Of course, the realm of the qaṣīda is not necessarily semiotically identical with he realm of the ghazal, but many of the associations apply equally to the world of the ghazal and to the world of the royal spring poem. This is understood intuitively enough when reading through the nasīb of the Ghaznavid qaṣīda, but we may also draw upon a number of secondary studies to buttress this impression. Julie Meisami has fleshed out the semiotic universe of the poetic garden, as a mirror of paradise,28 and the Lirica Persica project in Venice has created a delimited poetic corpus (1,000 lines each from a good number of poets, in a meticulously scientific Romanized transliteration), which can facilitate frequency studies and comparisons of particular images and motifs between poets, all with a view towards creating, eventually, a very devoutly-to-be-wished historical dictionary of the ghazal. One example of the type of study this data allows can be seen in the work of Daniela Meneghini Correale,29 whose complete inventory of the vocabulary of Ḥāfiẓ – including lemmatized frequency lists, a concordance, and a Romanized, grammatically parsed corpus of the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ – has been an indispensable tool for the current study, and in my previous work.30 And yet the basic tabulations for the comments that follow were done in the dark days before 1988, when Meneghini Correale’s The Ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ: Concordance and Vocabulary31 appeared, some 600 years after the poet’s death. Consequently, there may be some small discrepancies between the frequencies I have tabulated here, and those provided by Correale’s concordance and vocabulary. These differences will mostly stem from my attempt to count the occurrences of words in the entire Dīvān, and not just in the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ.
Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown us how mythology encodes certain cultural values. Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner have demonstrated that various cultural rituals give meaning to and symbolically encode certain periods of social-cultural transition. These encoded rituals sometimes implicitly inform literary and other artistic works, and making them explicit may therefore yield critical insights into these works. In the case of the tripartite Arabic qaṣīda, for example, Suzanne and Jaroslav Stetkevych have uncovered a rite of passage, with the stage of separation articulated in the nasīb; the stage of liminality symbolized in the journey section of the raḥīl; and the stage of aggregation, or reintegration, symbolized in the fakhr section of the poem. The animals that the poet encounters in the raḥīl, a journey often undertaken at night, are all symbolic of the sojourner’s outcast state.32
Similarly, an analysis of the specific time-frames of the Persian ghazal, the characters and events with which particular time periods and scenes are specifically and perhaps exclusively associated, the catalogue of motifs and images which radiate from it, and – in short – the semiotic horizons of the time-frame, may likewise prove useful in understanding the fixed-form of the Persian ghazal.
The Hour of Dawn in Ḥāfiẓ
Approximately 90, or nearly one-fifth, of the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ explicitly refer to dawn or early morning, which time must therefore constitute a significant semiotic horizon in his mythopoesis, particularly if these words come at a formative point in the poem, such as the first or the last line. In the rest of this chapter, I will attempt a lexical/semiotic inventory of dawn and the archetypal scenes, poetic situations and emotions attendant upon its evocation. Do the different words for dawn, daybreak and morning each have their own semiotic valency, or do they all evoke more or less an undifferentiated mythopoetic time? Consideration will be given to dawn in relation to other poetic time-frames (night, seasons, festivals) and its role as a sacred, or in illo tempore time, in which suffering is resolved and meaning is revealed. By isolating the semantic horizons of dawn as a topos, it is hoped that the relationship between certain themes and topoi, and therefore the architectonics of his ghazals, may emerge in somewhat clearer relief.
I take it as a clear premise of this study that dawn is indeed the paramount mythopoetic hour of the day, and symbolically saturated for Ḥāfiẓ. Ḥāfiẓ announces to us that he composes poetry at night and weeps at dawn, for the laughing and crying of lovers come from two different places (373: 6):
Khanda vu girya-yi ‘ushshāq zi jā’ī digar ast
mīsurāyam bi shab u vaqt-i saḥar mīmūyam.
The laughter and tears of the lovers comes from some other quarter
I compose at night and weep at dawntide.
This completely inverts the Psalmist’s setting for joy and grief: ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.’ Rather, our poet composes and carouses at night and weeps in the morning light. This significant line comes in the penultimate position of a seven-line ghazal, which contrasts the spiritual attraction Ḥāfiẓ finds in the fragrance of musk at the tavern, with the preacher’s assumption that he is sniffing the door of the tavern. These can be seen as the two different sources from which joy and grief come to the lovers.
Forms of this verb mū’īdan (to weep) occur only twice in the Dīvān, and only this once in reference to Ḥāfiẓ himself, so the word may bear some special weight (though we may also note that a word of this form is required in this rhyming position in the poem). Dawn is the time for sorrow, or the articulation of suffering, in contrast to the night, which is the time for joy and poetry. One may note that the frequent comparison of the poet to a sweet-singing bird may influence this image; the nightingale sings his courtship songs, beating his breast with his wings, at night. It is worth remembering here, with Ḥusayn-‘Alī Mallāḥ,33 that ḥāfiẓ is often the stage-name or professional description of a singer, that is someone with a good voice, and not simply someone who knows the Qur’ān by heart. Confirmation for this comes in the Iḥyā al-mulūk, where the names of six singers (mughannī) are mentioned, all of whom share the title ‘ḥāfiẓ’.34 Indeed, this title is still used for certain kinds of singers in Tajikistan.35 Sūdī of Bosnia, in his commentary on the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ (v.1, p. 31), mentions that the poet had a good voice. It is also clear from the pairing of qawl u ghazal with musicians in the poems of Ḥāfiẓ (e.g. 91: 9, 141: 2, 272: 4, 370: 8 and the Mughannī-nāma, p. 1058: 5b) that he alludes thereby to the first and second movements of the musical nawba performance, as explained a generation after his death by ‘Abd al-Qādir Marāghī (d. 838/1435), in which first Arabic poems are sung (qawl) and then Persian songs (ghazal), then tarāna (a rubā’ī text which is sung in either language), and finally furūdāsht (Arabic lyrics again). So, it may well be that Ḥāfiẓ not only memorized the Qur’ān, but could also chant it, and his poems, in a pleasing manner.
Let’s first inventory Ḥāfiẓ’s lexicon of dawn.
Saḥar occurs 49 times in the Dīvān, including 47 times in the ghazals. It is the primary word for dawn, obviously, and when it occurs in the ghazals, roughly 25 per cent of the time, it is in the first line, thus creating the temporal setting. Furthermore, this sememe appears in other lexical forms in the ghazals, such as saḥargah (eight times, three in the first line), saḥargahān (once), saḥargahī (once), saḥargāh (twice), saḥargāhān (twice, once in the first line), saḥarī (eight times, never in the first line), saḥar-khīz and saḥar-khīzān, again never in the first line.
Ṣubḥ occurs 46 times in the Dīvān, 42 of them in ghazals, and in the first line in seven of those ghazals, or one-sixth of the time. This generic word for morning is often a symbol of hope, as in 162: 4: ṣubḥ-i umīd ki shud mu‘takif-i parda-yi ghayb / gū burūn āy ki kār-i shab-i tār ākhar shud (‘to the morning of hope, which sat in devout retreat behind the curtain of the unseen say, come out, for the long dark night is over’); or 323: 4: bar āy ay āftāb-i ṣubḥ-i umīd / ki dar dast-i shab-i hijrān asīr-am (‘come out, o sun of the morning of hope / for I am captive in the grasp of the night of separation’). This contra-Alba theme, where the morning of hope scatters the darkness of the night, with its attendant sorrow and weeping over separation from the Beloved, would seem to dominate the topos of dawn in Ḥāfiẓ. Several compound n
ouns and adverbs of time are built upon this word, including ṣubḥdam (11 incidences, two in line 1), ṣubḥ-furūgh (once), ṣubḥgah (once, in the first line), ṣubḥgāh (five times, once in line one), ṣubḥgāhī (four times), ṣubḥī (once) and ṣubḥ-khwān (once). The fact that ṣubḥ is often used in the sense of sunrise, rather than some later point of the morning, is attested by the fact that it often occurs with the verb damīdan, to break: mī-damad ṣubḥ (13: 1), ṣubḥ-i dawlat mī-damad (14: 1), and so on.
Bāmdād occurs three times, and once again in the form bāmdādān, the latter in a poem (288:1) which is mystically infused with the primordial sunrise, and a virtually – and quite unusually for the ghazal – enjambed first and second lines:
bāmdādān ki zi khalvatgah-i kākh-i ibdā‘
sham‘-i khāvar fikanad bar hama aṭrāf shu‘ā ‘
bar kishad āyina az jayb-i ufuq charkh u dar ān
bi-namāyad rukh-i gītī bi hizārān anvā‘.
In the morn as the candle of the east casts its rays
from the seclusion of the palace of creation over everything
the wheel of heaven draws out the mirror from the collar of the horizon
to show the face of the earth in its myriad forms.
Pagāh occurs only once, as an adjective for bāmdād, meaning early in the morning, and it occurs at the start of the one poem where we do find it, setting the time and tone for ghazal 408:
khunak nasīm-i mu‘anbar, shamāma-yi dilkhwāh
ki dar havā-yi tu bar khāst bāmdād-i pagāh.
Fresh the fragrant breeze, the heartsome perfume
which stirred up early in the morn, craving your ambience.
Sipīda-dam, likewise a hapax legomenon in the Ḥāfiẓ corpus, occurs later in this same poem where we find pagāh, but as part of a metaphorical conceit rather than a poetic time-frame.
Other locutions do occur, some based on verbs, some on less frequently appearing nouns, but in the preponderance of cases, these words do not bear symbolic weight in creating a mythopoesis for the poem. Often they are simple binary oppositions – as in sleep/wake or night/day – or metaphors and similes, not meant to necessarily establish the mythic time of the poem. For example, we find damīdan in the past tense for rising of the metaphorical sun:
Guftam ay bakht bi-khusbīdī u khwurshīd damīd. (399: 2)
I said, fortune, you slept late and the sun arose.
I have not checked for the near synonym of bar āmadan or nūr afkandan, and so on, where the sun is subject; however, the words for sun (āftāb and khwurshid; shams does not occur in the ghazals) do not necessarily seem to specify sunrise as the poetic time of the poem where these words occur in the first line of the ghazal.
However, the word Ṭulū‘, meaning sunrise, occurs four times, though sometimes also said of the moonrise (110: 3), sometimes of the solar wine in the dawning-place of the drinking cup (288: 3), and sometimes employed in a virtuosically playful manner, as in this line (55: 3):
Zi mashriq-i sar-i kū-y āftāb-i ṭal‘at-i tu
agar ṭulū‘ kunad ṭāli‘am humāyun ast.
If the sun of your radiant countenance, from the east of the quarter dawns, my astrological chart will augur royal, auspicious.
The word Ṣabāḥ occurs twice, once in the phrase har ṣabāḥ u masā (443: 8), every morning and evening, meaning simply ‘all the time’. In the other incidence, however, ṣabāḥ does actually have a ritual, or even transcendent, semiotic charge, and determines the time-frame of the poem, situating the actions in a mythopoetic realm (128: 1):
Bi āb-i rawshan-i may ‘ārifī ṭahārat kard
‘ala ‘ṣ-ṣabāh ki maykhāna rā ziyārat kard.
With the bright water of wine, a Gnostic made ablutions
When at dawn he made pilgrimage to the wine tavern.
This wine poem continues with celestial imagery, as follows:
Hamān ki sāghar-i zarrīn-i khwur nahān gardīd
hilāl-i ‘ayd bi-dawr-i qadaḥ ishārat kard
Khwushā namāz u niyāz-i kasī ki az sar-i dard
bi āb-i dīda va khūn-i jigar ṭahārat kard
Bi rū-yi yār naẓar kun zi dīda minnat dār
ki kār-i dīda hama az sar-i baṣārat kard
Dilam bi ḥalqa-yi zulfash bi jān kharīd āshūb
chi sūd dīd nadānam ki īn tijārat kard
Agar imām-i jamā‘at ṭalab kunad imrūz
khabar dahīd ki Ḥāfiẓ bi may ṭahārat kard.
As soon as the golden goblet of the sun disappeared
The festive crescent signalled to send the chalice around
How blessed the prayers and supplications of him whose pain
has washed him pure with teardrops and heart’s blood
Look on the face of the friend and count your blessings for your eye –
That it conducted the business of the eye with insight
My heart in the ringlets of his hair bought disturbance, heart and soul
I cannot imagine what profit it saw in this transaction
If the Chief Prayer Leader summons me today
Give him this excuse: Ḥāfiẓ has purified himself with wine.
Of course, dawn can be conjured up without actually mentioning it, by summoning related elements of the topos, which we partially inventory as follows.
The appearance of the nightingale occurs 49 times in the ghazals in the form of the Bulbul, and a further seven in the form of ‘Andalīb. Various other terms for bird, some of which may also signify the nightingale, occur in the ghazals, such as murgh-i shab-khwān (twice), hazār (twice), and the generic murgh (57 times). Obviously, not all these occurrences are at dawn, and the birds are not always sweetly twittering, but there is often an association, implicit or explicit, with the dawn and with the rose (e.g. ‘At dawn the bird of the meadow said to the newly blossomed rose’. Ṣubḥdam murgh-i chaman bā gul-i naw-khāsta guft, 81: 1a). Khurramshāhī identifies the following characteristics with the nightingale: he is not colourful, but he has a melodically pleasing song, is extremely eloquent and often sings ghazals, and he is utterly in love.36
We may add that he suffers in his love (209: 7):
bar ṭarf-i gulshanam gudhar uftād vaqt-i ṣubḥ
ān dam ki kār-i murgh-i chaman āh u nāla būd.
I passed by the border of the garden at the hour of morning
at the moment when the efforts of the meadow-bird were sighing and lamenting.
In the following ghazal of seven lines (456), the bulbul is on nearly every branch:
Raftam bi bāgh ṣubḥdamī tā chinam gulī
āmad bi gūsh nāgaham āvāz-i bulbulī
Miskīn chu man bi ‘ishq-i gulī gashta mubtalā
v-andar chaman fikanda zi faryād ghulghulī
Mīgashtam andar ān chaman u bāgh dam bi-dam
mīkardam andar ān gul u bulbul ta’ammulī
Gul yār-i ḥusn gashta va bulbul qarīn-i ‘ishq
īn rā taghayyurī nih va ān rā tabaddulī
Chūn kard dar dilam athar āvāz-i ‘andalīb
gashtam chunān ki hīch namāndam taḥammulī
Bas gul shikufta mīshavad īn bāgh rā valī
kas bī-balā-yi khār nachīda-ast az ū gulī
Ḥāfiẓ madār umīd-i faraj az madār-i carkh
Dārad hizār ‘ayb u nadārad tafaḍḍulī.
I went to the garden in the morning to pick a rose
Suddenly the song of a nightingale came to my ears
The poor thing, like me, was destroyed by his love for a rose
And in the meadow he raised up a hue and cry
As I strolled in the meadow and garden for a spate
I was reflecting on that rose and the nightingale
The rose became the beloved beauty and the nightingale, mate of love
This was changed to that, and that transformed to this
When the song of the Philomel worked upon my
heart
It made me such that I could not stand it anymore
Many a rose is blossoming in this garden, yet
No one picks a rose from it without the prick of the thorn
Ḥāfiẓ, do not hope for release from the turning heavens
It has endless faults and not a single mercy.
In this poem, then, the poet’s persona reflects upon the morning/dawn symbol of the nightingale and its hopes as lover, and rejects all hope, in that love of roses comes with the prick of the thorn, and that is the unchanging fate of the world.37
As for the morning libation of wine, Ṣabūḥ, which occurs six times, always paired with another word for morning or late night (it appears a further nine times in other tokens of the lexeme ṣabūḥī, ṣabūḥī-zadagān) – we will come to this topos in the discussion below, on the sacrality of dawn.
We also find the easterly morning breeze, Ṣabā, which is invoked 105 times in Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals (most probably more than that in his entire oeuvre, if we also count his other forms) – that is to say, almost one of every five ghazals. Another word for the breeze, Nasīm, occurs 65 times and may sometimes, but not always, waft at dawn. This breeze is associated with sunrise and spring time, coolness and fragrance, which make the flowers blossom. It is also the breeze to which lovers tell their secrets. Khurramshāhī is of the opinion that Ḥāfiẓ may use the symbol of the pleasant fragrant breeze of morning (nasīm, with which he more or less seems to pair ṣabā) more than any other Persian poet. Furthermore, he ventures that the bād-i ṣabā, or simple ṣabā, is one of the active entities and heroes of the poetics of Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān.38
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 46