[In the following essay, Bausani analyzes the text of many Persian verses, including those of Hafiz, discussing the styles and techniques displayed in the lyrics of seventh-century Iran.]

The scientific study of style in both European and Oriental lyrics is a comparatively recent conquest of our literary criticism. Unfortunately, the student of the form and historical developments of European, "Western", literary style does not have at his disposal sufficient materials for stylistic comparisons. "A thing is better known through its contrary" says an old Muslim tradition. One of the causes of the rather complicated and somewhat obscure language of many Western studies dealing with problems of stylistics lies, in my opinion, in the lack of comparing possibilities. Our critics considered the world of Western lyrics as the world of Lyrics, thus assuming a colonialistic attitude, which, strangely enough, they often succeeded in forcing upon some modern Asian critics. as well. Dislike for the alleged "euphuism" and baroque form of Muslim classical art, absolute appreciation of the "natural", the "passionate directness" of Western literary style are attitudes often taken even by contemporary Oriental littérateurs: one of these was for instance the famous Urdu poet Hali (d. 1914), not to speak of some modern Persian writers.

A better understanding of the form of classical Muslim lyrics (the most perfect example of which is, probably, the Persian ghazal) would help—I think—modern European critics to a deeper insight into the structure of our lyrics. Persian lyrical style offers—to this purpose—an especially favourable field of study. It started from a point of departure not too far from that of our medieval "traditional" lyrics of the troubadours, but it afterwards developed on quite different lines.

My purpose in this article is to introduce the reader, to whom the Persian language—perhaps the richest poetical instrument of the Near and Middle East—is unknown, into the labyrinthine forms of the lyrics of "modern" Iran, that is to say the Iran of the 7th century after the Islamic conquest. As I am addressing a reader to whom I presume the language is unknown, I must have recourse to a rather laborious analysis of some texts belonging to a lyrical tradition that uses materials other than those familiar to us, and this will require of the reader the closest attention—in the etymological meaning of that word—and for this I apologise in advance.

Those who know Persian poetry through translations are led to one of two conclusions. They will either conceive for it an ingenuous admiration, reminiscent of the 19th century enthusiasms of Platen or Fitzgerald, admiring something which is not, strictly speaking, Persian poetry at all; or they will be bored and confirmed in their belief that the said poetry is nothing but a tiresome series of verbal acrobatics, a poor replica of European euphuism. Thus the well-known and widespread impression that our Western tradition alone has produced, in this field as in others, something really "living" and vital will be confirmed and the reader will be led once more to limit himself to the philological and cautious cultural provincialism of the West. Both these conclusions are alike discouraging for the Orientalist who believes that the subjects he deals with are of more than scientific importance and that it is his mission to enable large circles of the educated public—acquainted in our case with the culture of the West—to appreciate as fully and accurately as possible the spiritual "structures" of another type of culture.

Unfortunately, both the special difficulties of the task when lyric style is the subject dealt with, and the general tendency of European orientalism to restrict its field to that of philological science, have reduced to very small proportions studies devoted to the style and technique of Persian poetry. I do not think I exaggerate when I say that were it not for the very noteworthy names of Ritter who, in a youthful work of his of 1927 (2) made a truly fine study of the imagery used by Nizami, and for that of the Czech, Rypka (3), author of a masterly analysis of Turkish and Persian lyrical forms, were it not for these two writers who have both studied Persian poetry from the inside, the field with which we are dealing would be practically unexplored. In any case we may say that the history of the several styles and the study of the variations of Persian lyrical forms, which are not so uniformly monotonous as some believe, is practically untrodden ground. As we shall see, in the course of time at least five different styles have been used successively.

And now as an introduction to our subject, let us begin by reading a free transjation of a famous lyric by Hafiz (14th century), the Prince of Persian poets, to which we will add a more detailed analysis. It will clearly show that in this field more than in any other, and often without his being at fault, the translator is necessarily a traitor. The general atmosphere of this ghazal is vaguely "the return of the Spring".

1. - Once more the age of youth has returned to the garden—and the sweet-singing nightingale receives the good news of the Flower.
2. - Oh, gentle breeze! should you once more reach the budding plants in the meadow, give my greetings to the Basil, the Rose, the Cypress tree.
3. - The young Son of the Magi, the Vintner, appears before me in such charming motions that I am ready to sweep with my eyebrows the dust of the Tavern.
4. - Oh, thou who coverest with purest amber the face of the Moon, do not perturb yet more this man perplexed by love.
5. - I greatly fear that those who laugh at wine-bibbers may at last make a tavern of their Faith in God.
6. - But mayest thou remain a friend of the Holy Men, for in the Ship of Noah there is still a handful of Mud that knows how to defy the Deluge.
7. - Go out from this Dwelling, that has the Heavens for roof, and do not ask it for Food, for that Vile One at the end shamelessly kills her Guest.
8. - And say to those whose last resting-place will be a handful of Dust: "Friend, what avails it to raise high palaces to the Skies?"
9. - Oh, moon of Canaan! The throne of Egypt has been allotted thee; it is now high time that thou shouldst say farewell to the Prison!
10. - Oh Hafiz, drink wine, and be a libertine, and live joyfully, but take care, not, as others do, to make a snare of the Book of God!

We have here an excellent example—the poem has been chosen almost by chance—of many features characteristic of the style of Persian lyrical poetry of the golden age. Let us list, first of all, the several motifs: of the images indeed none, without exception, are original, though they may strike a Western ear as such.

• 1. - Nightingale-Rose (Flower). It may seem strange, but this motif, perhaps the one that occurs most frequently in Persian lyrics, has never been the object of historical research (4). It appears in the most ancient Persian lyrics of the 10th century. In the maturer lyrical forms (Hafiz) it contains the following meanings:

  The rose is beauty aware of itself, the supreme, inaccessible symbol of the divine istighna; often the rose disdainfully derides the nightingale but as soon as it blossoms it dies. This is the cause of the twofold sadness of the nightingale, which mourns over the rapid death of the rose and its disdainful rejection of union. But between the two there is a kind of mysterious connection: the Bird of Dawn (an epithet very frequently applied to the nightingale) alone understands the secret language of the rose. The nightingale sings in Arabic—the sacred language—invitations to partake of the mystic wine. Inebriated with the perfume of the rose it fears to end as did the magic-angel, Marut. As in the traditions (Cfr. Qur'an, XVII, 78) the prayer offered at dawn is of special value and has special power, so the lament of the nightingale is the auroral prayer. But it is a dolesome prayer, offered to something inaccessible, for, as Muqaddasi says in his charming book translated in the middle of last century by Garcin de Tassy (5) "my song is a song of grief and not of joy … Each time that I flutter over a garden I warble of the affliction that will soon replace the gaiety that reigns there". In an Indian Moslem allegory, the romance of the Rose of Bakawali (6) the inaccessible Rose, so difficult to find, is the only remedy that can restore the sight of King Zainu'l-Muluk, etc. The God-Rose identity in the famous preface of the Golestan of Sadi can be clearly seen when the Mystic who travels in the transcendental world is unable to bring back any gift from his travels because: "I had in mind that when I reached the Rose tree I would fill my lap with roses as gifts for my friends, but when I reached it I was so inebriated with the perfume of the Rose that the hem of my robe slipped from my hand". (7)

  The enthusiastic pan-iranist, Pizzi, has endeavoured, but without adequate evidence, to show influence of the Persian Rose motif in the mediaeval Roman de la Rose, whose symbolism is reminiscent of this (8). But in the absence of definite documentary evidence and of preparatory studies we cannot exclude the opposite hypothesis which is that a Hellenistic motif may have penetrated into both cultures, derived from that civilisation which in various ways and forms fertilised them both, i.e. the late Hellenistic symbolism. The reader should, however, bear in mind that what we refer to is a motif and not an emotional and original perception by Hafiz of the "romantic" and vivid reality of the Spring and the flowers. As we shall see, the "originality" of a Persian poet must be sought in other directions.

• 2. - And here we have another "personage", the saba, "the zephir", the spring-time breeze, generally held to be—-and not for the first time by Hafiz but by innumerable poets before and after him—the Messenger par excellence. The breeze also is personified in a bird, more especially the hoopoe. Why? because with a very slight change in the transcription, the pronunciation of its name is identical to that of the famous region of Saba (Sheba) whose Queen, we read in the Qur'an, sent a hoopoe as her messenger to King Solomon. Thus the "secondary images" aroused in the mind of the listener by the word saba are quite other than those awakened in us by the word "zephir", now ineradicably associated in our minds with Metastasio and Watteau. Saba is a sound that reverberates with a rich symbolism which can be traced back historically and clearly to a "gnostic" world. Basil (raihan), mentioned soon after, which to us suggests little more than the idea of "perfume", is instead a word quoted in the Qur'an. The fragrance of basil is one of the chief components of the olfactory joys of the Islamic paradise (cfr. Qur'an, LVI, 89), and, singularly enough, of the Zoroastrian paradise also (cfr. Menoke Xrat, chpt. VII). On the other hand, the Cypress, familiar to all amateur collectors of Persian carpets and miniatures, in its charming conventionalised shapes, is the sacred tree of Zoroaster. It is identified with the Prophet himself who planted a specially memorable cypress (that of Kashmar) just at the time when the ecstatic-prophetic experience first thrilled him (9). It is a motif that seems to have come straight from a Central Asian spiritual area: the Shaman, indeed, plants a tree when starting on his "prophetic" career (10). Thus, even if in the case in point the words are not always intentionally and knowingly symbolical, they are not merely descriptive but are related to verbal-psychological cycles with which they have no connection in our languages.
• 3. - In the springtime scenery summoned before us, the nightingale, the rose, the zephir, the cypress, basil and the "young" (plants) of the meadow are playing a part in a scene which, even from our descriptive standpoint might acquire a certain unity. But now there enters a character who to our eyes may seem truly extraneous. He is the young Magian (moghba e), the vintner, and the Tavern. Elsewhere (I1) I have shown that the "Zoroastrian" character of the images connected with wine, with the Superior of the Magi, and with the Young Magian (all images—the reader may be sure—not invented by Hafiz, for the connection between inebriety and forbidden practices with the Zoroastrian belief dates back to Daqiqi (12) of the 10th century) are but words used to summon up the idea of that which is forbidden, of sacred impiety. Poets ancient and modern, to evoke this idea use indiscriminately the words Magian Christian, temple of fire or church. Sa'di (13th century) although the differences were known to him, uses indiscriminately the words "priest", "bishop", "Brahmin" "Magian", "temple of fire", "church", "monastery" in the same poem (13). The ideas that these lyrical-symbolic images summon up are not something precisely and theologically Zoroastrian (wine indeed is only a secondary element in the Zoroastrian ritual); they serve as signs indicating an esoteric rite. As lyrical poetry was traditionally condemned both by Islam and by Zoroastrianism, the motif of self-abasement is added to this intricate image-motif. The poet, the Initiate, is willing even to wipe with his face the door of the tavern-temple where the Young Magian reigns. Here is summed up the material inherited from the frankly libertine, poetry of the Arab neoteroi (14) (wine-Christian Convent, already found in pre-Islamic Arab poetry) with the mystical gnostic motif of a Rite of the Wine which, even if, as Massignon would have it (15), it is already found in the Qur'anic symbolism of Paradise (yaum-i mazid), is nevertheless of more ancient sincretic-gnostic origin.
• 4. - And now, as in a filiform succession of images, the Young Magian takes on the ambiguous appearance of a boy-girl. Our aesthetic taste compels us sometimes to translate in the feminine what perhaps—and I say perhaps because the feminine gender is unknown to Persian grammar—was masculine. The fourth verse should more accurately be translated as: "Oh thou, who drawest across the moon a polo-stick (chaugan) of the purest amber, do not make me, whose head whirls (like a polo ball) yet more confused". And we must then add that the game of polo, which is of Persian origin, supplies a wealth of images to this lyric. The polo stick, with its characteristic hooked shape, is the zolf, the long whisp of hair, black as the night, and the moon is no other than the face (the roundness of the face is traditionally greatly admired in this lyric). The Child-Magian who is also the Beloved of the Poet (or his Initiator, or God, for even if Hafiz does not consciously wish it, tradition wills it thus) has the brilliant and round face of the moon. By mischievously half-veiling it with his black curl, shaped like a polo stick, he only makes the already confused head of the poet whirl like a polo-ball. And here the reader should be warned of a feature of this poetry, a rule of style studied by Ritter, which, I have suggested elsewhere (16), should be called the law of the formal harmony of comparison. In other words, the objects compared must have the same shape. The Persian poet does not create new poetic images but creates skilful, and if possible new relations between objects. In Persian poetry there are no mythological characters; things retain their natural shape: the wizardry of the poet consists in his skilful treatment of objects while respecting their shapes (moon=face, curl=polo-stick).
• 5. - In this verse the poet introduces another motif: he upbraids the doctors of the law, the othodox. And here, let me repeat, Hafiz must not for this be taken for an "anticlerical", a "progressive". There may be cases in the traditional poetry of Persia of mullas who, when indulging in this literary style, are obeying its conventions in abusing … themselves as a class. This motif can only have arisen from the fact that this kind of poetry gave a gnostic-neo-platonic interpretation to materials—derived from the Arabian Abbasid libertine poetry—quite heterogeneous to Islamic orthodoxy. The result was a strange combination of libertinism and mysticism that confers on it a special kind of style of its own.
• 6. - The verse that follows contains a transparent allusion to the superiority of the Saint (the man of God) over the Doctor of the Law, very skilfully expressed. Noah's ship is the human race, the handful of mud that it contains, possessing however the supreme faculty of overcoming any deluge, is the Perfect Man. the Saint, the mystic Master. He is "earth", mud indeed, but one which—as the original puts it—be-abi nakharad tufanra, that is to say "would not buy the deluge for a drop of water", i.e. gives no importance to external "deluges" (arid here note the word-play water-deluge-earth). We should therefore be friends of those Masters and not of the doctors of the law.
• 7-8. - The ethnical-mystical warning continues. But, be it always remembered, without undue personal tension. The world is seen as a house, an "old dilapidated convent". But the world—in Arabic a word of feminine gender,—is also often compared by the Persian poets to a malicious, faithless old woman. Here the word we have translated by "Vile One" is siyah-kasè, "of the black pot", also "miserly" "despicable"; hence the play of words "food"- "pot".
• 9. - The following verse contains a metaphor which may be familiar to the Westerner also Joseph the Jew, the symbol of perfect beauty, or of the Soul, for whom the therone of Egypt is prepared, but who yet groans in prison (a classic neo-Platonic metaphor). The last verse reiterates the traditional accusation of hypocrisy addressed to the mullas.

The reader unaccustomed to this kind of poetry will have noted a rather disconcerting feature it displays. Each verse forms a closed unit, only slightly interconnected with the others. Some modern scholars (17) to explain them have invoked the "psychology of depth" to show that there is unity, but an unconscious one, in the ghazal. However this may be, external incongruity would seem to be a real rule in classic Persian poetry. We are in the presence of a bunch of motifs only lightly tied together.

Now, is this lyrical style so monotous and invariable, as many have said? We think it is not, and we shall try to show the direction in which changes have come about, taking as our starting point the most important stylistic theme, the lyric of the golden age to which we have been introducing the reader.

The brief composition I shall now present is one of the most ancient specimens of Persian literature; it is by Daqiqi and dates back to the 10th century.

1. - A cloud from Paradise, oh my Idol, has clothed the earth in the gala raiment of April,
2. - And the rose garden looks like the paradise of Eden, with trees garlanded with flowers like the houris of heaven.
3. - So changed is the world that you would say that the tiger leaps on the kid only for a harmless scuffle,
4. - And you would say that the world has become like a peacock, here rough and uneven, there soft and smooth.
5. - The earth looks like a brocade spotted with blood, and the wind seems a hand wrapped in fragrant musk,
6. - A gracious hand that outlines on the meadow the image of the beloved in lines of wine and musk.
7. - An idol with ruby-coloured cheeks, a wine red as a garment sparkling in the temple.
8. - And from the dust rises a perfume as of rose-water, and you would think that roses were kneeded in the mud.
9. - But the good Daqiqi of the innumerable things of this world has chosen four, of all the good and the evil, four charming virtues:
10. - A lip that looks like a ruby, and the tender lament of the lute, and wine the colour of blood, and the faith of Zoroaster!

We have already referred to the religious images in Persian poetry and to the mysticallibertine cipher of Zoroastrianism. Here we should note not only the antiquity of these religious images—in the above brief poem there are at least four or five—but also that, in the first place, they have not yet succeeded in permeating the whole style, and in the second place that the technique of the image and of the comparison, while it does not reject word-play (gil-gul, etc.), has not yet been codified in those supremely harmonious but monotonous lyrical forms of the golden age. For instance, the wind compared to a hand wrapped in musk is, for instance, an idea which perhaps already differs from those which will become the traditional canons of the imagery; while the description—of which we shall have many lengthy examples in the later lyrics—is more vivid and at the same time less rich in resonances and in that mystical background which we have found in Hafiz. Here we see the "religious" features still bare and in a process of fusion: the houri-trees, the beloved-idol, the paradisiac cloud, wine and libertinage explicitly connected with the religion of Zoroaster. The several component parts are not yet throughly fused, and for this reason congruity of the verses is greater: the whole is nothing but a description of the Spring. So in the lyric poetry of this period, which we may call preclassic or archaic, we come often across descriptive poems, such as the description of old age ascribed to Rudagi, or long dialogues between the poet and his beloved like the famous one of Onsori, descriptions of love scenes as that by Farrokhi, etc.

The passage from this style to that of the golden classic age is characterised above all by the penetration of gnostic-mystical features (whose advent was already terminologically prepared) into the heart of the lyrical composition, a penetration which shatters the harmony of the composition and gives rise to that typical feature of the classic ghazal, the conceptual independence of the several verses, one of which may deal with love, another with spring, another again with the mystic wine while yet another will contain an ethical warning. It was above all in the 12th century that the classic ghazal arose, as Mirzoev (18) has well seen, though he refused to recognize the notable influence that mysticism had in bringing this change about, an influence which, far from being disproved, is justified by having been already to some extent terminologically prepared by the more ancient poetry. It thus happens that mysticism uses, on the one hand, the language of love while on the other the language of love is enriched by mystical under-tones. It should be noted how Khaqani (12th century), who was not a mystic, describes his success in resisting the temptations offered by a beautiful girl (or beautiful boy): "When I saw that she had celebrated the-Feast of Sadè like the Magi, and that fire was flowing from her tulip petals (= her face) and that her tangled amber curls formed a Cross,

"Then I understood that it was the Fire which is adored by Zoroaster and his Festival: I saw that from afar, and I would not draw near.

"I who at the Kaaba had celebrated the festival (Kaaba= earth) and had tasted the water of Zamzam,

"How could I have tasted, like sugar cane, her moist Fire (= the lips)? (19)".

We here see that a non-mystic like Khaqani, when he wishes to speak of love and of "amusement", not to say dissipation, inevitably uses religious images. This shows that in his time the fusion of the two realities had been already brought about in literary style.

This first variation on the theme in the history of Persian lyric poetry, a variation, which, as we have said, consists in replacing a natural description by an allusive one, accompanied by a notable conceptual independence of the several verses of the composition on the one hand and by a more definite formulation of the technique of the images, in what we termed above the formal harmony, on the other, is followed in the history of Persian poetry by another change which occurred in the 16th-17th century. As this variation, originating in Persia, was transplanted in India where, for various reasons, it found a favorable soil and where it acquired its most perfect forms, it has been called the "Indian style" (sabk-i hindi).

One of the best known representatives of this style, not then yet Indian properly speaking, was the Persian Sa'ib of Tabriz, in the 17th century (+ 1677). Let us read a ghazal of his, picked out by chance (20):

1. - In vain we cast the seed of our hope in the house of the world, in vain we sowed our grain in saltish soil.
2. - The pure earth of the eye was the place of the pearl of Warning, and we, with childish wantonness, cast there the seed of desire.
3. - Each one cast his grain in the earth, and we, foolishly, sowed the seed of chains in the midst of the desert.
4. - Like beings bearing light weight, we shall not pass the scales on the Day of Judgement for from one end to the other we have sown them with dents and notches.
5. - In the soil of the heart, the seat of Passion, of the fiery seal of love, our faulty nature has led us to sow the seed of Longing.
6. - The tie that binds us to the beauty-spot at the corner of that mouth is not of today, We sowed the seed of our love of her in the deepest heart of hearts.
7. - And every seed that we sowed here in the world, oh Sa'ib, has grown into the ear of repentance, except the seed of tears.

For the purpose I have in view I have endeavoured to translate this poem of Sa'ib as literally as possible. Here are a few preliminary remarks to assure an understanding of it, even if only on the outside.

V. 4. According to Moslem eschatology, all human actions on the Day of Judgement will be weighed on great scales.

V. 6. The heart of hearts is the suvaida-e qalb of the psychological-anatomical Hellenistic-Arabic-Persian tradition. It means literally "the blackness of the heart", the black spot of the heart. Formaliter, for its blackness and smallness, it may be compared to a mole or beauty-spot.

Now, those who are accustomed to read the divans of the classic period, that of Sadi and of Hafiz, feel that in a ghazal of this type there is a dissonance. In an article of a more technical character (21) I have shown that in defining the "Indian style" the following features must be taken into special consideration:

1. As we go forward in time and penetrate geographically into the Indian world, the shattering of the law of formal harmony, of which we have spoken, becomes more marked.
2. The tendency to give tangible shape to abstractions. Hence the number of comparable objects increases, and this gives rise to a richer terminology. Things even apparently commonplace or "vulgar", become subjects of poetry and, moreover, the entering of a great mass of abstract ideas into the play of images gives rise to a pseudo-philosophic tendency that is often tortuous and intricate.

For instance, "the pearl of warning" in the "earth" of the eye, in the poem just quoted, is an image which it would perhaps be difficult to find in a classic. The eye is formally too different from the earth. The "seed of chains" requires a special explanation. Tradition speaks of the flight in the desert of the unfortunate lover Majnun, the "madman". Chains are of course used to fetter madmen. To sow the seed of chains in the desert now becomes intelligible but the expression is not grotesque to our ears only, but probably also to those of a classical Persian. But it does not strike a classical Persian as grotesque that the lover's curl should be "a polo-stick that makes the ball of the lover's head whirl swiftly". One must therefore be careful not to interpret grotesque too precisely and too much in its European meaning. The image taken from the game of polo is quite consistent in its several features, as understood by the law of formal harmony (the curl can quite well be compared to the polostick and the ball to the head). On the other hand, the image drawn by Sa'ib, which we are studying, has, from the standpoint of classic criticism, at least two defects: one is that it offers a comparison whose terms are irreversible (it would hardly come into one's head, that is to say, to compare the link of a chain to a seed), the other is that, considered dynamically, there is also formal incongruity (the idea of the chain growing from seeds of chain), for while one of the terms of the comparison, a seed, does grow if planted, the other does not. As you see, the Persian traditional classic critic is anything but indulgent to creative imagination; in some of its aspects, the variation introduced into the classic technique by the "Indian style" brings it nearer to the "arbitrary creativeness" of the modern Western artists. The same remark holds good also to the "dents of the scales", and so forth.

It is curious to note that in this variant of Sa'ib greater congruence is obtained in a certain sense between the several verses of the composition. This is accounted for partly by the fact that the creators of this style attached great importance to that technical device known as radif, that consists in repeating at the end of each line one or more identical words or even a whole expression (in the case in point kashtim, "we sowed") thus forcing the poet to observe greater unity. But other reasons also contribute to confer greater unity on the composition, among which, last but not least, the conceptualism, the pseudo-philosophy, the tendency to loiter over ideas and turn them over and squeeze out all their possible contents.

At the end of the 18th century, coinciding more or less with the rise of the dynasty of the Qajar, another variation occurs in the style of Persian poetry, a variation which might be called neo-archaism, if we continue to assign to the poets of the pre-Sadi and pre-Hafiz period the far from correct term of "archaic". But it is in no sense a mere return to the antique. The refinement introduced by mysticism, the melody of Hafiz, the use of terminology taken from the notions and facts of every-day life, which characterised the Indian style, were features that could not easily be set aside.

We will now give an ode characteristic of the greatest of these poets, the most melodious, Qa'ani (+ 1853). It is a joyous hymn celebrating the Persian New Year festival, the Nauruz, when tradition requires that seven objects be brought together, all beginning with the letter sin (s), i.e. the hyacinth (sunbul), the apple (sib), lilies (susan), silver (sim), garlic (sir), vinegar (serke), and rue (sepand). But a single sin is enough for Qa'ani, that of the saghar (wine-cup).

"The festival has arrived, come, oh cupbearer, and carry round the cup, and give a kick to the revolving globe and to the passing of time!

"The sin of the cup suffices me, oh fine Turk, for the day of the festival: jolly good fellows who love wine have no need of seven sins!

"They are all talking now of new clothes, but I, lip to lip, seek the glass in which old and flavorsome wine is clothed.

"All are now putting sugar on the table and reciting prayers and exchanging wishes; I prefer to listen to the insults from your sugary lip.

"Today all have in hand silver and augural grain, but I desire only the grain of thy beauty-spot, oh thou whose body is of silver!

"The people have a superabundance of garlic (sir) on the table, while I am satiated (sir) with life if I have not the lovely Joy who has stolen my joy!

"Pistachio and almonds are the sweet food of Nauruz, but I need neither pistachio nor almonds for I have your eye and your lip!

"The festive guests burn aloe and I, deprived of my idol, burn like aloe, for with her beauty-spot, black as a Hindu, she plunders the hearts of the Moslems.

"They all kiss one another today, and I torture myself, dying, and think: "why is that sweet charming mouth to be kissed by another?".

"Vinegar is on the table of all, and like vinegar my friend turns to me acid and surly her rose-coloured face!

"The Festival lasts one day in the year for all; but looking at that royal face the festival is for me the year and the month and the week and every dawn and every evening!

"Indeed this special festival of mine (may its power and glory be eternal) conquers and defeats all the festivals of the common herd! (22)".

Here the images are still those of the classic type; the efforts based on the Indian style have been abandoned (and I know not whether this is a good thing or not). What has remained of that style is above all a richer terminology applied to the objects of poetry. The gnostic mystical element of the classic style has been abandoned, leaving behind it only its formal framework. Once more natural phenomena and objects have reacquired their natural appearance, even if they be sung with more charm and sometimes in a more mannered style. It may seem strange that this return to a more natural style should have coincided with what is universally considered to be a period of decadence in the political history of Persia. In reality, it was a reaction, a return to former days, to a reflected naturalness. The poets were weary of experimenting with new styles.

And it was at this time in the evolution of Persian poetry that the European experience was violently introduced (23).

The space at my disposal has only allowed me to give very few examples of this traditional style. But I hope I may have succeeded in making two things clear. One is the great variety of this Persian poetry of the ghazal, one of the most refined products of the age-old Iranian civilisation, and which,—strange as it may seem in view of its hermetic forms—has had an incredibly wide and deep influence on the literatures of Asia. From the shores of the Ionian Sea, only a few miles from Italy, where, until a few dozen years ago poems were written in the Albanian language imitating the Persian ghazal (for instance, those of Nezim, a famous Albanian ghazal writer of the 18th century) (24) as far as the Malay Archipelago, where the Persian ghazal had many imitators, from the steppes of Central Asia, one of the centres where the Indian style prospered greatly, to the tropical Deccan whose forests, as far back as the 15th-16th century, began to resound to the mystical ghazal, that "short yet spacious lay" provided the chief instrument for poetic expression for the most widely differing peoples in the most varied languages.

The other is the power of assimilation of the Iranian race, which has succeeded in its poetry in combining harmoniously motifs coming from the most diverse civilisations, forming a real. bridge between Semitic Asia Minor, Babylonia, Islam, and the world of the ancient Aryas whose name is proudly borne by the land of Iran itself. The ancient cosmic vision of light and darkness, the world of angels and of the transcendent hypostases, the grandiose conception of Divine Time and of the sacred transparency of human time, typical of Iranian religious thought; the robust anti-mythological sense of Islamic monotheism; the refinements of neo-platonic Hellenistic philosophy, provide the background, of diverse origin yet miraculously unitarian, on which this lyric poetry has grown.

I should like to close these remarks by reading the translation of a lyrical fragment by a great poet-philosopher who succeeded in a very remarkable way in fusing in himself both Iran and Islam, the philosophy of the Greek falasifa and of the Moslem ilahiyun. I refer to Naser-e Khosrov, of the 11th century, the period of transition in which the pre-classic lyric was shaped into the classic.

The shades of evening are falling on the soul of the poet and on the world: Persian pessimism, with which you are all familiar as powerfully expressed by a Khayyam, seems to be taking possession of the poet. But in the very depth of night the Iranian faith in the victory of Light over Darkness, of Heaven over Earth, reasserts itself. The stars begin to shine, the ancient Nahid (Venus), the goddess of fertility and of the waters, the Milky Way, the Pleiades, victorious lights, angelic powers which will at last defeat the Satanic powers of despondency and evil. And may this voice from Iran be not only to us but also to the friendly sister people and to the whole world, now so close to the Ahrimanic darkness, an augury and a symbol of resurrection (25).

"Look at the branch of the tree, bent like the back of the dal (26), look at the leaf shrivelled like a wasted face.

"The cloud of sadness has come and with its damp breath has watered everything, gardens and even deserted ruins.

"Beneath the dark cloud the disk of the sun … looks like thick dust on an ancient vase of gold.

"And when the autumn wind had clothed with garments of dark clouds the vault of heaven,

"The sun from the meridian heights hastened towards the low lying bed of the sea to cleanse its face from the black dust.

"When the fair-haired sovereign is defeated, the fierce Ethiopian prince will revenge himself on us (and it is perhaps for this that each night such an armed array of stars gathers in the heaven).

"Yester evening my eye was powerless to penetrate in meditation what a cruel fate wanted of me:

"Black was the sky, dark the heavens, I an ant; dust and earth whirling in a pitchblack box!

"And when half the night had passed I exclaimed: "It is perhaps the omnipresent Time that has opened its black mouth!".

"In the sky (a minute ago the blackest of bodies) only the planet Venus glowed, a shining beauty-spot of certainty on the black face of doubt.

"Then there appeared, little by little, the light of the Milky Way, like white milk spilt on an azure table,

"And then the Pleiades, like the last streaks of light on the nape of the neck of Ahriman left after the strong grasp of the Angel's fingers:

"Now the hosts of heaven were arming themselves with light, while in despair the soldiers of the earth were draping themselves in a shroud of pitch!".

Notes

¹ This article is the re-elaboration of a lecture entitled "Thought and Form in Persian Poetry" delivered at IsMEO, May 7, 1958. The lecture deals more especially with the most important Persian lyrical form, that of the ghazal or ode.

² H. Ritter. Ueber die Bildersprache Nizami's. Berlin-Leipzig, 1927.

³ Notable above all from this standpoint are his works: Beiträge zur Biographie, Charakteristik und Interpretation des türkischen Dichters Sabit. Praha, 1926, and more recently the full "Persian Literary History" Dejiny perske a tad icke literatury. Praha, 1956.

⁴ Also in Ritter's recent, large-scale work (Das Meer der Seele, Leiden, 1955) which, whilst dealing more especially with the poetical world of F. Attar (12th century). contains a rich collection of very many motifs of Persian mystical lyrics in general, this motif is not studied historically.

⁵ In his still useful Allégories, récits poétiques et chants populaires traduits de l'arabe, du persan, de l'hindoustani et du turc, Paris, 1876², pp. 25-26.

⁶ Ibid, pp. 307 et seq.

⁷Golestan, Furughi ed., p. 3.

⁸ I. Pizzi. Storia della poesia persiana. Turin, 1894, Vol. II, pp. 450-51.

⁹ Daqiqi (952) speaks of it in his epic fragments inserted in the Shahnama of Firdausi. For a further collection of material on the "cypress of Kashmar" see the very beautiful work in Persian by M. Moin Mazdayasna va ta 'sir-e an dar adabiyat-e farsi. Teheran, 1326 (= 1948), pp. 339 et seq.

¹⁰ Cfr. M. Eliade. Manuale di Storia delle Religioni (Italian ed.), Turin, 1954, p. 318.

¹¹ In a recent communication in the "International Islamic Colloquium" at Lahore (Dec.-Jan. 1957-58) entitled "Can we speak of Muslim Poetry?" published in an abbreviated form in "Pakistan Quarterly" (Vol. VII, n. 4, 1957), pp. 38 et seq.

¹² On the presumed "Zoroastrianism" of Daqiqi see the acute article by H. H. Schaeder, War Daqiqi Zoroastrier? in "Festschrift G. Jacob". Leipzig, 1932, pp. 288-303.

¹³ The text can be found in the Bustan (Furughi ed., pp. 215 et seq.) in an episode concerning the Hindu temple of Somnath. The essentially non-Islamic character of many of the features and motifs that form the complex picture of traditional lyrical poetry is sometimes clearly realised by the poets themselves. Thus the great Urdu and Persian poet Ghalib (d. 1869) of Delhi, says:

farman-rava na-gasht musalman ba-hich asr
gar raft mogh zi-maikada tarsa furu girift!

"The Moslem has never dominated in any century; as soon as the Magian leaves the tavern, the Christian enters!" (Intikhab-i Ghalib, Bombay, 1942, p. 57).

¹⁴ See, for instance, the verses quoted by Gabrieli in his Storia della Letteratura Araba, Milan, 1952, p. 127.

¹⁵ L. Massignon. Essai sur le lexique technique de la mystique musulmane, Paris, 1922, p. 89.

¹⁶ See my article Contributo a una definizione dello "stile indiano" della poesia persiana in "Annali dell'Istituto Univ. Orientale", Naples, N. S., Vol. VII, 1958, pp. 167 et seq.

¹⁷ For instance, in Pakistan, Dr. Abu'l-Lais Siddiqi, on page 37 et seq. of his critical study in Urdu Ghazal aur mutaghazzalin, Karachi, 1954. He disagrees with over-simplified attacks made on the traditional ghazal started by the great Urdu critic, Hali (1914). Hali's ideas on ghazal are set forth and discussed in my article Altaf Husain Hali's ideas on ghazal in "Charisteria Orientalia" Praha, 1956, pp 38 et seq.

¹⁸ Abdu 'I-Ghani Mirzoev. Rudagi va inkishaf-i ghazal dar asr-ha-ye X-XV, Stalinabad, 1957.

¹⁹ Text quoted in Moin op. cit., p. 482.

²⁰ I am translating from the lithographed Nawalkhishore edition, Lucknow, 1880, p. 559.

²¹ Already quoted in Note 16.

²² Persian text in Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Cambridge, 1953, Vol. IV, pp. 333-34.

²³ Another article will deal with a study of the style of Persian poetry subsequent to European influence.

²⁴ See on this matter E. Rossi: Notizia su un manoscritto del canzoniere di Nezim … In RSO, XXI, pp. 219 et seq.

²⁵ Only part of the text of this long poem has been translated. It is not, technically speaking, a ghazal, but a qasida, of ethical-religious content, but the vigour of the expression and the beauty of this fragment—lyrical from our point of view—have led me to select it to close this very brief summary of the history of the style of the Iranian lyric poetry. I translate from the edition of the canzoniere of Naser-e Khosrov by Nasrullah Taqavi, with an introduction by Hasan Taqi-zade, Teheran, 1307 (= 1929), p. 332.

²⁶ The Arab letter dal has a curved shape.