to the lips. "Loose the knots of the heart," he says. We absorb elements
enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and
growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims,
belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large
utterance, a river that makes its own shores, quick perception and
corresponding expression, a constitution to which every morrow is a new
day, which is equal to the needs of life, at once tender and bold, with
great arteries,—this generosity of ebb and flow satisfies, and we
should be willing to die when our time comes, having had our swing and
gratification. The difference is not so much in the quality of men's
thoughts as in the power of uttering them. What is pent and smouldered
in the dumb actor is not pent in the poet, but passes over into new
form, at once relief and creation.
The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a
certificate of profound thought. We accept the religions and politics
into which we fall; and it is only a few delicate spirits who are
sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility of
those whom it entangles,—that the mind suffers no religion and no
empire but its own. It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the
use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and reverend, and
therefore is always provoking the accusation of irreligion.
Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows.
"Let us draw the cowl through the brook of wine."
He tells his mistress that not the dervis, or the monk, but the lover,
has in his heart the spirit which makes the ascetic and the saint; and
certainly not their cowls and mummeries, but her glances, can impart to
him the fire and virtue needful for such self-denial. Wrong shall not be
wrong to Hafiz, for the name's sake. A law or statute is to him what a
fence is to a nimble school-boy,—a temptation for a jump. "We would do
nothing but good, else would shame come to us on the day when the soul
must hie hence; and should they then deny us Paradise, the Houris
themselves would forsake that, and come out to us."
His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader.
There is no example of such facility of allusion, such use of all
materials. Nothing is too high, nothing too low, for his occasion. He
fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love is a leveller, and Allah
becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his
mistress or to his cupbearer. This boundless charter is the right of
genius.
We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make
mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the
erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to
defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and
throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after
the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded
with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that
imports, and not the topics. Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys,
birds, mornings, and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and
sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on
these to mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence. These are the
natural topics and language of his wit and perception. But it is the
play of wit and the joy of song that he loves; and if you mistake him
for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses which express the
poverty of sensual joys, and to ejaculate with equal fire the most
unpalatable affirmations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the world.
Sometimes it is a glance from the height of thought, as thus:—"Bring
wine; for, in the audience-hall of the soul's independence, what is
sentinel or Sultan? what is the wise man or the intoxicated?" And
sometimes his feast, feasters, and world are only one pebble more in the
eternal vortex and revolution of Fate:—
"I am; what I am
My dust will be again."
A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is not
created to excite the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a
supernal intelligence. In all poetry, Pindar's rule holds,—συνετοῖς φωνεί,
it speaks to the intelligent; and Hafiz is a poet for
poets, whether he write, as sometimes, with a parrot's, or, as at other
times, with an eagle's quill.
Every song of Hafiz affords new proof of the unimportance of your
subject to success, provided only the treatment be cordial. In general,
what is more tedious than dedications or panegyrics addressed to
grandees? Yet in the "Divan" you would not skip them, since his muse
seldom supports him better.
"What lovelier forms things wear,
Now that the Shah comes back!"
And again:—
"Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down,
Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear."
It is told of Hafiz, that, when he had written a compliment to a
handsome youth,—
"Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of Shiraz!
I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and Buchara!"—
the verses came to the ear of Timour in his palace. Timour taxed Hafiz
with treating disrespectfully his two cities, to raise and adorn which
he had conquered nations. Hafiz replied, "Alas, my lord, if I had not
been so prodigal, I had not been so poor!"
The Persians had a mode of establishing copyright the most secure of any
contrivance with which we are acquainted. The law of the _ghaselle_, or
shorter ode, requires that the poet insert his name in the last stanza.
Almost every one of several hundreds of poems of Hafiz contains his name
thus interwoven more or less closely with the subject of the piece. It
is itself a test of skill, as this self-naming is not quite easy. We
remember but two or three examples in English poetry; that of Chaucer,
in the "House of Fame": Jonson's epitaph on his son,—
"Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry":
and Cowley's,—
"The melancholy Cowley lay."
But it is easy to Hafiz. It gives him the opportunity of the most
playful self-assertion, always gracefully, sometimes almost in the fun
of Falstaff, sometimes with feminine delicacy. He tells us, "The angels
in heaven were lately learning his last pieces." He says, "The fishes
shed their pearls, out of desire and longing as soon as the ship of
Hafiz swims the deep."
"Out of the East, out of the West, no man understands me;
O, the happier I, who confide to none but the wind!
This morning heard I how the lyre of the stars resounded,
'Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz!'"
Again,—"I heard the harp of the planet Venus, and it said in the early
morning, 'I am the disciple of the sweet-voiced Hafiz!'" And
again,—"When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken, and Anaitis, the leader
of the starry host, calls even the Messiah in heaven out to the dance."
"No one has unveiled thoughts like Hafiz, since the locks of the
Word-bride were first curled." "Only he despises the verse of Hafiz who
is not himself by nature noble."
But we must try to give some of these poetic flourishes the metrical
form which they seem to require:—
"Fit for the Pleiad's azure chord
The songs I sung, the pearls I bored."
Another:—
"I have no hoarded treasure,
Yet have I rich content;
The first from Allah to the Shah,
The last to Hafiz went."
Another:—
"High heart, O Hafiz! though not thine
Fine gold and silver ore;
More worth to thee the gift of song,
And the clear insight more."
Again:—
"O Hafiz speak not of thy need;
Are not these verses thine?
Then all the poets are agreed,
No man can less repine."
He asserts his dignity as bard and inspired man of his people. To the
Vizier returning from Mecca, he says, "Boast not rashly, prince of
pilgrims, of thy fortune. Thou hast indeed seen the temple; but I, the
Lord of the temple. Nor has any man inhaled from the musk-bladder of the
merchant, or from the musky morning-wind, that sweet air which I am
permitted to breathe every hour of the day." And with still more vigour
in the following lines:—
"Oft have I said, I say it once more,
I, a wanderer, do not stray from myself,
I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me;
What the Eternal says, I stammering say again.
Give me what you will; I eat thistles as roses,
And according to my food I grow and I give.
Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl,
And am only seeking one to receive it."
And his claim has been admitted from the first. The muleteers and
camel-drivers, on their way through the desert, sing snatches of his
songs, not so much for the thought, as for their joyful temper and tone;
and the cultivated Persians know his poems by heart. Yet Hafiz does not
appear to have set any great value on his songs, since his scholars
collected them for the first time after his death.
In the following poem the soul is figured as the Phœnix alighting on
Tuba, the Tree of Life:—
"My phœnix long ago secured
His nest in the sky-vault's cope;
In the body's cage immured,
He was weary of life's hope.
"Round and round this heap of ashes
Now flies the bird amain,
But in that odorous niche of heaven
Nestles the bird again.
"Once, flies he upwards, he will perch
On Tuba's golden bough;
His home is on that fruited arch
Which cools the blest below.
"If over this world of ours
His wings my phœnix spread,
How gracious falls on land and sea
The soul-refreshing shade!
"Either world inhabits he,
See oft below him planets roll;
His body is all of air compact,
Of Allah's love his soul."
Here is an ode which is said to be a favourite with all educated
Persians:—
"Come!—the palace of heaven rest on aëry pillars,—
Come, and bring me wine; our days are wind.
I declare myself the slave of that masculine soul
Which ties and alliance on earth once for ever renounces.
Told I thee yester-morn how the Iris of heaven
Brought to me in my cup a gospel of joy?
O high-flying falcon! the Tree of Life is thy perch;
This nook of grief fits thee ill for a nest.
Hearken! they call to thee down from the ramparts of heaven;
I cannot divine what holds thee here in a net.
I, too, have a counsel for thee; O mark it and keep it.
Since I received the same from the Master above:
Seek not for faith or for truth in a world of light-minded girls;
A thousand suitors reckons this dangerous bride.
Cumber thee not for the world, and this my precept forget not,
'Tis but a toy that a vagabond sweetheart has left us.
Accept whatever befalls; uncover thy brow from thy locks;
Never to me nor to thee was option imparted;
Neither endurance nor truth belongs to the laugh of the rose.
The loving nightingale mourns;—cause enow for mourning;—
Why envies the bird the streaming verses of Hafiz?
Know that a god bestowed on him eloquent speech."
The cedar, the cypress, the palm, the olive, and fig-tree, the birds
that inhabit them, and the garden flowers, are never wanting in these
musky verses, and are always named with effect. "The willows," he says,
"bow themselves to every wind, out of shame for their unfruitfulness."
We may open anywhere on a floral catalogue.
"By breath of beds of roses drawn,
I found the grove in the morning pure,
In the concert of the nightingales
My drunken brain to cure.
"With unrelated glance
I looked the rose in the eye:
The rose in the hour of gloaming
Flamed like a lamp hard-by.
"She was of her beauty proud.
And prouder of her youth,
The while unto her flaming heart
The bulbul gave his truth.
"The sweet narcissus closed
Its eye, with passion pressed;
The tulips out of envy burned
Moles in their scarlet breast,
"The lilies white prolonged
Their sworded tongue to the smell;
The clustering anemones
Their pretty secrets tell."
Presently we have,—
"All day the rain
Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain,
The flood may pour from morn till night
Nor wash the pretty Indians white."
And so onward, through many a page.
This picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri, seems to belong
to Hafiz:—
"O'er the garden water goes the wind alone
To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave;
The fire is quenched on the dear hearthstone,
But it burns again on the tulips brave."
Friendship is a favourite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have
matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.
Hafiz says, "Thou learnest no secret until thou knoweth friendship;
since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters."
Ibn Jemin writes thus:
"Whilst I disdain the populace,
I find no peer in higher place,
Friend is a word of royal tone,
Friend is a poem all alone.
"Wisdom is like the elephant,
Lofty and rare inhabitant:
He dwells in deserts or in courts;
With hucksters he has no resorts."
Dschami says,—
"A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe,
So much the kindlier shows him than before;
Throw stones at him, or ruder javelins throw,
He builds with stone and steel a firmer floor."
Of the amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very sparing in our citations,
though it forms the staple of the "Divan." He has run through the whole
gamut of passion,—from the sacred to the borders, and over the borders,
of the profane. The same confusion of high and low, the celerity of
flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is habitual to him.
From the plain text,—
"The chemist of love
Will this perishing mould,
Were it made out of mire,
Transmute into gold."—
he proceeds to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his
religious or in his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote
to afford a token of his mistress. The Moon thought she knew her own
orbit well enough; but when she saw the curve on Zuleika's cheek, she
was at a loss:—
"And since round lines are drawn
My darling's lips about,
The very Moon looks puzzled on,
And hesitates in doubt
If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth
Be not her true way to the South."
His ingenuity never sleeps:—
"Ah could I hide me in my song,
To kiss thy lips from which it flows!"
and plays in a thousand pretty courtesies:—
"Fair fall thy soft heart!
A good work wilt thou do?
O, pray for the dead
Whom thine eyelashes slew;"
And what a nest has he found for his bonny bird to take up her abode
in!—
"They strew in the paths of kings and czars
Jewels and gems of price:
But for thy head I will pluck down stars,
And pave thy way with eyes.
"I have sought for thee a costlier dome
Than Mahmoud's palace high,
And thou, returning, find thy home
In the apple of Love's eye."
Then we have all degrees of passionate abandonment:—
"I know this perilous love-lane
No whither the traveller leads,
Yet my fancy the sweet scent of
Thy tangled tresses feeds.
"In the midnight of thy locks,
I renounce the day;
In the ring of thy rose-lips,
My heart forgets to pray."
And sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment:—
"Plunge in your angry waves,
Renouncing doubt and care;
The flowing of the seven broad seas
Shall never wet thy hair.
"Is Allah's face on thee
Bending with love benign,
And thou not less on Allah's eye,
O fairest turnest thine."
We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few specimens from other poets.
NISAMI.
"While roses bloomed along the plain,
The nightingale to the falcon said,
'Why of all birds must thou be dumb?
With closed mouth thou utterest,
Though dying, no last word to man.
Yet sitt'st thou on the hand of princes,
And feedest on the grouse's breast,
Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewels
Squander in a single tone,
Lo! I feed myself with worms,
And my dwelling is the thorn.'—
The falcon answered, 'Be all ear:
I, experienced in affairs,
See fifty things, say never one;
But thee the people prizes not
Who, doing nothing, say'st a thousand.
To me, appointed to the chase,
The king's hand gives the grouse's breast;
Whilst a chatterer like thee
Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!'"
The following passages exhibit the strong tendency of the Persian poets
to contemplative and religious poetry and to allegory.
ENWERI.
BODY AND SOUL.
"A painter in China once painted a hall;—
Such a web never hung on an emperor's wall;—
One half from his brush with rich colours did run,
The other he touched with a beam of the sun;
So that all which delighted the eye in one side,
The same, point to point, in the other replied.
"In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found;
Thine the star-pointing roof, and the base on the ground:
Is one half depicted with colours less bright?
Beware that the counterpart blazes with light!"
IBN JEMIN.
"I read on the porch of a palace bold
In a purple tablet letters cast,—
'A house though a million winters old,
A house of earth comes down at last;
Then quarry thy stones from the crystal All,
And build the dome that shall not fall.'"
"What need," cries the mystic Feisi, "of palaces and tapestry? What
need even of a bed?"
"The eternal Watcher who doth wake
All night in the body's earthen chest,
Will of thine arms a pillow make,
And a bolster of thy breast."
Ferideddin Attar wrote the "Bird Conversations," a mystical tale in
which the birds coming together to choose their king, resolve on a
pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. From this
poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as
a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite
modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and
difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only
persevered, and arrived before the throne of the Simorg.
"The bird-soul was ashamed;
Their body was quite annihilated;
They had cleaned themselves from the dust,
And were by the light ensouled.
What was, and was not,—the Past,—
Was wiped out from their breast.
The sun from near-by beamed
Clearest light into their soul;
The resplendence of the Simorg beamed
As one back from all three.
They knew not, amazed, if they
Were either this or that.
They saw themselves all as Simorg,
Themselves in the eternal Simorg.
When to the Simorg up they looked,
They beheld him among themselves;
And when they looked on each other
They saw themselves in the Simorg.
A single look grouped the two parties,
The Simorg emerged, the Simorg vanished,
This in that, and that in this,
As the world has never heard.
So remained they, sunk in wonder,
Thoughtless in deepest thinking,
And quite unconscious of themselves.
Speechless prayed they to the Highest
To open this secret,
And to unlock _Thou_ and _We_.
There came an answer without tongue.—
'The Highest is a sun-mirror;
Who comes to Him sees himself therein,
Sees body and soul, and soul and body;
When you came to the Simorg,
Three therein appeared to you,
And, had fifty of you come,
So had you seen yourselves as many.
Him has none of us yet seen.
Ants see not the Pleiades.
Can the gnat grasp with his teeth
The body of the elephant?
What you see is He not;
What you hear is He not.
The valleys which you traverse,
The actions which you perform,
They lie under our treatment
And among our properties
You as three birds are amazed,
Impatient, heartless, confused:
Far over you am I raised,
Since I am in act Simorg.
Ye blot out my highest being,
That ye may find yourselves on my throne;
For ever ye blot out yourselves,
As shadows in the sun. Farewell!'"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote D: or Jámi.]
The Charm of Womankind
SOME OPINIONS OF MEN ON
"THE ETERNAL FEMININE"
_With a Frontispiece in Colours from a Painting by_
W. A. BREAKSPEARE.
* * * * *
FITZGERALD CENTENARY EDITION.
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
AND
Salámán and Absál
WITH
LIFE OF EDWARD FITZGERALD
and an ESSAY ON PERSIAN POETRY
_Frontispiece in Colour specially designed by_
T. W. MORLEY.
Pott 8vo. Cloth elegant 2s. 6d. net each; also
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* * * * *
Tales from Shakespeare
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A NEW EDITION.
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GEORGE SAMPSON.
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Transcriber's Note: Several errors in the original book have
been corrected for this eBook.
In the text of _Salámán and Absál_ the section headers for parts II,
V and XI were omitted—these have been checked in _FitzGerald's
Salámán and Absál: A Study_ by A. J. Arberry and put in the correct
places.
Also in _Salámán and Absál_, in part XXI, a paragraph break was
missing. This has been re-inserted.
In addition, the following typographical errors have been corrected:
p1 Bury St. Edmunds, During changed to
Bury St. Edmunds. During
p14 When the Imám rose from his lectures, they use to changed to
When the Imám rose from his lectures, they used to
p34 The mighty Mahmúd, the victorious Lord changed to
The mighty Máhmúd, the victorious Lord
p16 A.B. 1090 changed to A.D. 1090
p18 'Khayyám changed to "'Khayyám
p19 Naishápur I went to his final resting place changed to
Naishápúr I went to his final resting place
p19 the stone was hidden under them.'" changed to
the stone was hidden under them."'"
Footnote B 500 vêcu changed to vécu
p29 is neither Here nor There?" changed to
is neither Here nor There!"
p36 If clings my Being— changed to
It clings my Being—
p47 A Kurd perplext by Fortunes Frolics changed to
A Kurd perplext by Fortune's Frolics
p47 Sees it on anothers's Ancle— changed to
Sees it on another's Ancle—
p53 Stirr'd not a Step nor set Design afoot changed to
Stirr'd not a Step nor set Design a-foot
p54 Well was is said, changed to Well was it said,
p91 Beauty of the Brighest wanes; changed to
Beauty of the Brightest wanes;
p108 his name: of Jamschid, the binder changed to
his name; of Jamschid, the binder
p111 graybeard of the sky. He says:— changed to
graybeard of the sky." He says:—
p122 how the Iris of heaven; changed to
how the Iris of heaven
p124 Moles in their scarlet brest changed to
Moles in their scarlet breast
Archaic and inconsistent spellings, however, have been retained,
particularly with reference to transliterated words.