And that night,
when I had my visit with him
all alone,
before my night was through
the morning rose
above the mountains.
And, finally, from the last three lines of a nine-line ghazal (Mudarris-i Raḍavī, Qaṣīda 153), we find the takhalluṣ introducing a monologue delivered to the Beloved at dawn, summarizing the poem and the sufferings of the previous night. Though it approaches the Alba topos from a different angle – that of a tryst unmet at all, rather than one that must come to an end at sunrise – it nevertheless confirms the existence of the Alba genre. In fact, Martín de Riquier notes the existence of a class of Provençal poems which complain at dawn about the previous night’s separation, and has dubbed this twist on the dawn-theme, Contra-Alba poems24:
Gīram ki Sanā’ī az ghamat murd / bārī sukhanash bi-ṭab‘ bi-nyūsh
Ay rū-yi tu būd dūsh tā ṣubḥ / az nāla-yi ū jahān pur az jūsh
Yā rabb shab-i kas mabād hargiz / z-īn gūna ki ū gudhāsht shab dūsh.
I guess that Sanā’i
died pining for thee;
now drink
his words into your mind. (7)
Last night,
without your face,
dusk to daylight
the world was
in turmoil
filled with his lamentations: (8)
O Lord,
let no one ever
pass the night
the way he spent
last night. (9)
To my knowledge, this genre of Persian Alba and contra-Alba poems has not been previously noticed or studied, or even recognized as such, with the exception of Wickens’ article.
What’s Hecuba to Ḥāfiẓ, you may be asking at this point. Ḥāfiẓ, unfortunately, did not compose any poems like the two of Sanā’ī above. In fact, the word muezzin (mu‘adhdhin) does not even occur in the poetic lexicon of Ḥāfiẓ, so we cannot expect to see the same scenes we found in the Sanā’ī Albas. But Sa‘dī’s Alba ghazal beginning, ‘Tonight they must be beating more swiftly the unwelcome watchdrum’ (Imshab sabuktar mīzanand in ṭabl-i bī-hangām rā), did not feature the muezzin character either, so perhaps we should begin by looking for poems similar to this one in the corpus of Ḥāfiẓ. While the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ does preserve two poems rhyming in -ām with the radīf rā, neither uses rhymes similar to this poem of Sa‘dī, nor do the two ghazals without radīf and rhyming in -ām give any hint that Ḥāfiẓ had his eye on this poem of Sa‘dī to offer a poetic riposte (javāb).
But the first line of Sa‘dī’s ghazal pairs the dawn and the bird on the roof (bām), and we do indeed find such a collocation in Ḥāfiẓ (324: 9):
Man ān murgham ki har shām u saḥargāh / zi bām-i ‘arsh mīāyad ṣafīram.
I am a bird whose shrill cry rises each dusk and dawntide from the roof of God’s throne.
But neither this line nor this poem will have much to do with Sa‘dī’s motif, other than the lexical overlap. Worse yet, we find no topical correspondences in the corpus of Ḥāfiẓ to vocabulary like bī-hangām, which never occurs (the word hangām occurs only rarely – four times – and not in particular connection with the dawn). The word ṭabl is a hapax legomenon for Ḥāfiẓ, and its single occurrence is irrelevant to our comparison. Even imshab occurs relatively infrequently, only six times in the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ, despite this word having become a standard radīf in the works of other poets by this time, to such an extent that it almost constitutes a sub-genre of the ghazal all by itself. Although the word imshab does naturally – here, in more than one sense of the word ‘naturally’ – collocate with the idea of dawn and its associated motifs for Ḥāfiẓ, the occurrences do not seem particularly relevant to the Alba notion of the lover’s parting, as it occurs in Sa‘dī’s example. The following line can be seen as typical of Ḥāfiẓ’s usage of ‘tonight’:
Ay ṣabā imshabam madad farmāy / ki saḥargāh shikuftanam havas ast. (43: 5)
Morning breeze, come to my aid tonight / for I crave blossoming at dawn.
However, at least one of the imshab lines does indeed allude to the contra-Alba theme, but, as I hope to show below, the release from suffering that comes at dawn does not necessarily have to be associated with the Alba, the contra-Alba or even with love:
Bas-am ḥikāyat-i dil hast bā nasīm-i saḥar
valī bi bakht-i man imshab saḥar nimīāyad.
It’s enough for me to tell my heart’s tale to the breeze at dawn
But with my ill fortune, no dawn will come tonight.
If Ḥāfiẓ was not mindful of this poem by Sa‘dī, what of those two Alba poems of Sanā’ī? The first began ‘Last night my life’s fantasies were all fulfilled’ (Man naṣīb-i khwīsh dūsh az ‘umr-i khwud bar dāshtam), which radīf Ḥāfiẓ does not employ, nor any of its conjugant variants in the past tense (dāshtīm, dāshtī, dāsht), and which rhyme he does not use in its simple form without a refrain. I have not looked to see everywhere the rhyme –ar may occur in combination with another radīf, but one key word from this poem, bastar, does not appear in the lexicon of Ḥāfiẓ at all. The word chanbar occurs only twice in Ḥāfiẓ, and that not quite in the motif of the lovers’ tryst. However, recalling Sanā’ī’s example ‘Her arms and my arms encircled circled my neck her neck like a band, like a band’ (Dast-i ū bar gardan-i man hamchū chanbar būd u man / dast-i khwud dar gardan-i ū hamchū chanbar dāshtam), we may see some residual association with the word gardan and the notion of parting in the following token of chanbar (from Ḥāfiẓ 291: 9):
Falak magar chu saram dīd asīr-i chanbar-i ‘ishq
bi-bast gardan-i ṣabram bi rīsmān-i firāq.
When the celestial sphere saw my head caught in the noose of love
It bound separation’s tether fast around my patient neck.
The word kāfar, which was crucial to the last line of Sanā’ī’s poem in its pairing with Allāhu akbar, occurs only thrice in Ḥāfiẓ, twice in the phrase kāfar-i ‘ishq, though not as a rhyme, and not as part of an Alba topos. Allāhu akbar does occur once in Ḥāfiẓ (ghazal 40: 9), but not in association with the muezzin’s call; rather, with a comparison based on Khiḍr and the Spring of Life, whose waters originate in darkness (ẓulumāt), to the waters of the Allāhu Akbar spring in Shīrāz.
The only other potentially distinctive word from this poem which might possibly collocate with the motif of the lovers’ tryst is the word ‘lot’ (naṣīb), which Ḥāfiẓ uses only four times, and only once in this amorous context (156: 3):
Ravā madār khudāyā ki dar ḥarīm-i viṣāl
raqīb maḥram u ḥirmān naṣīb-i man bāshad.
O God, in the sanctuary of union do not permit
Intimacy to the rival and have deprivation be my lot.
Though this involves a lover’s tryst, it is neither bounded in time by the evening or the dawn, nor is this theme developed in the rest of the ghazal. So here, again, there is no fateful semiosis with naṣib.
What, then, of the second poem of Sanā’ī? ‘My world and my soul came to my side, / companion to my heart, comfort of my psyche’ (Āmad bar-i man jahān u jānam/ uns-i dil u rāḥat-i ravānam). Unfortunately, Ḥāfiẓ took no conscious notice of this poem, either; he has no poems in this rhyme and radīf, and the only truly distinctive word in this short poem, besides mu‘adhdhin (which as we have already noted, Ḥāfiẓ does not use), is the nightwatchman (pāsibān). Perhaps the nightwatchman will stumble onto an early morning lover’s tryst in Ḥāfiẓ, and uncover an arresting Alba scene for us?
Pāsibān appears only twice in Ḥāfiẓ, and its synonym ‘asas but once (261:5). Of these three occurrences, the nightly tryst of love is twice implicated, as follows:
‘Ishrat-i shabgīr kun bī-tars k-andar shahr-i ‘ishq
shabruvān rā āshnā’ī-hā-st bā mīr-i ‘asas.
Make love at night without fear,
for in the metropolis of love
Those who go by night in stealth are well known to the chief of police.
The meaning of this line may be that the lovers are themselves like thieves (shabraw) who sneak around at night, and the police already know who they are, but do not prosecute them in the city of love. Alternatively, it may be that the shabruvān are real criminals, who might pose a potential threat to the lovers – a category of people who also go about at night in pursuit of illicit love. Rather than prosecuting them, the nightwatchmen are protecting them from the real criminals.
It may not be inappropriate to ask why the watchman appears here, since the watchman is significant not only to Sanā’ī’s Alba poem, but also to the Alba poems of the Troubadours. As mentioned, the word ‘policeman’ (‘asas) occurs as a hapax legomenon in the Ḥāfiẓian corpus, and ‘nightwatchman’ (pāsibān) occurs but twice. There are, however, two other patrolling dangers to be avoided: the ‘royal political police’ (shaḥna) and the vice officer (muḥtasib). The muḥtasib enforces fair business practices and ensures that public morality is not violated by drinkers or lovers. To Ḥāfiẓ, the muḥtasib is a sharp-eyed (42: 1) spoiler of the pleasures of wine (144: 4) and a smasher of the chalice (146: 7), greatly to be feared (278: 4, 290: 7), perhaps because of his role in enforcing the criminalization of wine in Shīrāz (354: 4). Like some other officials, notably preachers, the muḥtasib is guilty of posing (195: 9), he is drunk with hypocrisy (riyā), and should be defied wherever possible (290: 7, 280: 2b). In Ḥāfiẓ’s Shīrāz, the muḥtasib sometimes patrolled with the royal political police (shaḥna, 48: 9) against wine, though the poet dismisses the latter as ineffectual (73: 4), even beseeching the ‘constable of the convivium’ (shaḥna-yi majlis) to prevent Ḥāfiẓ’s beloved from drinking with any rival (116: 11). Our chief watchman, the mīr-i ‘asas, is here (261: 5) associated with the possible interruption of lovers’ trysts, though depending on how we read this line (as suggested above), he may in actuality be facilitating them. Likewise, the metaphorical pāsibān, in the following line of Ḥāfiẓ, protects the phantom tryst that takes place in the seclusion of the lover’s heart (319: 8):
Pāsibān-i ḥaram-i dil shuda-am shab hama shab
tā dar īn parda juz andīsha-yi ū nagudhāram.
I’ve become watchman of the precincts of the heart at night all night
Forbidding entry behind the curtain to all but thought of him.
By contrast, the muḥtasib is an adversary, whom Ḥāfiẓ boldly confronts with the fact of his status as lover (338: 1a; see also 355: 8):
Man nay ān rind-am ki tark-i shāhid u sāghar kunam
muḥtasib dānad ki man īn kār-hā kamtar kunam.
I am not one to give up chalice and cherub;
The vice officer knows not to expect it often of me.
We might recall here that the watchman of many Alba poems, like Juliet’s nurse, is actually an authority figure in league with the lovers, protecting their tryst, though he or she is supposed to be preventing such mischief and vice. Sanā’ī’s example contrasts the pāsibān, as the friendly voice of the night, with the muezzin’s terminal announcement of the dawn.
The line of Ḥāfiẓ which evokes the chief watchman does so with the Arabic term for watchman (‘asas). It is needed here for the rhyme, of course, but as it happens this ghazal repeatedly evokes the Arabic traditions of the nasīb and ẓa‘n, the camel litter departing with the Beloved, who is here explicitly named ‘Salmā’, a common beloved’s name in the Arabic poetic tradition. All of this Arabizing does not quite dovetail, however, so neatly with the poem’s specific geographical coordinates in Azerbayjan, at the Araxes River. The opening apostrophe to the easterly morning breeze (ṣabā) suggests that the poem should begin at dawn, with a message bearing kisses to that fragrant spot (261:1):
Ay ṣabā gar bugdharī bar sāḥil-i rūd-i aras
būsa zan bar khāk-i ān vādī u mushkīn kun nafas.
Eastern Breeze! If you pass by the banks of the Aras River
Kiss the earth of that valley and perfume your breath with musk.
Other conventions of the Arabic nasīb on display in this poem include the advice-givers (nāsiḥān, line 4), whose earnest counsel the lover ignores, actually turning their sayings (qawl) into Arabic songs (qawl), set to the lovely music of the Rebec (rabāb). We might here recall that in the European Alba, the watchman who stands guard over the lovers is often a musician.25
In the line after we meet the chief watchman, the poet reminds us that the business of lovemaking is quite serious: ‘ishqbāzī kār-i bāzī nīst (line 6). ‘Lovemaking is no game’ – it requires self-sacrifice. But though this poem plays with conventions related to the Alba theme, it does not lead to a parting at dawn and therefore cannot be classified as an Alba. Although we may discern some fragmentary elements of the Alba topos here, they do not necessarily allude directly to the tradition, since the nightly tryst can indeed occur outside of the framework of the dawn’s early light, disrupting the night’s late love.
There is at least one ghazal from Ḥāfiẓ that seems to have some of the tiles of the Alba scene, albeit in a somewhat re-arranged mosaic. This ghazal makes no allusion to the three poems of Sa‘dī and Sanā’ī which we have been discussing, but it does have the following elements: an opening line that may be set at dawn, just after a message has come on the breeze from the beloved, who has invariably travelled far away, leaving the lover behind (98:1):
Dūsh āgah-ī zi yār-i safar karda dād bād
man nīz dil bi-bād daham har chi bād bād. (line 1)
Last night the wind brought a memento from that friend who journeyed away
I, too, will give my heart to the wind – que sera sera!
Today the poet realizes that those who are close to him, and had counselled him against giving his heart to the beloved, were giving good advice (line 4). The morning breeze gives hope of reunion and brings back to life the lover whose weak body had almost ceased to exist (line 6).
But we are still somewhat far from the Alba tradition. Perhaps the century of the Alba had passed by the time Ḥāfiẓ wrote his ghazals. If that is the case, it testifies to the dynamism of the tradition, which, though highly conventional in many ways, is discarding or re-arranging certain earlier motifs and generating new ones. If that is not the case and we can find evidence of Alba poems in the contemporaries of Ḥāfiẓ, then we may simply note that Ḥāfiẓ found the topos uninteresting or clichéd. If we have come up short in our search for Alba poems in Ḥāfiẓ, what then can we say about his mythopoeisis of the dawn?
Charles-Henri de Fouchécour’s La Description de la nature, a seminal study of nature in the poetry of ‘Unṣurī, Farrukhī, Manūchihrī, Qaṭrān, Azraqī and Mu‘izzī,26 has shown us the utility, indeed the necessity, of looking diachronically and synchronically at catalogues of related images and topoi in Persian poetry. Not only does this process help us to understand the tradition’s symbols better and more precisely, bringing the semiotic contours of various natural settings and topoi in Persian poetry into sharper relief, it also enables us to perceive more clearly the particularities with which individual poets invest certain conventional topoi, themes and, indeed, genres. Some of the items and features of the landscape Fouchécour describes obviously collocate with the larger scene and setting of dawn. Although the full range of auroral motifs are not typically invoked wholesale in any given ghazal, as soon as one such motif is invoked, the poet may potentially choose to amplify and develop this one motif by evoking another of the associated images, characters and ideas in the auroral catalogue. For the ghazal, this catalogue may include the morning breeze, or zephyr, that wafts from the east/north-east in the springtime (ṣabā);27 the brightness of day; the appearance of the beloved or the arrival / dispatch of a message to him or her; the fragrance and freshness of the garden; the appearance of the rose; a call from the wine tavern; a morning draught of wine; prayer; and so on. Fouchécou
r’s collection of data and summary description of the catalogue of images occurs mostly in the Persian qaṣīda poetry written about two centuries preceding Ḥāfiẓ, but will nevertheless provide us with a frame of reference by which we can anticipate a horizon of expectations for the various clusters of imagery in the corpus of Ḥāfiẓ, such as the times and seasons of the year and their associated festivals; the nightingale (bulbul, ‘andalīb) and birds more generally (murgh, 138ff.); the wind (95ff.); the stars and the heavenly bodies (218–20), and so forth. A portion of Fouchécour’s study, ‘Les heures du poète’ (26–7), treats the vocabulary of the times of day that typically appears in eleventh-century Persian poetry, including the dawn. From this we learn that, in Farrukhī’s qaṣīdas, sunset is the hour of fortune’s arrival. For Manūchihrī, the day departs too quickly, because it means the poet must leave his Beloved. The sky is purified at night. In the nights of spring, we see the shining of the rose, the tulip and pomegranate blossom, and we hear the nightingale. For Farrukhī, the turtledove sings late at night, the dew falls and the perfume of spring arises in the middle of the spring night, which is shorter than the day, even though the night seems long for the unrequited lover – a theme which we have seen as part of the contra-Alba in the ghazal.
Fouchécour notes (pp. 26–7) that the various terms for dawn, daybreak and morning, such as shabgīr, sapīda-dam, pagāh, saḥar, bāmdād or ṣubḥ, do not seem to be poetically differentiated. These terms all evoke flowers, the singing of birds, dew and rain, breeze and wind, fragrance, fog, thunder, rainbows and snow. The moon shines at dawn, things become clear, and all the natural phenomena which Manūchihrī associates with the day – such as the sun climbing the eastern sky, and the cock crowing and calling out to the drinkers – are on display. For Manūchihrī, the morning libation is a moment out of time, neither hot nor cold, without cloud, sun, wind or dust. Dawn is also associated with Nawrūz and the vernal festivities of renewal.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 45
