The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Hafez · a body of about five hundred ghazals, with the qasidas, qit’as, ruba’is and Saqi-nameh printed after them · gathered after the poet’s death in Shiraz in 1389 or 1390 · scored on the Persian of the ghazals in the critical text of Qazvini and Ghani (1941), with Khanlari’s edition as the second witness, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Persian quoted only where its words are certain, transliterated, with the desk’s own English glosses
Mode
Lyric in couplets, each complete, under one refrain; love song, drinking song, devotion, satire, consolation and praise in one voice
Mythos
The angels at the tavern door kneading Adam’s clay; the trust that Heaven could not bear; lost Joseph returning; the cup of Jamshid already held; the rend and the Magian elder
Phase
No narrative and no chronology: each ghazal turns from its opening couplet to the last, where the poet names himself and judges his own state
Presentation
Mono-rhymed ghazals in quantitative Persian metres, most with a radif, the pen-name in or near the last couplet, arranged alphabetically by the rhyme’s last letter
Register
Economical and double at every word, moving inside one poem from dread to defiance, from mockery to consolation, Arabic answered by Persian
Scale
One voice in one city across successive dynasties, holding the court, the mosque, the tavern, the garden and the covenant before creation
Governing Proposition
About five hundred ghazals, gathered after the poet’s death, in which the beloved, God and the prince stand in one addressee and no couplet lets the sacred reading be pulled apart from the profane. Its world is a tavern of fourteenth-century Shiraz that is also the door at which the angels kneaded Adam’s clay, and its figures, the rend who drinks without reputation, the Magian elder and the saqi, stand against the preacher, the ascetic and the enforcer of public piety. Its wager is that public piety is the likeliest place for a lie, that an honest disorder stands nearer the truth than an ordered hypocrisy, and that what the heart seeks far off it already holds.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Divan opens in Arabic, with the call to the saqi, “alā yā ayyuha-s-sāqī”, and the second half of the line answers in Persian: “ke ’eshq āsān nemud avval vali oftād moshkelhā”
“for love seemed easy at first, but difficulties fell.” One language calls and the other replies, and the first couplet of the book states its subject and its cost together. It is the first of about five hundred ghazals, and nearly every one of them works in the same small space.
The ghazal is a mono-rhymed poem in couplets, the beyt, set in the quantitative metres of Persian. Most carry a radif, a refrain word or phrase that follows the rhyme in every couplet, and in or near the last couplet the poet sets his pen-name, “Hāfez”. Each couplet is complete in itself. The ghazals are arranged by the last letter of the rhyme, an editor’s order, alphabetical, and neither a story nor a chronology. Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez of Shiraz wrote under the Inju and Muzaffarid princes and, at the end, under Timurid rule, and died in 1389 or 1390, the year 792 of the Hijra; his birth is placed between about 1315 and 1325 and is not certain.
No autograph survives. The Divan was gathered after his death, and the earliest dated manuscripts fall within a few decades of it. Hundreds of manuscripts followed, and they differ in the number of ghazals, in the number of couplets in a ghazal and above all in the order of couplets within a ghazal. The text weighed here is the critical one of Mohammad Qazvini and Qasem Ghani, published in Tehran in 1941, with Parviz Natel Khanlari’s edition as a second witness; both reconstruct from the earliest manuscripts. The ghazals are the work. The qasidas, qit’as, ruba’is and the Saqi-nameh that the editions print after them are few, and are not what the Divan is read for.
Movement II
In the opening ghazal the lover is at sea: “shab-e tārik o bim-e mowj o gerdābi chonin hāyel / kojā dānand hāl-e mā sabokbārān-e sāhelhā”
“dark night, the fear of the wave, and a whirlpool so terrible: how would the lightly laden of the shores know our state?” The dread is real, and the judgment in it is sharp: those who carry nothing and stand on dry ground cannot know the state of those at sea. The Divan’s heights begin here, in the first poem.
They come in more than one key, and they come often. There is defiance: “falak rā saqf beshkāfim o tarhi now darandāzim”
“let us split the roof of heaven and lay down a new design.” There is the quiet of “mazra’-e sabz-e falak”, the green field of the sky, where the new moon is a sickle and recalls to the poet his own harvest. There is the cosmic scene at the tavern door, and there is consolation. The heights are not reserved for a climax; they arrive in any couplet of any poem.
That is also their limit. Elevation in the ghazal comes couplet by couplet, and few of the poems sustain a single rising arc. Each couplet is a whole and can stand alone, and the manuscripts show how far that freedom runs: couplets move between witnesses, appear in one and vanish from another. William Jones’s version of the Shirazi Turk ghazal in 1771 brought the poem into English, and his figure for the form, pearls strung at random, names the cost. The couplet cannot lose a word; the ghazal can lose or reorder a couplet. The ghazal’s unity is of the radif and the mood, not of an argument.
Movement III
One ghazal holds the Divan’s myth in a single sequence. It begins, “dush didam ke malāyek dar-e meykhāne zadand”
“last night I saw the angels knock at the tavern door.” And they make the first man: “gel-e Ādam besereshtand o be peymāne zadand”
“they kneaded Adam’s clay and cast it into the cup.” The radif is “zadand”, “they struck”, and it returns with a new sense at each couplet: they knocked at the door, they cast into the cup. The word “peymāne”, the cup or measure, holds within it “peymān”, the covenant. Genesis happens at the door of a wine-house.
In the same ghazal stands the trust: “āsmān bār-e amānat natavānest keshid / qor’e-ye fāl be nām-e man-e divāne zadand”
“Heaven could not bear the burden of the trust; they cast the lot in the name of mad me.” The trust is the one in the Qur’an that the heavens refused; here it falls on the lover, and the two words that carry the claim, the lot and the madness, cannot be spared. The human being is the bearer of what the cosmos could not carry.
And the sects: “jang-e haftād o do mellat hame rā ’ozr beneh / chun nadidand haqiqat rah-e afsāne zadand”
“excuse the war of the seventy-two sects: since they did not see the truth, they took the road of fable.” The radif has turned again, from knocking to casting to taking a road; the order of these couplets is the editors’, but the turning of the word is the poem’s. In one ghazal the Divan builds its myth, Adam made at the tavern, the trust given to the mad, and states its law: love is the only truthful relation, and the doctrines that war over the truth have not seen it.
Movement IV
The Divan names its enemy: “vā’ezān k-in jelve dar mehrāb o menbar mikonand / chun be khalvat miravand ān kār-e digar mikonand”
“the preachers who make this show in the mihrab and the pulpit, when they go into private, do that other thing.” Against the preacher, the ascetic, the mufti and the muhtasib, the enforcer of public piety, the poems set the rend, the drinker of no reputation, the one figure who does not perform. His master is the pir-e moghan, the Magian elder of the tavern, and his place is the wine-house where the mosque and the khanaqah are turned inside out.
This is the swerve of the Divan, a turn within the inherited ghazal of Sa’di, Attar, Rumi, Khwaju Kermani and Salman Savaji rather than a break with it. The poems mock the enforcers of piety by type, and the ghazal becomes a voice of public dissent. The rend has since become an archetype in Persian culture while remaining a man with a stained cloak. The tavern is a real wine-house of fourteenth-century Shiraz and at the same time the site of the soul’s first covenant, and the poems do not ask the reader to choose.
Persian grammar gives the third person no gender, and the Divan builds on it. The beloved, God and the prince stand in one addressee. The Shirazi Turk is one of them: “be khāl-e hendu-yash bakhsham Samarqand o Bokhārā rā”
“for that Indian mole I would give Samarkand and Bukhara.” Panegyric couplets to Shah Shoja’ stand in the same vocabulary as the poems of love and devotion, and the praise of princes can be read against itself. Not all of the occasional pieces obey the law: in some of them the form is a container and no more.
Movement V
In the Joseph ghazal the radif is the consolation itself: “Yusof-e gomgashte bāz āyad be Kan’ān, gham makhor”
“lost Joseph will come back to Canaan; do not grieve.” “gham makhor” closes every couplet, and each new grief the poem names is answered by the same two words. And the heart, which looks far off for what it holds, is answered in another ghazal: “sālhā del talab-e jām-e Jam az mā mikard / v-ān che khod dāsht ze bigāne tamannā mikard”
“for years the heart asked of me the cup of Jamshid, and what it had itself it begged of strangers.”
The book has been opened at random for six centuries. The fal, consulting the Divan for an answer, rests on the fact that almost any ghazal yields a new sense to a new question, and a whole culture has tested the depth of the book by daily return. The Ottoman commentaries, Sudi of Bosnia’s in the sixteenth century the best known, already disputed whether the wine is wine, and modern scholarship has not settled it. The poet’s name is itself a claim: “hāfez” is one who has the Qur’an by heart, and in the last couplet of each ghazal the name judges the poet.
Jami and the Timurid and Safavid poets wrote in his shadow, the Indian style of the Mughal centuries answered him, and the Ottoman court read him with commentary. Hammer-Purgstall’s German version of 1812 and 1813 gave Goethe the West-östlicher Divan, and Emerson wrote on him and translated him. In Iran the Divan is kept in households beside the Qur’an, memorised and quoted as proverb, and the poet’s tomb in Shiraz is visited as a shrine. What has not come down with certainty is the order of the couplets: the poem one reads is in part an editor’s reconstruction, and the ghazal, couplet by couplet, survives entire.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites at two levels and gives two answers. At the level of the couplet the necessity is extreme: in the couplet of the trust that Heaven could not bear, which fell by lot on “mad me”, the whole claim rests on the lot and on the madness, and no word can go. At the level of the ghazal the test is weaker, and the manuscripts are the evidence: couplets move, appear and vanish between witnesses, which a strictly necessary order would not allow. The ghazal’s law is the unity of the radif and the mood, not of an argument. Across some five hundred ghazals some are near-repetitions and some occasional or panegyric, and that holds the axis at 8.2.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: public piety is the likeliest place for a lie, and an honest disorder is nearer the truth than an ordered hypocrisy. The preachers make their show in the mihrab and the pulpit and in private do that other thing; the rend, the drinker of no reputation, is the one figure who does not perform. Beside it stands a second disclosure, that the human being bears what the cosmos could not carry, and that what is sought far off is already held, as the heart begs of strangers the cup it has itself. This is meaning, not mood. Held at 8.9 because much of the body rests on mood and a shared code of images, and its disclosures recur more than they grow.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height is reached constantly, and in more than one key. The dreadful: the opening ghazal’s dark night, the fear of the wave and the whirlpool, and the lightly laden of the shores who cannot know it. The cosmic: the angels at the tavern door kneading Adam’s clay and casting it into the measure. The defiant: the call to split the roof of heaven and lay down a new design. The consoling: lost Joseph who will come back to Canaan. The quiet: the new moon as a sickle over the green field of the sky, recalling the poet’s own harvest. Held at 9.3 because elevation in the ghazal comes couplet by couplet, and few poems sustain a single rising arc.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The Divan evokes myth constantly and builds it as well. It evokes Joseph, Khizr and the water of life, Jamshid’s cup, Solomon’s ring, Majnun and the covenant of Alast. What it builds is a world: the tavern, the Magian elder, the saqi, the rend, the ascetic and the muhtasib make one symbolic order that holds across hundreds of poems, inverting the mosque and the khanaqah, in which the tavern is at once a real wine-house of fourteenth-century Shiraz and the site of the soul’s first covenant. When the angels knock at the tavern door, Genesis happens at that door: the myth is built and bears load. Held at 8.8 because much of the apparatus is inherited from Sana’i, Attar and the ghazal before him, and is used more than made.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Persian ghazal at its height: Sa’di’s love lyric, the mystical ghazal of Attar and Rumi, the ornamented ghazal of Khwaju Kermani and Salman Savaji, several of whose poems Hafez answers in the same metre and rhyme. The swerve is real, a turn within the form rather than a break of it. He made the ghazal undecidable, so that the beloved, God and the prince occupy one addressee and the profane and sacred readings cannot be separated in a single couplet; and he turned the ghazal outward, against the ascetic and the muhtasib, as a voice of public dissent that mocks the enforcers of piety by type. Held at 8.5 because the form, the metres, the image-code and many rhymes are inherited; the departure is of fusion and tone, not of structure.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The Divan knows that the sacred and the profane cannot be held apart, and the ghazal is how it knows it: each couplet is complete, Persian grammar leaves the addressee without gender, and the radif returns the same word under shifting senses, so that one poem reads as love, as devotion and as address to a prince, and no reading cancels another. In a masnavi the ambiguity would have to resolve; in prose it would become doctrine. The radif is an instrument: “do not grieve” closes every couplet of the Joseph ghazal and turns each new grief into the same consolation. The pen-name is form too, since “hāfez” is one who has the Qur’an by heart. Held at 9.2 by the occasional and panegyric pieces, where the form is a container.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The evidence is six centuries of return. The Ottoman commentaries, Sudi of Bosnia’s in the sixteenth century the best known, already disputed whether the wine is wine. Modern Iranian scholarship has not settled it, and Western readings since Jones and Hammer-Purgstall have taken him as hedonist, as mystic and as sceptic, while the poems hold all three. The fal, the practice of opening the Divan at random for an answer, rests on the fact that almost any ghazal yields a new sense to a new question: a whole culture tests the book’s depth by daily return. The iham, the deliberate double sense, and the networks of matched images reward reading at the level of the word, “peymāne”, the cup, against “peymān”, the covenant. Held at 9.5 because the code of images, once learned, makes some poems transparent.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The field is Persian poetry of the fourteenth century, and with it the lyric of the Persianate world from the Balkans to Bengal. The intrinsic force is the ghazal’s completion: after the Divan the form in Persian was measured by it, and it showed that the lyric could carry dissent, metaphysics and eros in one couplet without choosing. That is a reorganisation of what the ghazal could do, built on Sa’di’s achievement rather than against it, and it is held at 9.1 because the force perfected a form more than it founded one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Jami and the Timurid and Safavid poets wrote in his shadow; the Indian style of the Mughal centuries answered him; the Ottoman court read him with commentary; and Hammer-Purgstall’s German version of 1812 and 1813 gave Goethe the West-östlicher Divan of 1819.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The span is some six hundred and thirty-five years. Presence is as wide as any lyric’s in any language: in Iran the Divan is kept in households beside the Qur’an, consulted by fal, memorised and quoted as proverb; the poet’s tomb in Shiraz is visited as a shrine; he is read across Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the Persian-reading world, translated into the major languages of Europe and Asia, and set to music in the classical tradition. The charge is on form. No autograph survives; the Divan is a posthumous compilation, and the number and order of couplets, with a margin of attributions, are unstable, so that the poem one reads is in part an editor’s reconstruction. The ghazal with its couplets survives entire; the order of the couplets does not survive with certainty. That sets it at 9.4.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on the Persian. The economy is of every word doing two things: the iham of “peymāne”, cup and covenant at once when the angels cast Adam’s clay into it; the grammar of the radif “zadand”, “they struck”, carried through the Adam ghazal with a new verb sense at each return, knocked at the door, cast into the cup, cast the lot, took the road of fable; the code-switch of the opening line, an Arabic hemistich answered by a Persian one; and the placing of the pen-name, which turns the last couplet into the poet’s judgment on himself. The music of the metres and the consonance across a whole ghazal, which Persian readers place above any other poet’s, are not scored here. The 9.5 rests on what the words show.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a panegyric couplet to Shah Shoja’ and the angels kneading Adam’s clay; or the Shirazi Turk, for whose Indian mole the poet would give Samarkand and Bukhara, and the fear of the whirlpool on a dark night. One law governs them: love is the only truthful relation, and every institution that claims to mediate it, mosque, cloister, court and reputation, is suspect, the court included, so that even the praise of princes is written in the lover’s vocabulary and can be read against itself. The couplet that excuses the war of the seventy-two sects, since they did not see the truth, states the law. The range is wide. The panegyric and occasional pieces, the qit’as and the chronograms do not all obey it, and that holds the axis at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on what a lyric body of some five hundred ghazals holds, and weighed as it is. It holds consciousness fully: the lover’s states, doubt, despair, defiance and grace. It holds the sacred, in the covenant, the trust, the Qur’an, the cloister and its critique; the state and its power, in princes, their fall and favour, and the muhtasib enforcing public piety in a Shiraz under successive dynasties; society, in the preacher, the mufti, the ascetic, the Sufi, the tavern-keeper and the rend as a social type; and the natural order, the garden, spring and autumn, the rose, the nightingale and the night sky with its sickle moon. They are integrated by one voice and one law, not listed. What holds the axis at 7.9, the lowest of the twelve: labour, the family and the body at work are nearly absent, and history is a weather, not an agent.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well at 9.5 and The Made at 9.5, then The Imperishable at 9.4. Six centuries of commentary, dispute and daily consultation by fal that have not settled whether the wine is wine; a craft in which every word does two things, the cup that is a covenant and the refrain that changes its verb at each return; and a presence, in households beside the Qur’an and across the Persian-reading world, as wide as any lyric’s in any language.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9, for a world that holds the state, the sacred and society in one voice but leaves out labour and the family, with history as a weather rather than an agent. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.2: the couplet cannot lose a word, but the ghazal can lose or reorder a couplet, and the manuscripts show it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last exactly at it. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.9.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Divan of Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez of Shiraz, scored as the body of the ghazals as it is read, in the critical text of Mohammad Qazvini and Qasem Ghani (Tehran, 1941), with Parviz Natel Khanlari’s edition as the second witness. The qasidas, qit’as, ruba’is and the Saqi-nameh printed after the ghazals are named as context and weighed lightly. The ghazals weighed most are the opening ghazal, “alā yā ayyuha-s-sāqī”; the Shirazi Turk; “dush didam ke malāyek”; “sālhā del”; “Yusof-e gomgashte”; “biā tā gol barafshānim”; the preacher ghazal; the ghazals of the rend and the pir-e moghan; and “mazra’-e sabz-e falak”. Every axis is judged on the Persian. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Persian is quoted only where its words are certain, in an approximate transliteration; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. Translations known to this reading: H. Wilberforce Clarke’s complete prose version (1891) and Peter Avery’s complete translation (2007), the closest for sense; Dick Davis’s Faces of Love (2012), the best English poem; A. J. Arberry’s Fifty Poems of Hafiz (1947); and Gertrude Bell’s Poems from the Divan of Hafiz (1897). None is quoted, and nothing is charged or credited to any of them. Some fifty to sixty ghazals are known closely in translation and the famous couplets of some fifteen word for word in the Persian; the rest of the body is known more thinly, and the music of the metres is not scored. Jones, Hammer-Purgstall, Goethe, Emerson, Sudi and the later Persian, Ottoman and Mughal poets are cited as the record of the work’s reception and are not part of it. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them who first gathered the Divan, the number of ghazals in each critical edition, the usual length of a ghazal and the count of couplets in the whole, which metres are most used, the measures the princes of Shiraz took against the taverns, and the title and date of Emerson’s essay.