Joseph John On Hafiz

"O Hafiz, I have not seen anything lovelier than thy poetry; (I swear it) by the Qur'an thou hast in thy bosom.' These words written by Hafiz himself (and not, as one might have thought, by some reader enchanted by Hafiz's poetry) are not to be dismissed as exaggerated self-praise. Indeed many an enthralled Persian from Hafiz's time to ours would gladly swear "by the Qur'an" as to the peerless loveliness of Hafiz's lyrics. Hafiz is, in fact, generally recognized as the greatest lyric poet of Persia (Iran) and one of the world's great poetic geniuses. Hafiz belongs to one of the richest poetic traditions in world literature—a tradition which includes such great poets as Firdausi, Nizami, Omar Khayyam, Rumi, Sa'di and Jami.

Very little is known about Hafiz's life. The exact date of his birth is not known, but it is generally agreed that he was born about 1320 in Shiraz, the capital of Fars, a Persian province. His real name was Shams ud-din Mohammed. The name Hafiz, by which the world knows him, was a sort of honorific title he conferred on himself: It means "one who knows the Koran by heart."

Unlike his great (and older) contemporary Sa'di, also of Shiraz, who traveled and sojourned in many foreign lands including Arabia, North Africa and India, Hafiz lived almost all his life in Shiraz—which he loved and celebrated in his poetry. Although he lived in one of the most tumultuous times in Persian history, Hafiz maintained a poetic aloofness from the "blood and mire" of the wars, invasions, coups and usurpations that Shiraz witnessed during his lifetime.

One of the few facts we know about Hafiz's personal life is that he had but a brief married life. His wife died young, and he also lost his little son. In a poem believed to have been written by him on the death of his wife, he wrote:

How sweet it was on many a summer's day
On the green margin of the stream to lie
With her and the wild rose, and nothing say;
Little knew 1 That she was running like the stream away.
And for his son he wrote a moving epitaph in which he said:
Little sleeper, the spring is here:
Tulip and rose are come again,
Only you in the earth remain,
Sleeping dear.

Such expressions of sorrow over the loss of kith and kin kin are rare exceptions to the preoccupation of I Hafiz's poetry with the theme of love and wine. In almost all the poems in this collection, "Saki," "wine" and "beloved" constitute, so to speak, a triad of constants providing a basis for the variations in thought, mood and emotion that particularize the lyric tone and substance of each of the odes.

The Western reader who is familiar with classical Greek and Roman poetry, might well be reminded by Hafiz's verse of Anacreon or Lucretius, or of the theme of carpe diem ("Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.") in the European tradition. It may seem that Hafiz's message is in no way different from that of, for instance, John Gay, who wrote:
Women and wine should life employ. Is there ought else on earth desirous?

Or of Byron in Don Juan:
Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after.

Or, again, he might feel that the kind of love that informs Hafiz's lyrics is exactly identical with that expressed by Ben Jonson in these lines:

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.

However, the question has been asked—and will always be asked—whether Hafiz's "Saki" and "wine" and "beloved" are real or mystical. There never has been, and it is probable that there never will be, a critical consensus on this question. The truth is that Hafiz's poems can be interpreted in terms of carnal love as well as mystical love, and in terms of physical intoxication as well as spiritual inebriation. It is, in fact, part of the greatness of Hafiz's poetry that it is so richly ambiguous and is enjoyable at different levels.
The Western reader would do well to consider two important facts before jumping to the conclusion, as some Western critics have done, that Hafiz's bacchanalian terminology signifies nothing but the most blatant form of hedonism. First, there is the fact that, as the translator Richard Le Gallienne observed, even "the orthodox Persian regards the Divan (Hafiz's collected poems) in much the same light as the orthodox Christian regards The Song of Solomon.'" Secondly, we have Hafiz's own assertion that there is more in his "wine" and his "intoxication" than meets the eye:
Hafiz is drunk in many different ways—
Drunk with the Infinite, drunk with the Divine,
With music drunk, and many a lovely face;
Also, he's drunk—with wine.

Elsewhere he says:
Of course, I'll go on getting drunk,
But it will be another way— A more august inebriation.

Like Emily Dickinson, who sang, "Inebriate of air am I," Hafiz, too, was "inebriate" of everything that life had to offer him—and this included intimations of the Infinite no less than the joys of the finite world.

The "inebriation" of which Hafiz speaks points to his Sufi orientation. Hafiz, if not himself a Sufi, was greatly influenced by Sufism—the mystical or esoteric form of Islam. His teacher, Attar, was a great Sufi mystic. Hafiz's Sufism, however, like his teacher's, was devoid of the usual ascetic practices of the Sufis. All the same, such a great Sufi poet-philosopher as Jami found it appropriate to call Hafiz "a Sufi of eminence." C. K. Streit (a translator of Hafiz) who believed that Hafiz used his Sufism "as a camouflage for some of his hedonism," admits, however, that there are "hidden meanings" in his verse. Of these hidden meanings encoded in Sufi symbolism, Streit says:
The Sufis have a very complete and ingenious code whereby they use sensuous words and images to convey their hidden mystic thought. Thus "wine", by the Sufi code, represents "spiritual ecstasy," the "beloved" is the "Divinity," the "tavern" is the "Sufi monastery," the "Magi" or tavern keeper is the "spiritual guide," and so on into more abstract terms. Those who consider Hafiz a Sufi mystic explain his verse by this code, and it is obvious that, if one is sufficiently zealous, much of the Divan can be interpreted in this way.

Needless to say, if the reader bears in mind the possibility of "hidden meanings" in Hafiz, most of the poems in this volume such as, "My Hermitage the Tavern Is" (Ode 42) or "Wine for a Breaking Heart" (Ode 1) will be found to have dimensions of meaning beyond their ostensible theme of unabashed hedonism. At the same time, the poems will lose much of their immediacy of appeal, if their prima facie charm as uninhibited celebrations of the sensuous joys of human life is missed in an over-zealous search for "hidden meanings."
At any rate, no sensitive reader will fail to note the romantic sentiments that give life and zest to Hafiz's poetry. Neither will he miss the nature and quality of the thought from which these sentiments derive. Philosophically, Hafiz's approach to reality is oriented toward distrust of reason as a key to the "riddle" of the universe. A. J. Arberry suggests that Hafiz's doctrine of unreason must have been the offspring of the weltschmerz germane to the turbulent times in which he lived, but the "unreason" that Hafiz celebrates has less to do with the seeming incoherence of human history as it worked itself out in the Persia of his day than with the gnostic epistemology of Sufism which subordinates reason to intuition, and knowledge to love, as ways leading to union with God. The philosophy that informs Hafiz's poetry, together with his sempiternal pining for "what is not" and his use of the terminology of religious worship and adoration to express the affections of the heart are a significant part of the "legacy of Islam" to Western thought and literature, especially to the great psychic revolution that culminated in the momentous phenomenon of European Romanticism.

—Joseph John