"See how the roses burn!
Bring wine to quench the fire!
Alas! the flames come up with us,--
We perish with desire."
After the manner of his nation, he abounds in pregnant sentences which
might be engraved on a sword-blade and almost on a ring.
"In honor dies he to whom the great seems ever wonderful."
"Here is the sum, that, when one door opens, another shuts."
"On every side is an ambush laid by the robber-troops of circumstance;
hence it is that the horseman of life urges on his courser at headlong
speed."
"The earth is a host who murders his guests."
"Good is what goes on the road of Nature. On the straight way the
traveller never misses."
"Alas! till now I had not known
My guide and Fortune's guide are one."
"The understanding's copper coin
Counts not with the gold of love."
"'Tis writ on Paradise's gate,
'Wo to the dupe that yields to Fate!'"
"The world is a bride superbly dressed;--
Who weds her for dowry must pay his soul."
"Loose the knots of the heart; never think on
thy fate:
No Euclid has yet disentangled that snarl."
"There resides in the grieving
A poison to kill;
Beware to go near them
'Tis pestilent still."
Harems and wine-shops only give him a new ground of observation, whence
to draw sometimes a deeper moral than regulated sober life affords,--and
this is foreseen:--
"I will be drunk and down with wine;
Treasures we find in a ruined house."
Riot, he thinks, can snatch from the deeply hidden lot the veil that
covers it:--
"To be wise the dull brain so earnestly throbs,
Bring bands of wine for the stupid head."
"The Builder of heaven
Hath sundered the earth,
So that no footway
Leads out of it forth.
"On turnpikes of wonder
Wine leads the mind forth,
Straight, sidewise, and upward,
West, southward, and north.
"Stands the vault adamantine
Until the Doomsday;
The wine-cup shall ferry
Thee o'er it away."
That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result
from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the
world, which entitle the poet to speak with authority, and make him an
object of interest, and his every phrase and syllable significant, are
in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone.
His was the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily
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 schoolboy,--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 cup-bearer. This boundless charter is the right of
genius. "No evil fate," said Beethoven, "can befall my music, and he to
whom it is become intelligible must become free from all the paltriness
which the others drag about with them."
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,--[Greek:
sunetois phonei], 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!"