecstasy of the saint, are suggestive of vinous intoxication. When the disciples were full of the Holy Ghost, on the day of Pentecost, they were thought to be drunk ; and in the Christian ritual the blood of the grape is associated with the supreme moment and sacrificial consummation of the world’s spiritual redemption.

The Persians call wiue âtishi raz, the fire of the vine, and the Greeks called Dionysus πΤριΥϵυης, the fire-born, — an epithet which does not need for its explanation the silly story of the untimely birth of the god through the fright of his mother Semele, at the sudden apparition of her lover, Zeus, in the form of lightning.

In the Lieder des Mirza-Schaffy, Bodenstedt expresses a thoroughly Persian thought, when he says that wine is degrading or ennobling, according to the nature of him who takes it. ‘ Where is it said that wiue is wrong for all ? ” exclaims ’Umar al Khayyâm.

“ ’T is lawful for the wise, but not for fools.”

It was to the “ Magian Shaikh,” who read the secrets of the sky in Jamskîd’s magic cup, that Hâfîz appealed in theological perplexities and questions of casuistry. Weariness of robe and rosary, and willingness to pawn his cowl for an intoxicating draught and to souse his book into the wine-butt, are explained by Sûfi exegetes as expressing his disgust for outward ceremonial in worship and barren traditionalism in theology; whilst under the imagery of riot and revelry is represented spiritual aspiration. In Sûfi phraseology the musky locks of the loved one are emanations and expansions of divine glory, redolent with celestial perfume. The closest union and most sacred covenant of the soul with the Supreme Spirit are symbolized by betrothal and nuptial ties. The purest and most poetic expression of this phase of Sûfism is found in Sa‘di’s Bustân, especially in the third chapter, and in the Masnawi of Maulânâ palâlud-Dîn Rûmî.

Doubtless some of Hafiz’s odes, convivial songs as well as love-poems, admit and even require a mystical interpretation. In the one hundred and eighty-sixth ghazal, for example, bright cheeks, alluring dimples, languishing eyes, and wanton ringlets are intended to typify divine attributes. In such cases the two elements are so closely blended that it is hard to separate them, and to distinguish the natural from the figurative, the earthly from the heavenly, the warm hues of carnal affection from the glowing fervor of religious adoration. But in the majority of Hâfiz’s poems the sense is plain enough, and the keenest scholastic subtilty would find it as difficult to detect an esoteric meaning iu them as to discover sublime mysteries and theosophies in the odes of Horace, the lyrics of Anakreon, or the songs of Burns.

Indeed, there is in Hâfiz a constant tendency to reverse the symbolical method ; instead of spiritualizing objects of seuse and making them the vehicle of religious sentiment, he is fond of carnalizing sacred things, and using them to justify natural appetites and to exalt earthly affections. The Mecca to which ho pilgrims is the vintry ; his Ka‘ba is the wine-cup; the arch of Mihrâb, which attracts and directs his devotions, is “ an eyebrow’s bow.” When ’Umar al Khayyâm was urged to renounce the pleasures of this life in order to inherit the joys of the life to come, he replied that a little cash in hand was better than any amount of credit. Hâfiz, too, was not disposed to wait for the sky to fall in order to catch larks. “ Strive always after ready bliss,” was his motto. The fowler who lays his snare for the phoenix will take only empty air. In many passages he compares the stature of his beloved to the graceful cypress, which he prefers to the Sidrah and the Tûbâ, and all the celestial trees that afford shade and refreshment to the elect in Paradise.

Ilafiz often gives a facetious turn to texts from the Kur’an, and makes jesting allusion to its chief doctrines. Thus, in reply to the reproaches of the zealot, he adduces the zealot’s creed, and excuses his propensity to tippling by appealing to the dogma of predestination, which is one of the fundamentals of Islâm. On the Day of Alast, the AllWise One foreordained him to love woman, wine, and song; and what is feeble and short-sighted man that he should presume to thwart eternal providence and annul the divine decrees ? He takes particular delight in playing upon the catch-words of the sects and the terminology of pious cant: —

“ Come, Hâfiz, to the house of wine, and I willshow thee thereThousands of men, who, ranged in line, rejoicein answered prayer.”

Less Irreverent, of course, to the Muhammadan than to the Christian mind would be the comparison of the power of wine or of love to the resuscitating breath of Jesus that can restore the dead to life.

Hafiz sums up his ethics in a short and comprehensive couplet intelligible even to the meanest understanding: —

“Harm no one; otherwise do all thou wilt:My statutes recognize no other guilt.”

This simple rule of universal kindness implies also the largest tolerance. Pantheism has no motive for proselytisra and no place for persecution. Diversity of speculative opinion is not an element of discord, but a source of pleasing variety and a stimulus to intellectual effort.

“ For none in our drunk rev’lers’ sect inquireWho worship matter and who worship fire.”“One to love’s eyes the cell and wine-house seem;Whate’er the spot, the Friend’s bright features beam.“ Where in the convent pious works abound,The cross and the monk’s cloister bell are found.”

In the same spirit, Khayyâm asserts his superiority to sectarian shibboleths, and reverences mosques and pagodas, synagogues and churches alike, as holy temples and “ true homes of prayer.”

But while Persian poets and mystics were proclaiming these liberal ideas, and opening world-wide the doors of spiritual hospitality, in Europe popes and bishops, synods and ecclesiastical councils, were rooting out heresy with sword and fagot, and the chief countries of Christendom were ablaze with the baleful fires of the Inquisition. It was Khayyâm, too, who said that of all the dogmas taught by the three and seventy sects of Islâm he accepted only one,— the love of God. And for centuries after him sentiments and principles like these, which the comparative science of religion has but recently made familiar to the Western mind, were repeated and enforced by seers and sages, until they became a part of the aphoristic and axiomatic wisdom of the East.

Like all Eastern poets, Hafiz is exceedingly repetitious, both as regards ideas and imagery. The Greeks used to say, Give us your fine things two or three times. But the Persians would deem it undue rigor and irksome restraint to be limited to this moderate amount of iteration. They never tire of a fine thing, and reproduce it on every possible occasion. This is preeminently true of the lyric poet, who weaves his verses out of the staple of Iiis internal states, as the spider spins its web out of its own vitals. This species of poetry is therefore intensely subjective, and confined to a narrow circle of emotions; and the perpetual harping on one string makes even the best of the Divâns rather tiresome as consecutive reading.

Another characteristic of all classes of society in Persia is a notable love of nature; not so much in its wild and rugged aspects as in its milder and more cultivated forms. They have a passion for gardens and flowers, quiet groves and the soft cadence of murmuring brooks; and the sentiment of such scenes pervades all their poesy, and is liable to surfeit the Occidental reader by its monotony of sweetness. Possibly, when Hâfiz satig of the chaman, he may have had iu mind, not a parterre, but a green field or stretch of lawn ; features which to-day have almost wholly disappeared from the Persian landscape, having been supplanted by patches of waving corn, bright with blue-bottles, poppies, and grape hyacinths. All these phenomena of the world of sense are brought into direct and living relations with the world of the imagination, and made to portray the affections and to reflect the desires of the mind. The garden borrows its fragrance and the zephyr its perfume from the amber-scented locks of the loved one; the rose takes its color from her cheeks, and the narcissus steals its languor from her eyes. Some of the metaphors drawn from this source are quite apt and original, as when the spark of love, which has fallen into and indelibly branded the poet’s heart, is compared to the deep puce mark which the wild tulip of Shîrâz bears in the centre of its white petals.

In the twenty-eighth quatrain “ the musk-moled maiden’s heart is seen through her transparent breast, like a pebble in a limpid stream.” Shakespeare puts the same words into the mouth of love-sick Lysauder: — “ Transparent Helena! Nature shows her artThat through thy bosom makes me see thyheart.”

It is curious to note such coincidences, which are the results, not of accident, but of intellectual affinity. Thus Hamlet asks, “ Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole ? ” So Hâfiz discovers the head of the same monarch in the tiles on the roof. And Khayyam saw mangled by a potter’s wheel

“ Ferîdun’s fingers and Kai Khosru’s heart,”

He recognizes in tlie graceful handle of the wine-jug an arm that

“Has many a time twined round some slender waist;”

and bids the reader tread lightly on the common dust, since perchance “’T was once the apple of some beauty’s eye.” Even the lump of clay cries out to him who fashions it: —

“ Use me gently, pray ;I was a man myself but yesterday.”

In grammatical construction the verses of Hâfiz are models of simplicity and perspicuity. From the standpoint and standard of European criticism, his chief defects, which he shares with all Persian poets except Firdausi, are the want of rhetorical sobriety and symmetry; a fondness for obscure allusions and farfetched conceits; an exuberant and un chastened imagination, prone to run riot in mixed metaphors, and to spin them out until they become so attenuated as to break down by their own weight. His motley tropes, instead of illustrating the subject, often tend to confuse the reader by the protean facility with which they change their shapes, and glide from one image into another.

On the principle of sympathy through external similitude, which prevails so largely in ancient medicine, especially in the branch of philter lore, he speaks of his u pine-cone heart ” as longing for reunion with the “ pine-like stature ” of his friend. Even indigo is personified as an archer, because it “ draws a bow ” over the arch of the eyebrows, from which the fatal arrows of love are sped. An oft-recurring figure of speech, derived from the Oriental pharmacopœia, is to call red lips “ ruby tonic,” the catliolicon which can heal all his ailments. He compares the lock resting on the check, and turning up at the end to a hook, which he longs for as he takes to the sea. The wee mouth of his maiden “ sweetly proves ” the truth of the atomical philosophy. He dwells with glee upon her tiny waist,“ no thicker than a hair.” Everywhere in the Orient large hips as well as a slender waist are regarded as essential to female beauty, In the Indian drama of Sàkuntala, the royal lover recognizes the footprints of the heroine by the depth to which her heels sink into the white sand, owing to the weight of her hips. Amru, the author of the sixth Mu‘allakat, describes his lady-love as slim and tall, “ with gracefully swelling hips, which the door of the tent is scarcely wide enough to admit.” In the Anvâri Suhaili of Husain Vaiz, the enthusiastic lover likens the hips and waist of his sweetheart to a mountain (kûh) suspended by a straw (hâh). German minnesingers had the same ideal of female beauty so far as the waist is concerned. Wolfram von Eschenbach says of a fair damsel, —

“ You know how ants are wont to beAround the middle slight and small :Still slimmer was the maiden tall.”

The Greeks possessed a finer sense of symmetry than to imagine that a woman should be patterned after a wasp or an emmet in order to be a model of beauty.

Some of Hâfiz’s metaphors strike us as rather ignoble. It is not pleasant to think of a young girl’s long eyelashes as daggers dripping with blood nor to see ants in the soft down of her cheeks. The dimple in the chin, shining with perspiration, is a well-pit, into which the passionate pilgrim is liable to fall.

Hâfiz’s allusion to his maiden, with her moon-face and moist dimple, recalls Heine’s description, in his Harzreise, of “ the large, voluminous lady, with a red square mile of face, and dimples in her cheeks which looked like spittoons for Cupid.” It would be difficult to decide which of the comparisons is more defamatory of this most delicate and effective feature of female beauty. The Persian is certainly more matter of fact, and lies under the disadvantage of not intending to be funny.

Another peculiarity of Oriental poets, always offensive to the most refined Occidental taste, is the habit of extravagant self-praise, in which they constantly indulge. True, the same tendency shows itself sporadically in European literature. Shakespeare was fully conscious of his genius, and knew the enduring worth of his “powerful rhyme.” In language almost identical with that of the Sonnets, Firdausî, in his satire on Shâh Mahmûd, extols his own epos, the Shâh Nâina; and Sa’dî, in the introduction to the Gulistan, expresses like confidence in the lastingness of his work.

In a Persian or Arab poet, self-praise is not an individual idiosyncrasy, and does not necessarily imply excessive self-conceit. The very structure of the ghazal requires the introduction of the poet’s name in the final couplet, and this mention of himself is expected to be laudatory. Indeed, the author must exercise considerable ingenuity and fertility of invention in order to avoid too great monotony of self-commendation. Heaven, our poet tells us, flings down upon his poetry her “clustered Pleiades,” in recognition of the superiority of his pearls of song to her pearly garland of stars, just as opera fanatics throw laurel-wreaths to a popular prima donna and Spanish ladies cast their necklaces at the feet of a favorite torero.

Self-encomiums (fakhrîyât) are treated in Arabian poetics as a distinct and well-defined class of compositions, as legitimate as elegiacs or erotics. We have no more right to infer that those who cultivate this kind of poetry are exceptionally vain than that every author of a drinking-song is a toper, every composer of martial music a hero, and every writer of madrigals a love-lorn swain. A fair specimen of this autoeulogy is the following, from Hâfiz : —

“ The beauty of those verses baffles praise:What guide is needed in tiie solar blaze?Extol that artist by whose pencil’s aidThe virgin, Thought, so richly is arrayed.For her no substitute can reason show,Nor any like her human judgment know.This verse, a miracle, or magic white —Brought, down some voice from Heaven, or Gabriel bright ?By me as by none else are secrets sung,No pearls of poesy like mine are Strung.”

Making due allowance for Oriental hyperbole., every student of Persian literature will indorse the opinion here expressed. The age of Hâfiz was that of a brilliant galaxy of poets, the golden age of lyric song. Kamâl (perfect), the author of Zephyrs of Friendship (Nafhat al Uns), and Aimad, surnamed the “ faultless,” on account of the finish of his style and the purity of his sentiments, were his contemporaries. But the united suffrages of his countrymen and of European scholars have assigned to Hâfiz the foremost place in Persian letters, and a permanent place among the world’s great poets. It is not, however, by an enumeration of isolated qualities that an adequate estimate can be formed of his rare and peculiar genius. He is not to be measured, much less exhausted, by an anthology of elegant extracts. There is in him, also, a certain subtile and precious element and nimble essence which evades the cold edge of the keenest critical analysis. What he says of the manifold and indefinable sources of the lover’s passion is equally true of the fascination exercised by his own poetry : —

“ ’T is a deep charm which wakes the lover’s flame,Not ruby lip, nor verdant down its name. Beauty is not the eye, look, cheek, ana mole;A thousand subtle points the heart control.”

In his works we find preëminently that glowing interfusion and fruitful espousal of thought and phrase which is the supreme achievement of the creative imagination, and which Goethe represents as the wedlock of word and spirit:—

Let the word be called the bride ;Bridegroom let the spirit be!At this marriage-feast abideThose who prize, Q Hâfiz, thee.

E. P. Evans.