As indicated by the complexities of this already simplified schematic summary, Ḥāfiẓ notoriously revels in creating – often already within each line of his ghazals – a richly contrasting set of intensely dramatic, intentionally mysterious, open-ended and multi-faceted potential constellations of understanding. In consequence, the awakening and effective application of those potential alternative understandings, at each moment, entirely depends on the particular range of imagined meanings which each reader is able to supply for each of these indispensable dialogical components, embedded in the intensely condensed internal dramatic speech of each line of the ghazal. Perhaps the most immediate way for modern, non-expert readers of Ḥāfiẓ in translation to begin to appreciate all that is potentially going on within these short ghazals – indeed, often within a single line – is to encounter some of the extraordinarily dramatic, richly evocative miniature paintings, which were later inspired by and devoted to mirroring and elucidating these unique poetic masterpieces.3
The particular demands of this uniquely polyvalent, multi-dimensional dramatic dialogical structure of each line of the ghazal on the properly prepared and seriously engaged reader can perhaps best be appreciated by students approaching Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals with little or no prior cultural preparation, by analogy to the similar degree of active intellectual and affective participation (and preparation) required by Plato’s dramatic dialogues, or by the hexagrams of the I Ching, which itself so closely mirrors the traditional divinatory rituals and expectations surrounding the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ. Perhaps an even closer analogy, for some readers, may be suggested by the familiar features of complex role-playing computer games; or by recent cinematic thinkers fascinated with depicting the complex interplay between each human actor’s outward destiny, character and inner history, fateful decisions, and the revealing consequences of our inner and outward acts of free will.4 For within each distinctively multi-faceted line of Ḥāfiẓ, the actively engaged reader is unavoidably challenged to ‘write out’ – and simultaneously to act out, since it is our own self and inner personal history and imagination that is so pointedly mirrored in our particular hypothetical understandings of the possible speakers, audiences and speech-situations at issue – several plausible, but necessarily contrasting, mini-dramas, along with the further consideration of their eventual outcomes.
Next, in the following line or two, Ḥāfiẓ typically moves on to evoke a radically different perspective (both metaphysical and practical) that – just as with the interplay of different characters and personalities in Plato’s dialogues or other great dramas – immediately tends to cast a very different light on the issues and alternatives raised by the immediately preceding lines. Thus each reader’s simultaneous active inner creation and subsequent reflective re-consideration of each of these alternating mini-dramas – only further enriched by their interactions with the further dramas and perspectives of each succeeding line – precisely mirrors the familiar existential processes by which participants in therapy gradually become more aware of – and eventually responsible for and relatively detached from – the largely unconscious, non-reflective, and painfully one-dimensional dramas and dilemmas that originally brought them into the therapeutic quest. This is also why, just as with the study of Plato and other great dramatists, teachers quickly discover that the best practical initiation into these typically individualized and unavoidably interactive psychospiritual complexities of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry is through carefully attentive group reading and study. For such shared discussion quickly reveals and highlights the dramatic alternative perspectives and resulting dialogues (together with their manifold individual implications and outcomes) so carefully embedded in each successive line and half-line of his ghazals.
In short, these progressive dialogical perspective shifts are part of a carefully crafted process designed to elicit from Ḥāfiẓ’s readers both new relevant experiences and contrasting interpretive alternatives, through such familiar devices as evocative but initially puzzling symbols (paralleling a key feature of the earliest Qur’ānic surahs); contrasting schemas of interpretation, including the elaborate metaphysical and philosophical traditions well known to Ḥāfiẓ and his original audiences; and the familiar Qur’ānic principles of explicit metaphysical paradox and incongruity. Second, these dramatic shifts help to heighten each reader’s awareness of key unconscious elements (i.e., our inwardly operative assumptions, blinders, prejudices, and so on) and previously unexamined possibilities, through the carefully suggestive mirroring of those inadequate assumptions or their destructive consequences, emotionally heightened by Ḥāfiẓ’s frequent (and often disarmingly self-deprecating) use of humour and irony. Third, Ḥāfiẓ often uses these sudden perspective shifts to elicit each reader’s habitual forms of projection (i.e., the emotionally charged mirroring of our own inner impulses in others), through more openly voicing our inner conflicts and assumptions in the guise of those familiar, recurrent conflicts and dramas that run through all his poems. Finally, each ghazal as a whole integrates those preceding elements in the reader’s gradual movement from an opening state of one-sided egoistic desire and associated emotions (needfulness, anxiety, longing, nostalgia, despair; or transient sensual distraction from that deeper suffering) to the potential transfiguration of that desire in the active reciprocity of true mutual love and spiritual awareness; that is, in all the states and actions of the divine Ḥāfiẓ – and His or Her human mirrors – which are so pointedly and insistently recalled in each ghazal’s concluding line.
For the poet’s concluding pen-name is at once divine Name, human description and obligation, and singular active imperative. As such, however we may encounter it at the end of each ghazal, it constitutes an unavoidably revealing litmus test of where this challenging poetic voyage has left us, especially in contrast to the uniquely personal situation and dilemmas with which each of us necessarily begins this journey. Like the ‘Book’ of all our actions, thoughts and influences that each soul, according to the Qur’ān, is given to contemplate at its judgement, each ghazal brings us face to face with our own humanity, and with the immediate imperatives we discover there.
Two Illustrative Ghazals
Due to practical pedagogical concerns relevant to English-language students of Ḥāfiẓ who are unable to read the Persian (including the ready availability, range and variety of translated ghazals, their relative literalness, and the helpful provision of a facing Persian text), I have based the following two illustrations on my own slightly revised versions of the translations by Elizabeth T. Gray in The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Dīwān of Hāfiz, pp. 49 and 69. The original translations have been supplemented here only as necessary to indicate particular important original textual key words or clues (usually more literal or in some cases underlying Arabic meanings) that are referred to in the following discussion of each ghazal. The particular numbers identifying each ghazal here (6, 13) refer to their original order in that published volume of English translations.
Perspective Shifts in Ghazal 6: The ‘Absence’ of the Friend
This short and relatively straightforward ghazal5 offers a richly illustrative introduction to Ḥāfiẓ’s typical use of subtle and rapidly shifting, typically ambivalent shifts in perspective and voice. To begin with, almost every phrase in the opening line – as we shall see in more detail below – offers a complexly evocative set of inescapable existential alternatives (engaging and awakening each reader’s will, love, understanding and intention), which are then articulated and given voice in an ongoing, gradually ascending internal dialogue throughout the rest of the poem. For the sake of simplicity, we could call these two parallel starting points the ‘two faces of the intellect’ (‘aql), already so familiar from the Qur’ān and centuries of earlier Islamic spiritual poetry; that is, the intrinsically limited, ego-mind of the human-animal (bashar), in contrast with the all-inclusive, inspired and penetrating spiritual Intelligence. Initially, each pair of verses
retains a single similar formal perspective, while at the same time subtly preparing the way for the more comprehensive points of view articulated in the following set of lines. The final verse, as is usually the case with Ḥāfiẓ, stands alone as the definitive – hence almost always knowingly ironic and multi-faceted – response to all the preceding interrogations, inherently recapitulating and integrating all those possible multiple perspectives within the whole of each reader’s experience.
Ghazal 6
[1] O dawn wind, where is the Friend’s resting-place/shrine/tomb?
Where is that moon’s stopping-place, that rogue, killer/enticer of lovers?
[2] The night is dark, the way to the valley of (the burning bush) is up ahead.
Where is the fire of Sinai? Where is the promised time of seeing (the Friend)?
[3] Whoever comes into this world bears the mark of ruin/transience:
In this tavern/ruins, say: Where is the sober/wise one?
[4] He who understands spiritual signs lives with glad tidings.
There are so many subtleties: Where is the intimate of secrets?
[5] Every tip of my hair has thousands of works with You:
We, where are we? And the work-less blamer, where is he?
[6] Reason has gone mad. Where are those dark/musk-scented chains?
The Heart of/from Us went into retreat. Where is the eyebrow of the Heart-Holder (Friend)?
[7] Wine, musician and rose are all ready, but
Life without the Friend is not ready! Where is the Friend?
[8] Ḥāfiẓ, don’t be pained by the wind of autumn across the plain of Eternity/time:
Have a wise thought: say, where is the rose without thorns?
Lines 1–2: Lost and Indeterminate Subject and Object – but Richly Evocative Audience
In the first two opening lines here, both the speaker and the identity of the beloved Friend,6 the object of the speaker’s deepest longing, are all kept carefully and rigorously indeterminate – an indeterminacy which readily draws in and encourages each reader to read these lines as a strictly personal soliloquy, immediately substituting the peculiar situation of their own unique experience of love, loss and nostalgic longing. However, the audience and time of this recurrent plaint also suggest immediately concrete and undeniable signs of hope and presence: the first dawn light, and the wind-messenger of the divine Beloved, with its fresh spring reminders of the reality and proximity of the Garden. The second line – indeed, like each of the phrases in the opening verse – continues that opening question, but filled with the poignant reminder of the still abstract possibility of reunion: of those transforming theophanic encounters that tauntingly remain, at this moment, either in the mythical past (the burning bush and Mt. Sinai) or in the still distant eschatological future (each soul’s ‘promised seeing [ru’yā]’, and ultimate meeting with God). Yet that abstract reminder is itself enough to suggest and constitute that inner way and lifelong path which will be revealed and discovered in the rest of the poem. Hence the constant concluding ‘Where?’ refrain already begins to move away from the opening hopeless, helpless complaint to a nascent, more focused and hopeful inner quest.
Lines 3–4: The Voice of Abstract, Generalized Reason
In these lines, Ḥāfiẓ suddenly switches to the distant, all too annoying voice of abstract, detached and universal wisdom – to the familiar most outward (and equally abstract) ‘narrative’ voice of the Qur’ān, that voice which pointedly speaks to the indeterminate ‘you-all’ (‘say’ here is unusually in the second-person plural). In the familiar modern imagery of animated cartoons, this reminder of the transient nature and dualistic conditions of ‘this lower life’ (dunyā/jahān) is the remonstrative voice of the white angel on the protagonist’s shoulder, accurate and pertinent, but also painfully soft and distant. And in line 3, Ḥāfiẓ gives full ironic voice to the bitterly hopeless, despairing anger that such sober, abstract reasonableness tends to evoke among those (and each part of our self) still helplessly attached to these passing tavern-ruins. Surprisingly, then, line 4 unexpectedly provides the beginning of a real, effective – and necessarily individual – answer to that ironic query, pointing towards the radical transformation of perspective articulated in the first person in verses 5–6. Appropriately enough for the turning-point of the entire poem, the first half-line of verse 4 (together with the beginning of the second half) offers what is still a poignantly abstract reminder of those dozens of Qur’ānic verses emphasizing the omnipresence of the divine Signs, in every domain and instant of our inner and outer experience, and of the ‘glad tidings’ (bishārat/bushrā) necessarily flowing from their proper appreciation and understanding.
Hence the conclusion of this line, marking the climactic transition of the whole ghazal, is a poignantly personal question, perhaps even the voice of an entirely different speaker (already the ‘I’ of lines 5–6?). For each of us, there is only one possible and indispensable ‘intimate of spiritual secrets’, and no real choice (or way out of this dilemma) but to turn in the direction of that Friend.
Lines 5–6: The Heart’s Essential ‘Work’ of I and Thou
In line 5, Ḥāfiẓ, at least, openly takes that inevitable turn inward, from the abstract, critical intellect to the necessarily personal and uniquely individual – powerfully marked here by the very first mention of ‘I’ and the divine, Buberian ‘Thou’ – to the Heart (dil/qalb), the dynamic, mutual meeting place of the divine Spirit and all its individual manifestations, and the unique locus of the defining human Work of creation, spiritual transformation and awakening. As the second half of line 5 indicates, those who are consciously busy with that infinite sacred Work of the divine-individual ‘We’ are indeed in a radically different place from that complaining, critical, fault-finding ‘ego-self’ whose many inner voices (already richly amplified in lines 1–4) are all too familiar to each of us. The forcefully emphasized ‘We’ opening the second half of line 5 is not a polite rhetorical substitute for Ḥāfiẓ’s or our own ego-self (much less a vague bunch of people), but rather a radical and far-reaching, truly transforming insight into this poet’s own distinctive reading and understanding of that peculiarly mysterious divine ‘We’-voice which so intimately speaks so much of the Qur’ān. The essential identity of this profoundly personal divine/ human ‘We’ with the transforming presence of the Walī/Friend is highlighted here by its explicit opposition to the censorious ‘blamer’ (malāmatgar, the inner ego-‘blamer’). That opposition here is meant to openly echo the famous Qur’ānic verse 5:54 on the saving, restorative divine function of all the saintly Friends of God, ‘... who do not fear the blame of any blamer’.
Line 6 then moves on to describe more completely the decisive inner transformation – and the constantly available spiritual choice – between the real ‘We’ of the Friend/Spirit and the self-separating, illusory ego, which was so sharply evoked in line 5. This inner union of the heart-self and its divine Creator-Beloved Friend always remains bewildering and ‘crazy’ (dīvāna/hayrān) to our limited ego-intellect. For our individual intellect alone – in Ḥāfiẓ’s already classic poetic imagery for conveying the foundational ḥadīth of the blinding Face of the divine Beloved and its ‘70,000 veils’ of all created manifestation7 – by its very nature cannot see beyond the endless veils of created phenomena, which for it are always psychic ‘chains’ of distraction and temptation. Only the Heart, when it is properly focused or ‘withdrawn’ into itself (khalwa/gūsha-girift), can follow the subtle fragrances of divine attraction – here echoing that perfumed dawn-breeze (nasīm) which so evocatively opens this ghazal – back to the very Eye/Essence (‘ayn/ābrū) of the One ‘Heart-holder’ and always present Friend.
Thus line 6 leaves each reader faced directly with one essential question: with the apparent choice between seeing – and living – in perspective, in that loving awareness of Heart and Spirit which is both real and always connected with the divine Friend (every hair linked ‘by tho
usands of works’). Or else of disintegrating and returning to the lonely separation of the ego-intellect and all the familiar sufferings (the ‘thorns’ of the concluding line) inherent in its ‘nearer-world’ (dunyā) of transient material entities, space and time – all quite literally destined to the pervasive ruins (kharābāt) of line 3. Or between the divine Friend, the Beloved Herself, and her dark and endlessly veiling – but also fragrantly alluring! (mushkīn/mishkīn) – chain of tresses. More honestly, of course, we rarely seem to have much effective choice between these two alternatives, finding our conscious selves, from moment to moment, apparently entranced in one of these states or the other.
But Ḥāfiẓ’s final poignant ‘Where?’ here obviously does not mean that we have simply returned to the initial helplessness and despair that marked the beginning of the poem. For the poet has actually brought his readers a very long way at this point, and his final two lines in fact are devoted to clarifying the realization and deeper insight into the universal nature of each Heart’s individual path and work, which has only now become possible. In short, we are simply asked to begin to recognize that the ‘Path’ of this quintessentially human Work is not the apparent, dramatic motion from one lower spiritual point to another apparently higher one, as in the progression from line 1 here to line 5. Rather, that uniquely individual work, and resulting path, always lies in the ongoing dynamic process of spiritual learning and growth that constantly takes our heart back and forth from one state and momentary spiritual stopping-place (manzil, in line 1) to another. So that what we first took as separation, loss and failure is in reality the essential precondition for the ongoing human task of loving, of the striving and discovery of the Friend.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 41
