with the Jewish history, and the anterior traditions of the Pentateuch.
The principal figure in the allusions of Eastern poetry is Solomon.
Solomon had three talismans: first, the signet-ring, by which he
commanded the spirits, on the stone of which was engraven the name of
God; second, the glass, in which he saw the secrets of his enemies, and
the causes of all things, figured; the third, the east-wind, which was
his horse. His counsellor was Simorg, king of birds, the all-wise fowl,
who had lived ever since the beginning of the world, and now lives alone
on the highest summit of Mount Kaf. No fowler has taken him, and none
now living has seen him. By him Solomon was taught the language of
birds, so that he heard secrets whenever he went into his gardens. When
Solomon travelled, his throne was placed on a carpet of green silk, of a
length and breadth sufficient for all his army to stand upon,--men
placing themselves on his right hand, and the spirits on his left. When
all were in order, the east-wind, at his command, took up the carpet and
transported it, with all that were upon it, whither he pleased,--the
army of birds at the same time flying overhead, and forming a canopy to
shade them from the sun. It is related, that, when the Queen of Sheba
came to visit Solomon, he had built, against her arrival, a palace, of
which the floor or pavement was of glass, laid over running water, in
which fish were swimming. The Queen of Sheba was deceived thereby, and
raised her robes, thinking she was to pass through the water. On the
occasion of Solomon's marriage, all the beasts, laden with presents,
appeared before his throne. Behind them all came the ant with a blade of
grass: Solomon did not despise the gift of the ant. Asaph, the vizier,
at a certain time, lost the seal of Solomon, which one of the Dews, or
evil spirits, found, and, governing in the name of Solomon, deceived the
people.
Firdousi, the Persian Homer, has written in the _Shah Nameh_ the annals
of the fabulous and heroic kings of the country: of Karun (the Persian
Crœsus), the immeasurably rich gold-maker, who, with all his treasures,
lies buried not far from the Pyramids, in the sea which bears his name;
of Jamschid, the binder of demons, whose reign lasted seven hundred
years; of Kai Kaus, in whose palace, built by demons on Alberz, gold and
silver and precious stones were used so lavishly, that in the brilliancy
produced by their combined effect, night and day appeared the same; of
Afrasiyab, strong as an elephant, whose shadow extended for miles, whose
heart was bounteous as the ocean, and his hands like the clouds when
rain falls to gladden the earth. The crocodile in the rolling stream had
no safety from Afrasiyab. Yet when he came to fight against the generals
of Kaus, he was but an insect in the grasp of Rustem, who seized him by
the girdle, and dragged him from his horse. Rustem felt such anger at
the arrogance of the King of Mazinderan, that every hair on his body
started up like a spear. The gripe of his hand cracked the sinews of an
enemy.
These legends,--with Chiser, the fountain of life, Tuba, the tree of
life,--the romances of the loves of Leila and Medschun, of Chosru and
Schirin, and those of the nightingale for the rose,--pearl-diving, and
the virtues of gems,--the cohol, a cosmetic by which pearls and eyebrows
are indelibly stained black,--the bladder in which musk is brought,--the
down of the lip, the mole on the cheek, the eyelash,--lilies, roses,
tulips, and jasmines,--make the staple imagery of Persian odes.
The Persians have epics and tales, but, for the most part, they affect
short poems and epigrams. Gnomic verses, rules of life conveyed in a
lively image, especially in an image addressed to the eye, and contained
in a single stanza, were always current in the East; and if the poem is
long, it is only a string of unconnected verses. They use an
inconsecutiveness quite alarming to Western logic, and the connection
between the stanzas of their longer odes is much like that between the
refrain of our old English ballads,
"The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,"
or
"The rain it raineth every day,"
and the main story.
Take, as specimens of these gnomic verses, the following:--
"The secret that should not be blown
Not one of thy nation must know;
You may padlock the gate of a town,
But never the mouth of a foe."
Or this of Omar Chiam:--
"On earth's wide thoroughfares below
Two only men contented go:
Who knows what's right and what's forbid,
And he from whom is knowledge hid."
Here is a poem on a melon, by Adsched of Meru:--
"Color, taste, and smell, smaragdus, sugar, and musk,--
Amber for the tongue, for the eye a picture rare,--
If you cut the fruit in slices, every slice a crescent fair,--
If you leave it whole, the full harvest moon is there."
Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his extraordinary gifts
adds to some of the attributes of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Burns
the insight of a mystic, that sometimes affords a deeper glance at
Nature than belongs to either of these bards. He accosts all topics with
an easy audacity. "He only," he says, "is fit for company, who knows how
to prize earthly happiness at the value of a night-cap. Our father Adam
sold Paradise for two kernels of wheat; then blame me not, if I hold it
dear at one grapestone." He says to the Shah, "Thou who rulest after
words and thoughts which no ear has heard and no mind has thought, abide
firm until thy young destiny tears off his blue coat from the old
graybeard of the sky." He says,--
"I batter the wheel of heaven
When it rolls not rightly by;
I am not one of the snivellers
Who fall thereon and die."
The rapidity of his turns is always surprising us:--
"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,
'Woe 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 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 ears 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, and 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 unvailed 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 Pleiads' 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 vigor 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 upward, 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,
Sees 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 favorite with all educated
Persians:--
"Come!--the palace of heaven rests 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 forever 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 favorite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have
matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.
Hafiz says,--
"Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest 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 path 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 yon 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 colors 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 for 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 colors 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?"