Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

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Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 44

by Leonard Lewisohn


  Le Tout est commencement. En germe le plus haut degré universel...

  – Paul Valéry (1913)2

  The present study considers a question of comparative literature, that of a particular literary topos of dawn, the ‘Alba’, and, beyond that, the wider horizons of the mythopoesis of dawn and its associated locus amoenus in the ghazal tradition, with particular reference to its development in the poems of Ḥāfiẓ of Shīrāz. Speaking of mythic time, the kernel of this essay was actually written more than two decades ago, in 1986, and then buried away in a drawer.3 A few years later, my elder daughter, Sahar, was born. Since she is now at the dawn of her own college career, and the hour of parting from her childhood home approaches, it seemed an opportune moment to resurrect this chapter as a memento of all the happy days she has brightened our household.

  The Alba

  Dawn is a symbolically charged time in many literary traditions, perhaps most famously in the medieval Provençal lyric – or, in the terminology now preferred, Occitan lyric, since the langue d’oc was not delimited to the county of Provence, but flourished in Poitou and Aquitaine, and eastward beyond this, throughout much of southern France and into northern Italy, in a region now dubbed Occitania. A small but important corpus of Troubadour poems sharing particular features has been classified generically as ‘dawn’ poetry. This genre is named Alba, which word appears as a refrain in many of these poems, though the French word ‘aube’ or ‘aubade’ is sometimes applied to thematically related poems in the langue d’oïl, and an even larger corpus of medieval German poetry in this genre goes under the name Tagelied.4 By the twelfth or thirteenth century, the Occitan tradition already recognized these ‘Alba’ poems, which were probably sung to musical accompaniment (and perhaps even danced or acted, in at least three voices), as belonging to a distinct thematic convention, or genre, of their own.5 Although these dawn songs are well known, and have been considered by some to be, along with the sirventes,6 ‘perhaps the most famous, peculiar and representative of Provençal forms’,7 they are actually a rather minor genre, not much practised by the major Troubadour poets, and generally composed in a popular tone with comparatively unsophisticated versification. However widespread the genre must have been, only a small number of Alba survive: Alfred Jeanroy counted 16 Occitan Alba poems,8 though at least one additional Occitan or Provençal Alba was discovered after his 1934 study of the matter. In 1944, Martín de Riquer tallied 18 poems as belonging to this canon,9 while in 1965, B. Woledge, using more restrictive criteria, accepted just nine troubadour Albas, with four further poems in the penumbra of the Alba, possibly ‘derivatives of the main genre’, insofar as they are all concerned in some way with ‘the parting of lovers at dawn’.10 The five common characteristics of the nine poems, which Woledge felt were central to and representative of the Alba genre, include the following features:

  1) They describe the feelings of lovers who, after a night spent together, must separate at dawn because it would be dangerous for them to be found together.

  2) In addition to the two lovers, they have a third character, a watchman who announces the coming of dawn.

  3) All except one [of these nine] have a refrain containing the word Alba (‘dawn’).

  4) Most of them contain a certain amount of dialogue, or a combination of narrative with direct speech.

  5) All seem to have been written either in the late twelfth century to middle thirteenth century, with few if any being from the late thirteenth.

  In a footnote, Woledge adds that in five of the nine poems a further characteristic is that the lovers are in danger from ‘the jealous one’ or ‘the husband’.11 He also points out that poets made both secular and religious use of the Alba theme. Frank Chambers succinctly describes the Alba – which he apparently assimilates to the French aubade and the German Tagelied – as follows: ‘a dawn song, ordinarily expressing the regret of two lovers that day has come so soon to separate them.’ He furthermore suggests that the Alba ‘probably grew out of the medieval watchman’s cry, announcing from his tower the passing of the night hours and the return of the day’. This watchman will sometimes stand guard to protect the lovers’ privacy.12 Indeed, it has been argued that the watchman of the Alba can be identified with the muezzin on his minaret at dawn. However, Arthur Hatto rejects this theory, because in the existing examples of lovers awakened by either the muezzin or the Balkan Hodzha, the lovers are non-Muslims. On these grounds, Hatto argues that any Andalusian connections to the Alba should be through Mozarabic models, and not Muslim ones, though he does not find much evidence for this in existing Mozarabic dawn songs.13

  Whatever its origins, the Alba topos became well ingrained into European literary traditions,14 with the topos of dawn as the time of parting of two lovers suffusing medieval European and renaissance literature. An excellent example of the survival of the contours of the Alba can be seen in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene V, set in Capulet’s orchard, with Juliet standing at the window, conversing with Romeo, about whether the bird they hear is the nightingale (‘nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree’), or the lark, ‘herald of the morn’. Romeo points out that even if he disagrees with Juliet, he is happy to submit to her command, though the Duke’s order of banishment means death for him if discovered still in town in the daylight. Juliet’s nurse comes to warn her that her mother is coming to her chamber, in which she has enjoyed her tryst with Romeo. Beware, the day is broke! Exit Romeo.

  Woledge’s study enumerating the characteristic features of the Alba appeared in Arthur Hatto’s marvellously wide-ranging survey of dawn poetry in world literature, Eos.15 The chapters therein on the Arabic and Persian traditions were written by Bernard Lewis with S.M. Stern (pp. 215–43), and G.M. Wickens (pp. 243–7), respectively. Concerning Arabic, Lewis and Stern claim that it ‘has no dawn-poetry as a special genre’ like the Alba, because ‘there are in Arabic no independent poems of a fixed structure having as their sole theme the separation of lovers at dawn’. They do, however, recognize it as a ‘fairly frequent’ motif, if not an indispensable one, in Arabic love poetry (specifically the erotic poetry of the Umayyad period, though they include numerous examples from the Abbasid era and from Andalusia). Of course, the dawn already figured in pre-Islamic poetry as the hour of parting of migrating tribes (the verb ibtakara, indeed, means to part at dawn), and also of the disappearance of the ṭayf al-khayāl, the phantom image of the beloved which torments the lover during his sleepless night.16 Dawn also interrupts the nocturnal wassail, marking the end of the drinking soirée, which lasts throughout the night. But there is a second kind of drinking occasion, the morning draught (and also the morning hunt), which may instead make the poet impatient for the signs of dawn to arrive. But as far as lovers are concerned, in a poetic context dawn is the enemy, because the night of union is never long enough.

  Lewis and Stern’s negative assessment of the existence of dawn poetry, per se, in the Arabic tradition would seem to be greatly undermined by the 33 excellent examples they do produce of just such poetry, including, for example, the following poem by the Umayyad caliph, al-Walīd II (reg. 125–6/743–4)17:

  Qāmat ilayya bi-taqbīlin tu‘āniqu-nī

  rayya’l-‘iẓāmi ka-anna’l-miska fī fī-hā

  Udkhul fadaytu-ka lā yash‘ur bi-nā aḥadun

  nafsī li-nafsika min dā’in tufaddī-hā

  Bitnā kadhālika lā nawmun ‘alā sururin

  min shiddati’l-wajdi tudnī-nī wa-udnī-hā

  Ḥattā idhā mā bada’l-khayṭāni, qultu la-hā:

  ḥāna’l-firāqu fa-kāda’l-ḥuznu yushjī-hā

  Thumma’nṣaraftu wa-lam yash‘ur bi-nā aḥadun

  wa’llāhu ‘annī bi-ḥusni’l-fi‘li yajzī-hā.

  She rose to greet me with kisses, embracing me

  Full-limbed, fragrant as if musk was in her mouth

  ‘Enter, my dear one, so that none knows of us

  I am your ransom against suffering.’ />
  Thus we lay the night, without sleep, on our couches [pillows]

  From the force of passion, she clasped me, and I clasped her

  Until the two threads appeared,18 I said to her:

  ‘The time for parting has come,’ and grief almost overcame her

  Then I left her, and none knew of us [was aware of us]

  May God reward her for her good deed.

  Beyond the several examples Lewis and Stern do reproduce, many other examples of an Alba topos in Andalusian poetry are found in Ibn Qūzmān of Cordoba (d. 555/1160), including his Zajal 141, which parodies the theme – always an indication that something has become canonical in a tradition. This and several other examples led Dionisia Empaytaz de Croome to argue that ‘numerous dawn poems in the Hispano-Arabic tradition ... show links with Iberian dawn poetry ... dawn partings, which some scholars would prefer to keep out of the Iberian Peninsula altogether, appear in the Muslim literature of Spain as frequently as the Alba in Old Provençal Poetry.’19

  As for the Persian tradition, Wickens argues that ‘the Alba form is not of common occurrence in Persian’ and is ‘in no sense a recognized poetical convention’. However, he held out hope that one day a ‘considerable yield of dawn poems’ might be found among Persian poetry manuscripts, especially of the mystical tradition, insofar as the majālis of the Sufi lodges commonly lasted throughout the night.20 Though this assumption that dawn and the Alba was a naturalistic, rather than a mythopoeic, setting is far wide of the mark, Wickens does offer us two Persian examples of the Alba theme, one a passage from Firdawsī describing Zāl’s tryst with Rūdāba, which led to the birth of Rustam, which we will pass over here, and the other from a ghazal of Sa‘dī, as follows:

  Imshab sabuktar mīzanand in ṭabl-i bī-hangām rā

  yā vaqt-i bīdārī ghalaṭ būd-ast murgh-i bām rā

  Yik lahẓa būd īn, yā shabī, k-az ‘umr-i mā tārāj shud

  mā ham-chunān lab bar labī nā-bar-girifta kām rā

  Ham tāza-ruyam, ham khajil, ham shādmān, ham tang-dil

  k-az ‘uhda bīrūn āmadan natvānam īn payghām rā21

  Gar pāy bar farqam nahī tashrīf-i qurbat mīdahī

  juz sar nimīdānam nihād az ‘udhr-i īn iqdām rā.22

  Chūn bakht-i nīk-anjām rā bā mā bi-kullī ṣulḥ shud

  bugdhār tā jān mīdahad bad-gū-yi bad-farjām rā

  Sa‘dī ‘alam shud dar jahān, ṣūfīy u ‘āmī gū bidān

  Mā but-parastī mīkunīm āngāh chunīn aṣnām rā.

  Wickens renders the poem in prose as follows:

  Tonight they must be beating more swiftly the unwelcome watchdrum, or else the rooftop-bird has mistaken the hour of waking. Was this a moment or a whole night thus plundered from our lives, and we still lip to lip with our desire unsatisfied? Now smiling am I, now in constraining, now rejoicing and now sad at heart – still I fail to convey this message. If you but deign to place your foot upon my neck, you honour me by your proximity: verily but for my low-laid head I know no welcome to offer your approaching footsteps. Since good fortune has at last become reconciled to us, let the malignant slanderers go hang! Sa‘dī has become a marked man in the eyes of the world: bid them know, then, mystics and mob alike – we may be idolators, but then what idols!23

  I would here like to offer in fulfilment of Wickens’ prescient hope two further Persian examples of Alba poems, both of which turn up in Mudarris-i Raḍavī’s edition of the Dīvān of Sanā’ī. The first (ghazal 215) echoes strongly with the Arabic Alba example of Walīd II, which was cited above:

  Man naṣīb-i khwīsh dūsh az ‘umr-i khwud bar dāshtam

  k-az saman bālīn u az shamshād bastar dāshtam

  Dāshtam dar bar nigārī rā ki az dīdār-i ū

  pāya-yi takht-i khwud az khwurshīd bartar dāshtam

  Nargis u shamshād u sūsan, mushk u sīm u māh u gul

  tā bi hangām-i saḥar har haft dar bar dāshtam

  Bar nihāda bar bar-i chūn sīm u sūsan dāshtam

  lab nihāda bar labī chūn shīr u shikar dāshtam

  Dast-i ū bar gardan-i man hamchū chanbar būd o man

  dast-i khwud dar gardan-i ū hamchū chanbar dāshtam

  Bāmdādān chūn nigah kardam basī farqī nabūd

  chanbar az zar dāsht ū, sūsan zi ‘anbar dāshtam

  Chūn mu’adhdhin guft yik ‘Allāhu akbar’ kāfar-am

  gar umīd-i ān digar Allāhu akbar dāshtam.

  Last night

  my life’s fantasies

  were all fulfilled:

  I bedded down

  on a pillow of jasmine,

  on a slender trunk,

  (1)

  held in my embrace

  a beauty who

  as I looked on her

  made me feel

  the bed stood

  high above

  the sun.

  (2)

  Narcissus,

  slender trunk,

  lilies,

  musk and silver,

  moon and rose,

  clear through till dawn,

  I hugged all seven in my arms

  (3)

  My breast

  pressed

  to a breast

  like silver and lilies,

  my lips

  pressed

  upon lips

  like milk and sugar;

  (4)

  Her arms and my arms

  encircled circled

  my neck her neck

  like a band, like a band

  (5)

  When I looked

  in the morning’s light,

  that’s almost how it was:

  she had a necklace of gold

  and I a lily of ambergris

  (6)

  As the Muezzin

  pronounced his first ‘Allāhu akbar’ –

  I’m a heathen

  if I wished him

  to complete the pair.

  (7)

  And here is the second short Alba ghazal (no. 236) from Sanā’ī, in which the muezzin again heralds the morning and disrupts the lovers’ congress:

  Āmad bar-i man jahān u jānam / uns-i dil u rāḥat-i ravānam

  Bar khwāstam-ash bi-bar giriftam / bifzūd hizār jān u ravānam

  Az qadd-i buland u zulf-i pushtash / guftam ki magar bi āsimān-am

  Chūn sar bi-nihād dar kināram / raft az bar-i man jahān u jānam

  Faryād marā zi bāng-i mu’adhdhin

  Man banda-yi bāng-i pāsibān-am.

  My world and my soul

  came to my side,

  companion to my heart,

  comfort of my psyche.

  I called her over

  pressed her in embrace;

  my spirit multiplied

  a thousand fold

  within

  me.

  Gazing the length of that tall body

  and the twines of tress down her back,

  I thought:

  I must be in the heavens

  No sooner had she laid her head upon my breast,

  than my world and my soul

  left my side.

  Save me from the call of the Muezzin!

  I’m a slave to the cry of the night watchman!

  Given the small corpus of less than a score of poems, according to Woledge, that has allowed us to identify the Alba as a thematic genre of Occitan poetry, the existence of the four above-mentioned poems of al-Walīd II, Sa‘dī and Sanā’ī surely requires that we reconsider and reject the thesis that Persian and Arabic lack the Alba genre. Except for the fact that the word ‘Alba’ does not of course reprise in these poems (though, in the first of the two Sanā’ī poems quoted here, two different Persian equivalents for ‘dawn’ do in fact appear: hangām-i saḥar and bāmdādān) – most of the defining characteristics of Woledge’s canon are manifestly evident here, and thus qualify the poems as belonging thematically to this international genre.r />
  A few further examples from the final lines of other ghazals by Sanā’ī will be offered here as further evidence that this type of ending is indeed part of a conventional topos of which Sanā’ī was consciously aware, and which remained present in the poet’s mind, even where the poem is not entirely structured like the Persian Albas above. From ghazal 173, line 7, in a poem which lacks a takhalluṣ, we find the poet, in the absence of the Beloved, enjoying the presence of his or her phantom image, and not wanting the day to dispel this pleasant reverie:

  Bā hijr-i tu har shab zi pay-i vaṣl-i tu gūyam:

  ‘Yā rab tu shab-i ‘āshiq u ma‘shūq makun rūz’.

  In your absence every night,

  in search of union

  I proclaim:

  O Lord,

  do not turn

  the night of

  the lover and beloved

  to

  day.

  The following complaint of the all-too-swift arrival of the morning that concludes the lovers’ meeting comes from Sanā’ī’s Qaṣīda 77 (which is, however, in fact, a ghazal):

  V-ān shab ki marā būd bi khalvat bar-i ū bār

  pīsh az shab-i man ṣubḥ zi kuhsār bar āmad.

 

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