PERSIAN POETRY BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Omar Khayyam, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Jami, and FitzGerald, Edward
“By breath of beds of roses drawn, I found the grove in the morning pure, In the concert of the nightingales My drunken brain to cure.
“With unrelated glance I looked the rose in the eye: The rose in the hour of gloaming Flamed like a lamp hard-by.
“She was of her beauty proud. And prouder of her youth, The while unto her flaming heart The bulbul gave his truth.
“The sweet narcissus closed Its eye, with passion pressed; The tulips out of envy burned Moles in their scarlet breast,
“The lilies white prolonged Their sworded tongue to the smell; The clustering anemones Their pretty secrets tell.”
Presently we have,—
“All day the rain Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain, The flood may pour from morn till night Nor wash the pretty Indians white.”
And so onward, through many a page.
This picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri, seems to belong to Hafiz:—
“O’er the garden water goes the wind alone To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave; The fire is quenched on the dear hearthstone, But it burns again on the tulips brave.”
Friendship is a favourite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.
Hafiz says, “Thou learnest no secret until thou knoweth friendship; since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.”
Ibn Jemin writes thus:
“Whilst I disdain the populace, I find no peer in higher place, Friend is a word of royal tone, Friend is a poem all alone.
“Wisdom is like the elephant, Lofty and rare inhabitant: He dwells in deserts or in courts; With hucksters he has no resorts.”
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. From the plain text,—
“The chemist of love Will this perishing mould, Were it made out of mire, Transmute into gold.”—
he proceeds to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his religious or in his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to afford a token of his mistress. The Moon thought she knew her own orbit well enough; but when she saw the curve on Zuleika’s cheek, she was at a loss:—
“And since round lines are drawn My darling’s lips about, The very Moon looks puzzled on, And hesitates in doubt If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth Be not her true way to the South.”
His ingenuity never sleeps:—
“Ah could I hide me in my song, To kiss thy lips from which it flows!”
and plays in a thousand pretty courtesies:—
“Fair fall thy soft heart! A good work wilt thou do? O, pray for the dead Whom thine eyelashes slew;”
And what a nest has he found for his bonny bird to take up her abode in!—
“They strew in the paths of kings and czars Jewels and gems of price: But for thy head I will pluck down stars, And pave thy way with eyes.
“I have sought for thee a costlier dome Than Mahmoud’s palace high, And thou, returning, find thy home In the apple of Love’s eye.”
Then we have all degrees of passionate abandonment:—
“I know this perilous love-lane No whither the traveller leads, Yet my fancy the sweet scent of Thy tangled tresses feeds.
“In the midnight of thy locks, I renounce the day; In the ring of thy rose-lips, My heart forgets to pray.”
And sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment:—
“Plunge in your angry waves, Renouncing doubt and care; The flowing of the seven broad seas Shall never wet thy hair.
“Is Allah’s face on thee Bending with love benign, And thou not less on Allah’s eye, O fairest turnest thine.”
We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few specimens from other poets.