[Love] is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything which exists. We are born into the world, and there is something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness ... We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man ... the portrait of our external being ... [is] a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness; a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise ... the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that, without which there is no rest and respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence in solitude ... we love the flowers, the grass, and the waters, and the sky. The motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture ... like the voice of the beloved singing to you alone.40
Shelley’s philosophy of Love is of course strongly influenced by neo-Platonism, and is essentially an explanation of the doctrine of emanation which is shared between Sufism and Platonic ideals. Shelley, like Emerson, sought Ideal Beauty and the Universal Soul, and many of his poems reflect and record such a search. This is central to poems such as Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, Adonis and the locus classicus of his poetry of Divine Love, Epipyschidion (and to many other poems too). ‘I always seek’, he says, ‘in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object’.41 Shelley’s doctrines have much in common with Sufism, in part because both have their roots in Greek philosophy. As we have seen, Jones compares Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry to Spenser’s neo-Platonic poem An Hymn in Honour of Love; likewise, Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty has been compared to Spenser’s Hymn:
If Shelley had not read Plato at all, he could have got the quintessence of Platonism from Spenser’s Hymns [Four Hymns]. An Hymn in Honour of Love contains many direct references to doctrines of the Symposium: that Eros was ‘begot of Plentie and Penurie,’ that Love tempers the elements of the universe, that mortals ‘multipy the likeness of their Kynd,’ that man
Breathes a more immortal mynd,
Not for lusts sake, but for eternitie,
Seekes to enlarge his lasting progenie.42
In order to compare further the closeness of imagery employed both by Shelley and Ḥāfiẓ, it is useful to look briefly at the image of ‘the veil’ in the two poets. In Prometheus Unbound, the image of the fallen veil is used in order to reveal ‘pristine purity’43:
How thou art changed! I dare not look on thee;
I feel but see thee not. I scarce endure
The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change
Is working in the elements, which suffer
Thy presence thus unveiled. [...]
... love, like the atmosphere
Of the sun’s fire filling the living world,
Burst from thee, and illumined earth and heaven
And the deep ocean and the sunless caves
And all that dwells within them; [...]
Such art thou now: nor is it I alone, [...]
But the whole world which seeks thy sympathy.
Hearest thou not sounds i’ the air which speak the love
Of all articulate beings?44
If we compare Shelley’s lines with these lines by Ḥāfiẓ, as translated by Jones, the similarities become apparent:
In eternity without beginning, a ray of thy beauty began to gleam;
When Love sprang into being, and cast flames over all nature;
On that day thy cheek sparkled even under the veil,
and all this beautiful imagery appeared on the mirror of our fancies.45
The image of the veil is, of course, as much a Platonic image as it is of Persian Sufi poetry. It is this shared idealism and philosophy which first attracted one of the fathers of American poetry to read the Persian poets.
Emerson, like Shelley, was opposed to the orthodox church, and sought in his transcendental views, which, again like the ideas of Shelley, were nurtured by the German philosophers, to establish a Universal Soul. In fact, echoes of what Shelley writes on Love are also discernible in Emerson’s essay on ‘Love’. Strikingly, Emerson places as an epigraph to his essay a quotation from the Qur’ān, ‘I was as a gem concealed; / Me my burning ray Revealed’,46 which is the central doctrine of Sufism. Emerson had read Ḥāfiẓ in Sir William Jones’ works when he was still a young boy. He later came across von Hammer’s Diwan and tried his hand at translating Ḥāfiẓ into English from German. His notebooks contain many finished and unfinished translations from Ḥāfiẓ.47 His Essay on ‘Persian Poetry’ also contains many translations from Ḥāfiẓ.48 According to Emerson: ‘Ḥāfiẓ 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, so that his work sometimes affords a deeper glance at Nature than belongs to any of these other poets.’49 In one of his journals, Emerson writes that Ḥāfiẓ is
characterised by a perfect intellectual emancipation which he also provokes in the reader; Nothing stops him. He makes the daregod & daredevil experiment. He is not to be scared by a name, or a religion. He fears nothing. He sees too far; he sees ... throughout; such is the only man I wish to see and to be.50
Ḥāfiẓ, it appears, is his touchstone; his is that poetry which is most capable of ‘inoculating the reader with poetic madness’.51 It was this ‘poetic madness’ which stimulated Emerson to the translation of Ḥāfiẓ and to the employment of the Persian poet’s allegorical imagery in his own poetry. Emerson’s first full translation of a poem of Ḥāfiẓ was the Sāqī-nāma. In the process of translating, he became fascinated with the imagery of wine and the Sāqī (Wine-bearer), which in the Sufi tradition are respectively symbols for ecstatic spiritual intoxication and for the Primordial Cup-bearer or spiritual master. These images and their implications were later reflected in two poems, both called ‘Bacchus’. One is complete, the other fragmentary. In both, the influence of Ḥāfiẓ’s poem is obvious. Yohannan has offered an elucidation of the fragmentary ‘Bacchus’.52 Here the complete ‘Bacchus’ is discussed briefly (though quoted in abridged form):
Bring me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,
Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through
Under the Andes to the Cape,
Suffer no saver of the earth to scape. [...]
We buy ashes for bread;
We buy diluted wine;
Give me of the true, –
Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled
Among the silver hills of heaven
Draw everlasting dew;
Blood of the world,
Form of forms, and mould of statures,
That I intoxicated,
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures;
The bird-language rightly spell,
And that which roses say so well. [...]
Pour, Bacchus! The remembering wine;
Retrieve the loss of me and mine!
Vine for vine be antidote,
And the grape requite the lote!
Haste to cure the old despair, –
Reason in Nature’s lotus drenched,
The memory of ages quenched;
Give them again to shine;
Let wine repair what this undid;
And where infection slid,
A dazzling memory revive;
Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the aged prints,
And write my old adventures with the pen<
br />
Which on the first day drew,
Upon the tablets blue,
The dancing Pleaides and eternal man.53
Emerson is obviously aware of the mystical symbolism of ‘wine’, though we have the Greek god of wine replacing Ḥāfiẓ’s Sāqī. Here the wine does not grow on a tree, but is a ‘true’ wine ‘[w]hose ample leaves and tendrils curled / Among the silver hills of heaven’, and, like the wine of Ḥāfiẓ, it refreshes and rejuvenates the spirit – it is a ‘Universal Wine’. In this poem, as in many of his other poems, Emerson also succeeds in incorporating his theory of Nature – essentially that of the Romantics on both sides of the Atlantic.54
Ḥāfiẓ’s popularity did not diminish later on in the nineteenth century. His influence can be seen in Tennyson’s poetry most forcefully. Tennyson, who tried to learn Persian in order to read Ḥāfiẓ, had two very well-known teachers – Edward Fitzgerald and Professor E.B. Cowell. The three were firm friends, and I have elsewhere established the literary relations between them.55 Unfortunately the limits of this chapter will not allow any extensive discussion of Ḥāfiẓ’s influence on the most notable poet of the Victorian era, but some aspects of the way in which Ḥāfiẓ is reflected in his poetry must be discussed briefly. From an early age, Tennyson was interested in Eastern mysticism. Hallam Tennyson writes:
The philosophers of the East had a great fascination for my father, and he felt that the Western religion might learn from them much of spirituality. He was sure too that Western civilization had even in his time developed Eastern thought and morality...56
It was, once again, through Sir William Jones’ works that Tennyson first became familiar with Ḥāfiẓ, and he learned some Persian under the tutelage of Fitzgerald. Tennyson was almost certainly aware of Tholuck’s Ssufismus, sive theosophia persarum pantheistica (Berlin 1821), and more than likely read it as well, since Fitzgerald had acquired a copy when preparing to translate Jāmī’s Salaman and Absal. Tennyson was also interested in the works of Goethe and read West-östlicher Divan. By that time there were also many translations of Ḥāfiẓ available to the public, as well as, of course, E.B. Cowell’s own essays and translations. So an eager soul such as Tennyson would have had ample resources to make use of in getting to know Ḥāfiẓ intimately. His knowledge of the esoteric and erotic language of Ḥāfiẓ is reflected abundantly in his poetry. Here we can only elaborate on a few examples. The mystical imagery of Ḥāfiẓ occurs repeatedly in such poems as The Princess, ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’, ‘The Day Dream’, ‘Vision of Sin’, ‘Akbar’s Dream’ and In Memoriam; but the locus classicus is found in ‘The Lover’s Tale’:
She was dark-haired, dark-eyed:
Oh, such dark eyes! A single glance of them
Will govern a whole life from birth to death,
Careless of all things else, led on with light
In trances and in visions: look at them,
You lose yourself in utter ignorance;
Methought a light
Burst from the garland I had woven, and stood
A solid glory on her bright black hair;
A light methought broke from her dark, dark eyes.57
Direct echoes of Ḥāfiẓ are discernible in this poem if we compare these lines with some lines in Ḥāfiẓ:
The curves of thy hair is the snare of infidelity and of faith [...]
Thy comeliness is the miracle of beauty, but the story of thy glance is visible magic.
[...] let there be a hundred shouts of praise to that dark eye, which has magical powers in the killing of lovers [...]
How can anyone on whom thy capricious glance has fallen, that glance which always waits in ambush with the bow of thy eyebrow.58
One night my heart was dark that I sought to find it in the darkness of thy hair, I saw thy face and drank a cup of wine from thy lips.
At once I embraced thee, and the waves of thy hair embraced my heart, I placed my lips, and made sacrifice of my heart and soul.59
Another passage from ‘The Lover’s Tale’ will clarify further to what extent Tennyson’s poem is permeated by images of Sufi Unity:
... we woke
To gaze upon each other. If this be true,
At thought of which my whole soul languishes
And faints, and hath no pulse, no breath – as though
A man in some still garden should infuse
Rich atar of the rose,
Till drunk with its own wine, and overfull
Of sweetness, and in smelling of itself,
It fall on its own thorns – if this be true –
And that way my wish leads me evermore
Still to believe it – ’tis so sweet a thought,
Why in the utter stillness of the soul
Doth questioned memory answer not, nor tell
Of this our earliest, our closest-dawn,
Most loveliest, earthly-heavenliest harmony?60
It is relevant to consider another pattern of Sufi imagery frequent in Ḥāfiẓ, as manifested in Tennyson. The image of ‘the veil’ employed by Shelley is also prominent in Tennyson:
‘Not for thee,’ she said,
‘O Bulbul, any rose of Gulistan
Shall burst her veil.’61
Ḥāfiẓ contains many lines which provide parallels for this passage; for example:
The song of the bird rises up, where is the flagon of wine? The bulbul makes its clamour, saying ‘who has torn the rose’s veil?’62
In both ‘De Profundis’ (II, ll. 39–56) and the last stanza of In Memoriam (LVI, ll. 25–8), the image of the veil is employed in a very Sufistic manner (as seen in Ḥāfiẓ). In the first poem it is the symbol of what divides the known from the unknown, whereas in the second it operates very much in the sense of both Sufi and Platonic doctrines of the body understood as a veil which hides the soul, a veil which the soul yearns to tear away in order to reveal itself, as Ḥāfiẓ says:
Ḥāfiẓ! thou thyself art thy own veil. From its midst rise up, and attain the beloved.63
This short survey has, I hope, shown something of how widespread the employment of the Ḥāfiẓian language of love was in the work of both British and American poets. As we have seen, anything like a full understanding of the implications of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry has arisen only gradually. Early Orientalists such as Jones and later scholars such as E.B. Cowell were important in this process; but as far as the poets were concerned, perhaps the greatest influence (especially on the poetry of Tennyson and Emerson) was Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan. Goethe called Ḥāfiẓ his spiritual master, and his authority was crucial in advancing the understanding of the Persian poet in the West. Ḥāfiẓ’s work has left distinct and important traces on the imagery, on some of the poetic forms, and on important areas of thought, amongst British and American poets of the nineteenth century. This chapter has been able only to treat superficially the rich materials relevant to the widespread influence of Ḥāfiẓian imagery, poetical language and thought on the poetry of this period. Yet, unfortunately, it has to be recognized that, with the exception of Tennyson and Emerson, none of the other major English-language poets of the nineteenth century made really extensive use of the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ in their own work. In this regard none can compare with Goethe, who stands alone as a re-creator of Ḥāfiẓ in another poetic tradition.
Notes
1 See my ‘Historical Background to English Translations of Hafiz’.
2 Cowell’s translations were published in various periodicals. For a complete list, see my book, Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography, pp. 332–3.
3 See the introduction to Avery and Heath-Stubbs, Hafiz of Shiraz (1952 edition).
4 Quoted in Clarke, The Dīvān ... Hāfiz-i-Shīrāzī (Calcutta 1891), p. viii.
5 Samuel Robinson, A Century of Ghazals, or a Hundred Odes, Selected and Translated from the Diwan of Hafiz (1875). Justin Huntly McCarthy, Ghazals from the Divan of Hafiz... (1893).
6 Herman Bicknell, Hafiz of Shīrāz: Selections from his Poems... (1875). Alexander Rogers, Persian Anthology; being translations from the Gulistan of Sadi, the Rubaiyyat of Hafiz and the Anwar-i-Suheili... (1889).
7 Richard Le Gallienne, Odes from the Divan of Hafiz (1905), p. xviii. Also John Payne, The Poems of ... Hafiz of Shīrāz (1901).
8 Arberry, ‘Orient Pearls at Random Strung’; ‘Hafiz and his English Translators’, pp. 111–28 and 229–49; Fifty Poems of Hafiz, Text and Translations; and his Immortal Rose, an Anthology of Persian Lyrics (1948). The translations by Rundall, Selections from the Rubaiyât & Odes of Hafiz... were originally published anonymously, but when they were well received he acknowledged his authorship.
9 Farzaad, To Translate Hafez, p. 15.
10 Walter Leaf, Versions from Hafiz, An Essay on Persian Metre; John Payne, The Poems of ... Hafiz of Shiraz (1901); Paul Smith, Divan of Hafiz, 2 vols (1983).
11 Elizabeth Bridges, Sonnets from Hafiz and Other Verses (1921); Basil Bunting, Uncollected Poems (1991). For further information on Bunting’s translations, see Loloi and Pursglove, ‘Basil Bunting’s Persian Overdrafts: A Commentary’, pp. 343–53.
12 Crow, Wineseller’s Street: Renderings of Hafiz and Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved; Boylan, Hafez: Dance of Life; Landinsky, I Heard God Laughing, The Subject Tonight is Love, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Sufi Master, and Love Poems from God.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 49
