_Stanza 2._—See Note to Stanza 1 of Poem III.
_Stanza 5._—“Narrow-eyedness” is the exact translation of the Persian
word for greed, and there is consequently, in the original, a play of
meaning between the physical and moral attributes of the Tartars.
It is significant that Hafiz should choose the “narrow-eyed” Tartar
robbers as types of cruelty. Just as the Anglo-Saxons prayed to be
delivered from the Danes, so a clause in the Persian litany of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries might have been: “From the power of
the Tartars, good Lord, deliver us!” First under Hulagu, and then under
Timur, they overran and devastated Persia. The destruction wrought by
them was very similar to that wrought by the Arab conquerors in the
Roman provinces of North Africa. They rased to the ground great cities;
they reduced populous and fertile regions to a barren desert by breaking
down the old reservoirs and destroying the irrigating system, completely
changing the physical conditions of parts of the country. In the
mountains to the north of Tehran, for instance, there are villages
bearing names the etymology of which points to their having stood at the
outlet of a reservoir of which no other trace remains, and it is said
that the country surrounding the town was far more thoroughly irrigated
before the Tartar invasion, and supported a larger population. The
invaders completely destroyed the ancient city of Rhages, which lay at a
distance of about three miles from the modern capital. The same thing
happened in North Africa. The ruins of Roman towns are to be found in
country which must once have been fertile, but which is now reconquered
by the sands of the Sahara.
“One poor robe.” The Persian runs: “man dervish-i-yek kaba”—_i.e._ I, a
poor man of one robe—_dervish_ signifying in its primary sense, it is
hardly necessary to say, _poor_. I should think that the double meaning
is significant. In its mystical sense, the poem describes how Hafiz
found consolation in the ecstatic drunkenness of the Sufis, in the
minstrel’s song, or divine message, which brought him a word from God;
and when finally the last shred of his orthodoxy had been torn from him,
when in his desperate struggle with existence he was forced to abandon
even his dervish robe, Heaven mercifully showed him a safe refuge in the
Sufi doctrines.