Ralph Waldo Emerson

“ Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows.
“Let us draw the cowl through the brook of wine.”
[Pg 115]
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. ”

“ 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, the 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Religion and poetry are all their civilization. The religion teaches an inexorable Destiny. It distinguishes only two days in each man’s history—his birthday, called the Day of the Lot, and the Day of Judgment. Courage and absolute submission to what is appointed him are his virtues.
The favour of the climate making subsistence easy and encouraging an outdoor life, allows to the Eastern nations a highly intellectual organization,—leaving out of view, at present, the genius of the Hindoos (more Oriental in every sense) , whom no people have surpassed in the grandeur of their ethical statement. ”

“ A Palace was before me; whither running
For Refuge from the coming Soldiery,
Suddenly from the Troop a Sháhzemán,
By Name and Nature Hasan—on the Horse
Of Honour mounted—robed in Royal Robes,
And wearing a White Turban on his Head,
Turn’d his Rein tow’rd me, and with smiling Lips
Open’d before my Eyes the Door of Peace.
Then, riding up to me, dismounted; kiss’d
My Hand, and did me Courtesy; and I,
How glad of his Protection, and the Grace
He gave it with!—Who then of gracious Speech
Many a Jewel utter’d; but of these
Not one that in my Ear till Morning hung. ”

“ One day Hasan said to me and to Khayyám, “It is a universal belief that the pupils of the Imám Mowaffak will attain to fortune. [Pg 15] Now, if we all do not attain thereto, without doubt one of us will; what then shall be our mutual pledge and bond?” We answered, “Be it what you please.” “Well,” he said, “let us make a vow, that to whomsoever this fortune falls, he shall share it equally with the rest, and reserve no pre-eminence for himself.” ”

“ 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 honour 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All or nothing is the genius of Oriental life. Favour of the Sultan, or his displeasure, is a question of Fate. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy. The prolific sun, and the sudden and rank plenty which his heat engenders, make subsistence easy. ”

“ Probably, in the absence of agreement amongst authorities, the soundest view is that expressed by FitzGerald’s editor, [C] that the real Omar Khayyám was a Philosopher, of scientific insight and ability far beyond that of the Age and Country he lived in; of such moderate and worldly Ambition as becomes a Philosopher, and such moderate wants as rarely satisfy a Debauchee; that while the Wine Omar celebrates is simply the Juice of the Grape, he bragged more than he drank of it, in very defiance perhaps of that Spiritual Wine which left its Votaries sunk in Hypocrisy or Disgust. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. [Pg 116] 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 ”

“ 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 nightcap. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, [Pg 114] 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. ”

“ Never, throughout a lengthy life, did irritability and erratic petulance (displayed ’tis true, at times by the translator of “that large infidel”) , darken the eyes of those he honoured with his friendship to the simple and whole-hearted genuineness of the man.
From Oxford, FitzGerald retired to the ‘suburb grange’ at Woodbridge, referred to by Tennyson. Here, narrowing his bodily wants to within the limits of a Pythagorean fare, he led a life of a truly simple type surrounded by books and roses, and, as ever, by a few firm friends. ”

“ The MS. runs thus:—
For a while, when young, we frequented a teacher;
For a while we were contented with our proficiency;
Behold the foundation of the discourse!—what happened to us?
We came in like Water, and we depart like Wind.
In FitzGerald’s version the verses appear thus:—
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint and heard great Argument
But it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nestles the bird again.
“Once, flies he upwards, 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!
[Pg 122]
“Either world inhabits he,
See 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 favourite with all educated Persians:—
“Come!—the palace of heaven rest on aëry pillars,—
Come, and bring me wine; our days are wind. ”

“ The Persians and the Arabs, with great leisure and few books, are exquisitely sensible to the pleasures of poetry. Layard has given some details of the effect which the improvvisatori produced on the children of the desert. “When the bard improvised an amatory ditty, the young chief’s excitement was almost beyond control. The other Bedouins were scarcely less moved by these rude measures, which have the same kind of effect on the wild tribes of the Persian mountains. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Its elements are few and simple, not exhibiting the long range and undulation of European existence, but rapidly reaching the best and the worst. The rich feed on fruits and game,—the poor on a watermelon’s peel. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many qualities go to make a good telescope,—as the largeness of the field, facility of sweeping the meridian, achromatic purity of lenses, and so forth,—but the one eminent value is the space penetrating power ”

“ Oriental life and society, especially in the Southern nations, stand in violent contrast with the multitudinous detail, the secular stability, and the vast average of comfort of the Western nations. Life in the East is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. ”