SOURCE: "The Ghazal as Fiction: Implied Speakers and Implied Audience in Hafiz's Ghazals," in Intoxication, Earthly and Heavenly: Seven Studies on the Poet Hafiz of Shiraz, edited by Michael Glünz and J. Christoph Burgel, Peter Lang, Inc., 1991, pp. 89-103.

[In the following essay, Meisami argues for taking a literary—as opposed to a biographical or allegorical—approach to studying the relationship between speaker and audience in Hafzz's poetry.]

Since Roger Lescot called attention to the plurality of the object or addressee of Hafiz's ghazals, it has become commonplace to speak of parallelism between the ma 'shuq, mamduh and ma 'bud.¹ While Lescot was primarily interested in the correlation between the ghazal's addressee and actual individuals, others, notably Gilbert Lazard, have discussed the problem in connection with the "symbolic meaning" of the ghazals. On the basis of the triad of potential addressees Lazard posited three "degrees" of Hafiz's use of language, one literal, according to which the ghazal may be taken at face value, and two metaphorical, in which the ghazal contains a panegyric or mystical subtext; although these three interrelated fields of meaning may be present simultaneously within a given poem, one will usually be dominant.²

These discussions are valuable as far as they go; but they do not go far enough, as they do not delve deeply enough into the literary world of the ghazal. Their focus is typically on the identification of the literal, or actual, addressee in a particular ghazal. Less attention has been paid to the existence of yet other addressees who exist in some relationship to the poem's speaker, or to the fact that changes in addressee are often accompanied by a change in speaking voice as well. This, it seems to me, is because behind most readings of the ghazals, whether as secular, mystical, or panegyric, lies the assumption that the speaking voice is always that of the poet, and that the sentiments conveyed are his own, even though they may be rhetorically "dressed up" to appear otherwise (a tendency exemplified by Lescot's reduction of mystical imagery and allusions to a mere rhetorical strategy).³ Further testimony to this assumption is the endless series of discussions of Hafiz's "philosophy" with which we are all familiar.

Jan Rypka voiced the typical Orientalist view of the relationship between the lyric poet and his poems when he observed, "It is indeed not easy to say to what extent lyric poetry consists of a masterly variation on conventional themes and where actual experience begins."⁴ This assumes a dichotomy between convention and reality and equates "true poetry" with the expression of personal experience. Yet, as we know, Persian poetry is highly conventional; could it have flourished as such for many centuries if poets found its conventions cumbersome and intolerably restricting? As Robert Rehder points out, "Men for hundreds of years wrote ghazals not out of mere habit but because the ghazal expressed what they wanted to say in a way which pleased them,"⁵ and stresses that "as a love lyric the ghazal is both personal and impersonal. There is intimacy without autobiography."⁶

To what extent is it appropriate to equate the statements of any poet, but especially a medieval poet working in a highly conventional craft, with his own views, as is routinely done in the case of Hafiz? One result of this legacy of Romantic theories of poetry (arguably inapplicable even to Romantic poets) is that the inconsistencies perceived in a poet's oeuvre, which violate the Romantic criterion of "sincerity", must be rationalized by recourse to a variety of pseudo-explanations: the exigencies of patronage, a chronogical development of the poet's "ideas" in which different views represent different stages, the corruptions introduced by scribes, and, especially in the case of Hafiz (but not limited to him), an all-encompassing mystical allegoresis which absorbs inconsistencies by interpreting all statements according to a predetermined code. None of these approaches has been of great utility in the study of Hafiz, and they have often created more problems than they have solved. For this reason I would like to suggest a different approach to reading Hafiz (and by extension other Eastern poets), one which is literary rather than biographical or allegorical, and which has been utilized in the study of other pre-modern poets.

Over forty years ago Leo Spitzer, in an article which was to have a major impact on literary theory, warned against confusing between what he called "the poetic and the empirical I."

In the Middle Ages [wrote Spitzer], the 'poetic I' had more freedom and more breadth than it has today: at that time the concept of intellectual property did not exist because literature dealt not with the individual but with mankind: the 'ut in pluribus' was an accepted standard … And we must assume that the medieval public saw in the 'poetic F' a representative of mankind, that it was interested only in this representative role of the poet.⁷

Discussing the example of Dante, he continues,

All the modern misunderstandings on the part of commentators of the 'biographical approach' school are due to their confusion of the 'poetic F' with the empirical or pragmatical T of the poet—who, in the very first lines of his poem, has taken care to present his 'poetic F' as representative of humanity: 'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura … 'At the same time, however, Dante does not allow us to forget that his empirical personality (his feeling, speaking, gesticulating personality) is also included in this T … For the story that Dante had to tell, both aspects of his composite T were necessary: on the one hand, he must transcend the limitations of individuality in order to gain an experience of universal experience; on the other, an individual eye is necessary to perceive and to fix the matter of experience.⁸

In other words, while the poet may incorporate recognizable biographical details into his work (just as he incorporates recognizable reality items drawn from the world around him), they are transformed by this inclusion into literary materials, and must henceforth be considered with respect to their literary function. Although he did not use the term himself, Spitzer's article greatly influenced what soon came to be known as persona criticism. The notion of the literary persona is not a new one; it was recognized to some extent at least by Plato and Aristotle,⁹ and we should not forget that among the "proofs" of classical rhetoric is that by character, or ethos, which involves convincing the audience, or jury, that the speaker arguing (for example) a legal case is of a certain character.¹⁰ But this important critical concept has remained virtually ignored in the study of Near Eastern literatures, despite its clear potential for the illumination of many critical issues.

Persona criticism makes a distinction between the implied author (or speaker) in a work and the real-life author of that work; the implied speaker is a fictional creation whose chief function is to provide the norms which inform the world presented in the work. "The degree to which the implied author reveals himself and the nature of the norms that he espouses are dictated by the effects that the author wishes his work to have … Considerations of the sincerity of the author and the degree to which the implied author does or does not represent the norms of the real-life author are relegated to biography."¹¹

Classicists have applied the concept of the persona to the study of the Roman elegiac poets. As Robert Elliott observes,

Classical literary doctrine assumed no necessary connection between the most intense personal poems and the lives or personalities of their authors. The Roman elegists … write of their mistresses with memorable passion; to our ears the poems seem openly confessional, "sincere"; yet modern scholars have shown the folly of reading [such poems] as autobiographical documents. Despite its personal form, erotic poetry cannot be taken to reflect the true feelings or conduct of the writer. There are conventions for love poetry as for other forms of artistic expression, and the poets themselves insist on the distinction between art and life … For [these poets] sincerity is a function of style, involving a relationship between the artist and the public; it has to do with the presentation of a self appropriate to the kind of verse being written, to the genre, not with the personality of the poet.¹²

Similar obervations have been made for medieval lyric: Peter Dronke notes that the term "personal" "implies not (or not necessarily) the revelation of private experience, but rather the realisation of a persona, that is, the attainment of a certain objectivity … The authenticity lies in … the strength of the imaginative projection."¹³ The notion of persona is also central, if implicit, in Frederick Goldin's discussion of varying perspectives in the courtly lyric.¹⁴ Of particular importance is Martin Stevens' modification of the notion of persona to a theory of the "performing self to which attention is called by the poet's self-referential statements in his poem.¹⁵

Conventionally the ghazal is univocal: that is, each poem typically features a single speaker who remains consistent throughout. Different types of ghazal, however, present different speakers, a fact which becomes apparent when we discard the notion that the speaker in any ghazal is the poet himself. The characters and roles of the ghazal's various speakers are conventional and determined by generic considerations; many such "speaking voices" can be traced back to earlier Arabic poetry, in particular that of the early Abbasid period, which saw the development of specialized types of poem such as the khamriya, the independent love poem, and the zuhdiya or homiletic poem, each characterized by a distinctive speaking voice. In the zuhdiya the speaker is the sage, contemptuous of the world and its deceits, who exhorts to abandonment of worldly concerns and enjoins a life of piety in preparation for the Hereafter. In the love poem it is the lover, who complains of separation from his beloved and of her cruelty and protests his undying dedication. In the khamriya the speaker is the libertine who boasts of his exploits in the tavern and praises the wine which is, to him, the only worthy object of devotion. Other voices inform other types of poetry, encomium, satire, mudjun poetry, and so on; moreover, as a poet moves from one genre to another, so does the implied speaker make a corresponding shift.

In the qasida various speaking voices may be combined; though they complement each other, all are implicitly subsumed under the dominant generic persona of the encomiast. A contrast is sometimes established between private and public aspects of the persona; for example, the love relationship described in the nasib parallels or contrasts with the poet-patron relationship in the madih. But in the short poem—the Arabic qit'a or "short qasida", as al-Djahiz termed the independent, single-topic poem, or the various brief Persian lyric forms—the implied speaker is, conventionally, consistent throughout the poem. In the ghazal, which is par excellence a love poem, this speaker is a lover, the addressee or dedicatee his beloved, and the poem is sung to gain the favour of this implied addressee.

But not all ghazals are love poems; and not all love poems deal with secular love. In the mystical ghazal the implied speaker is the mystical aspirant, a questing lover on the path of divine union. In wine poems (both secular and mystical) we often hear echoes of Abu Nuwas's libertine persona, revived in that of the rind who prefers honest sin to hypocritical piety and who (in contrast to his generic adversary the zahid) enjoins his listener to "seize the day". With the development of mystical poetry and the frequent overlapping of the language of mystical and courtly ghazal the persona of the rind comes to encompass not only that of the lover but also that of the sage, especially when, with poets such as Sa'di, the Sufi sage takes on the generic, as well as the actual, function of advisor to princes, and becomes a fixture in the courtly as well as the mystical world of the ghazal. Each of these personae is conventional and each has a long tradition behind it; thus the implied speaker of any poem would have been instantly recognizable to its hearers, as would the subtlest variation on any of its conventions.

The speaker of a given poem exists in relation to his audience, which is represented in the world of the poem and which, like the speaker, combines reality with fiction. It is the audience, and the different elements within it, which determines the role assumed in any poem—and in different portions of a single poem—by its speaker. As Frederick Goldin notes,

The courtly community is represented in the lyric by the audience; the directions that love may take, by the different kinds of persons in that audience and the conflicting impulses of the 'I', the courtly lover, in the lyric … The lyric audience consists of friends and enemies who are so designated by the singer as he responds to them in the course of his song.¹⁶

Goldin's remarks are of particular importance because he emphasizes the performance context of the lyric, a context often conveniently forgotten by those who equate poetic statements with personal opinions and who overlook the fact that medieval poetry is not, in terms of its production, either confession or private meditation, but public performance. Goldin suggests a method of reading such lyrics, central to which is the notion of the "basic fiction" of the courtly lyric.

… This fiction is fragmented, analyzed into a fixed register of episodes, moods, and postures, from which the poet draws in order to arrange a certain nonnarrative pattern … The courtly audience knew this fiction thoroughly, and once it heard the opening lines it would place each lyric at a specific point in the round of courtly love … The opening lines, like the opening moves of a game, determine the possibilities that can follow … Once the audience located the lyric, it would know ex-actly what to expect, and the poet would go on to satisfy or astonish his listeners.¹⁷

It is scarcely necessary to review the basic conventions of courtly love: the inaccessibility, or cruelty, of the beloved, the lover's single-minded devotion, his joy at the least favour shown him, his despair at separation or at obstacles to the realization of his love. Nor is it necessary to dwell on the ethical dimensions of this fiction: that "Courtly love … is the love of courtliness, of the refinement that distinguishes a class, of an ideal fulfilled in a person whom everyone recognizes," and who is concretely embodied in the singer of the poem, "the performer who stands before the audience in the role of a courtly lover," and whose song has at one and the same time "a universal and an individualized significance: the singer reveals to the audience its own idealized image and at the same time proves his right to belong to the courtly class."¹⁸ Essential to this ideal of courtliness was the maintenance of the fiction; for what could be more absurd (as romance writers East and West have shown) than taking literally the fiction of courtly love, which "as a literary theme … is an ameliorating and unifying influence, but as the basis of an actual relation between flesh-and-blood lovers … is simply ridiculous."¹⁹ It is this—and not biography—which accounts for the remoteness, the unattainability of the love object (whether real or spiritualized), a remoteness parodied by the bacchic poets who, like Abu Nuwas, sing of a real, accessible beloved rather than the ephemeral Laylis and Hinds of the love poet.

The speaker may at times identify himself with the hostile elements in his audience: the slanderers, spies, hypocrites, false lovers, false poets, vulgar people, and, in Persian ghazal in particular, the ascetics and their ilk, who condemn his love and wish to discredit it;²⁰ he may criticize their lack of perception, or adopt their viewpoint momentarily only to reject it. He thus addresses varied elements in his audience, friends and enemies alike, moving from one to the other in his poem. The structure of the poem, the order it observes, are determined by this movement, "by the singer's successive awareness of the various segments in his audience during the performance of the song."²¹

This technique—which Goldin terms "the technique of playing through the perspectives of an audience, the technique of the performed song"²²—is characteristic of the ghazal. It accounts for the change of acting persons within a single poem first commented on by Joseph von Hammer, who noted that "the poet may, in one and the same poem, speak now in the first person, now in the second, now in the third," and saw this as contributing to the ghazal's lack of unity.²³ This feature reflects the interaction of the speaker with different segments of his audience, who represent different perspectives on, or responses to, his poem;²⁴ while yet more shifts in perspective are provided by the takhallus, also frequently seen as another cause of the ghazal's incoherence.

Reading the lyric as performance, as the dramatisation, so to speak of an accepted and familiar fiction, sheds light on many of Hafiz's ghazals, for example the famous "Shiraz Turk" ghazal (P3)²⁵, over which more ink has been spilled (and to less point) than any other.²⁶

1. Should that Turk of Shiraz take my heart into his hand, I'd give up, for his Hindu mole, all Samarqand and Bukhara.
2. Saqi, bring the last of the wine, for you'll not find in Paradise the banks of Ruknabad's stream, or the rosegarden of Musalla.
3. Alas! those jesting gypsies, so graceful and disturbing, have robbed my heart of patience, as Turks plunder the feast.
4. Of our imperfect love the beloved's beauty has no need: what need for paint, for mole and down, has the beauteous face?
5. From that daily-growing beauty which was Joseph's I knew that love would bring Zulaikha out from the veil of chastity.
6. Though you revile and curse me, yet I will pray for you, for bitter answers well become sugared, ruby lips.
7. Listen to this advice, my love, for better than life itself do the fortunate young love the counsel of wise elders:
8. Talk of the minstrel and of wine; seek less the secret of Time, for no one has solved, or will, through wisdom that enigma.
9. You have sung a ghazal and threaded pearls; come, sing sweetly, Hafiz, that the sphere may scatter the Pleiads' necklace upon your verse.

The speaker begins by addressing the friends in his audience, confiding to them his despair in love, and his willingness to give all for a sign of favour. Despairing of success, he seeks solace in wine and the pleasures of the present company because, as he says, he can endure no more of this torment. This is typical hasb-i hal material, and it is not necessary to see in may-i baqi any more than this literal sense (his willingness to drink whatever remains of the wine reinforces the lover's desperation). Then follow those lines which have excited mystical interpretation for generations, as the speaker ponders the perfection of his beloved—a beauty which, like that of Joseph, would drive anyone to distraction—and his own imperfect state, both givens of the fiction of courtly love. Even those who avow purity, says he (casting a sidelong glance at the enemies in his audience, the critics of his excess), would be putty in the hands of such a beauty; but while they might criticize the beloved's ill-treatment of the lover, he forgives it, "for bitter answers well become sugared ruby lips." He continues to address his beloved (implicitly among the audience) with advice meant to incense the ascetic enemies: talk only of wine and music, for who can understand love's mysteries? The implication is that he will go on with his obsession, despite the grief it brings him and the danger of ridicule from others, because this is, after all, the lover's role. The final cap demonstrates the artificiality of all this, plus the fact that it is a performance and not a "slice of life": the singer's poem is so excellent, so well constructed and adorned, that the heavens will bestow on him the "Pleiads' necklace" in reward.

This is perhaps an oversimplified reading; but it has the advantage of dispensing with glosses, explications and commentaries relying on items which are not in the text itself, and which can only be put there with a considerable amount of strain. The takhallus line, moreover, calls attention to the fact that the ghazal which has preceded it is a fiction, and stresses the role of the poet as creator and performer of that fiction. The various forms of self-reference in the takhal-lus, paradoxically, both emphasize the named poet as author of the text, and distance him from that text. Often (as in the "Shiraz Turk") the speaker stands back from the poem to admire it; at other times he refers to it as if it were the work of another; he sometimes addresses himself, at other times a member or members of his audience, at others he may refer obliquely to a specific segment of that audience. Such strategies may establish a distinction between the speaker of the ghazal itself and the speaker of the takhallus; or they may create an identity, a community of sentiment, between the implied speaker and one segment of the audience (the friends, the patron) or an opposition between the speaker and the values he represens and another segment of the audience (the enemies, the detractors).

The technique of representing a variety of perspectives through shifts in speaking voices or through changes in acting persons is not distinctive to Hafiz's ghazal; there are precedents in earlier ghazal, both courtly and mystical, as there are for other strategies, such as the multiplicity of speakers in dialogue poems, or in poems which contain passages of discourse either reported by the speaker or directed to him by another person in the fictional world of the poem. But Hafiz varies these familiar techniques in a number of ghazals in which we find a plurality of implied speakers within the body of the poem, a plurality of personae each of whom informs a particular segment of the ghazal. Overtones of this are present in the "Shiraz Turk" ghazal, in the advice addressed to the beloved, where the speaker moves briefly from the role of lover to that of sage: "Listen to this advice, my love, for better than life itself do the fortunate young love the counsel of wise elders." In this context the implied addressee correspondingly shifts from beloved to prince, who are thereby conflated. These voices are also combined in my second example (P8),²⁷ which was discussed by A. Bausani as an example of "formal incoherence" in Hafiz's ghazals,²⁸ and which recalls Shah Shudja"s famous (if perhaps apocryphal) criticism of Hafiz for mingling verses on wine, Sufism and love in a single poem.

1. The brilliance of youth's time has returned to the garden; news of the rose has reached the sweet-singing nightingale.
2. Saba, if you pass by the youths of the meadow, carry my regards to cypress, rose and basil.
3. If the wine-selling Magian child displays himself so, I will sweep the threshhold of the wineshop with my eyelids.
4. O you who draw over the moon a polo-stick of pure amber, do not cause me, a bewildered wanderer, distress.
5. I fear that those people who laugh at the drinkers of dregs will place faith at the disposal of the tavern.
6. Be the companion of the men of God; for in Noah's ship is earth which gives not a drop for the tempest.
7. Go out of this turning dwelling, and do not ask for bread, for that much-visited host in the end kills its guest.
8. The last resting-place of everyone is a handful of earth; say, what need then to raise a palace to the skies?
9. O my Moon of Canaan, the throne of Egypt is yours; it is time for you to bid farewell to your prison.
10. Hafiz, drink wine, practice rindi, and be happy; but do not, like others, make the Koran a snare of hypocrisy.

The ghazal begins (lines 1-2) with a description of spring (wasf-i bahar), a characteristic prelude to love poems, wine poems, and panegyrics, and suggests that the speaker is elsewhere than in the garden described. Lines 3-4 identify his whereabouts as the wineshop, where he sings for a less formal gathering, and where the beauty of the "wineselling Magian child" threatens to rob him of his wits. With lines 5-8 the tone shifts abruptly from a lover's complaint to admonition, in which the speaker offers sententious advice; the segment remains linked to the previous one, however, by the motifs of wine, tavern and saqi. Yet the voice of the speaker is a different, sterner one: that of the rind in his incarnation as sage, who exhorts to sincere piety as opposed to hypocrisy, and warns of the transience of this world. The two final lines recapitulate, in the same order, these two voices: the lover apostrophizes his beloved, the sage rind exhorts himself to eschew hypocrisy. Line 9 employs a topic of ghazal, the anticipated appearance of the beloved, now given courtly overtones; the final line combines an invitatio (invitation to drink) with a further warning against hypocrisy.

That the generic dominant in this poem is not ghazal, or love poetry, but admonition, is clear from the central position and the amount of space devoted to that genre, and from its linkage with other elements which provide supporting evidence for the unspoken thesis that contentment with life's simple joys is superior to material aspirations thinly veiled by hypocritical piety. The poem's homiletic character makes irrelevant the glossing of the rose as "the supreme, inaccessible symbol of the divine istighna;" in ghazal the rose is the beloved, in panegyric the prince, in homiletic poetry an emblem of the transience of beauty and power; a mystical interpretation is extraneous to the ghazal itself. The over-interpretation of such figures as the mughbacha, the rose and the nightingale—who in this poem at least is not singing "invitations to partake of the mystic wine"—stems from the view that "tradition" imposes meanings on topics and images that the poet "does not consciously wish;" in fact, the poet selects the areas of meaning he wishes to stress, chooses his images and topics accordingly, and places them in the mouth of an appropriate speaker.

This pre-determined reading, moreover, misses an important field of meaning that the poet has deliberately built into this ghazal: the courtly one. We may assume that the ghazal was composed for, and performed before, a courtly audience in a courtly setting. The garden of the opening lines is a courtly garden, its inhabitants—cypress, rose and basil—all emblems of royalty. That the speaker is not present in that garden, that he asks the lovers' messenger (the Saba) to convey his greetings there, and that he is troubled by his beloved's cruelty, suggest, in this courtly context, that he is out of favor, has lost his place in the courtly garden. This suggestion is strengthened by the homiletic segment, where the speaker turns on the hypocrites, accussing them of false piety and reminding them that the last resting place of all is in the earth: what good are lofty palaces then? The sudden apostrophe to the beloved, with the allusion to Joseph, freed from prison to become ruler of Egypt, suggests not a mystical but a topical reference to the prince (perhaps alluding to his restoration as ruler of Shiraz in 1366). Beneath the voices of lover and of rind lies that of the encomiast, the court poet who combines in his person two complementary sets of values, two stances—dedication to love and to virtue—traditionally held up for emulation by the audience. Both audience and dedicatee are invited to displace themselves into the persona of the speaker, to occupy either, or both, of these stances and thus to distinguish themselves from the enemies, who scoff at the drinkers and who make the Koran "a snare for hypocrisy."

Another type of poem, to which I have referred to elsewhere as Hafiz's microcosmic ghazal,²⁹ features both reported discourse by a substitute speaker or speakers as well as a plurality of implied speakers. This type is represented by the two final examples, which exhibit remarkably parallel structures. The first (P48)³⁰ begins with the dialogue of nightingale and rose.

1. At dawn the bird of the meadow said to the new-risen rose, "Less coquetry! for many like you have flowered in this garden."
2. The rose laughed: "Indeed, the truth does not disturb us; but no lover ever spoke a harsh word to his beloved.
3. "If you desire to drink the ruby wine from that bejewelled cup, many a pearl must you string with the tips of your eyelashes.
4. "The scent of love will never come to the nostrils of one who does not sweep the sill of the wineshop with his forehead."
5. Last night in Iram's Garden, when, with the gentle air, the hyacinth's curls were stirred by the dawn breeze,
6. I said, "O Throne of Djamshid, where is your world-seeing Cup?" It answered, "Alas, that waking fortune slept."
7. The words of love are not those which come to the tongue: Saqi, bring wine, and cut short all this talk.
8. Hafiz's tears have cast wisdom and patience into the sea. What can he do? the burning of love's grief cannot be hidden.

In the opening dialogue (1-4) the nightingale is a substitute speaker for the lover; the rose represents the beloved, replying as such a person might. The second segment (5-6) shifts to the voice of the court poet as sage, who questions the personified throne of Djamshid and receives in answer the type of sententious statement normally expressed in the voice of the sage himself. In the third segment (7-8) the distressed lover addresses the saqi with a typical complaint (the saqi is customarily not required to reply, but merely to pour the wine, and we must envisage a real saqi among the assembly doing just that); the final cap suggests the reason for the complaint (as if in reply to a hostile criticism) which by extension relates to the entire poem: love carries with it, paradoxically, not only the obligation of "concealing the secret," but of speaking out, of communicating lived experience, or sententious wisdom, to others in order that they may learn from it, so taht they may more perfectly identify with the roles to which they aspire.

The final example (P468)³¹ presents the same set of speakers in a slightly different combination which involves recapitulation as well as alternation.

1. The nightingale, from the cypress branch, to a Pahlavi air, sang last night the lesson of spiritual stations:
2. "Come, for Moses' fire has put forth a rose, that you may hear from the tree the subtle sentence of Unity."
3. The birds of the garden are all poets and wits, that the lord may drink wine to the sound of Pahlavi songs.
4. Djamshid bore nought from this world but the tale of the Cup: beware! set not your heart on worldly things.
5. How pleasant is the beggar's mat and secure sleep; this life is not within the grasp of the royal throne.
6. Hear this strange tale of upside-down fortune: my beloved has slain me with his life-giving breath.
7. Your eyes have, with a glance, destroyed men's homes; may you suffer no headache, who walk so gracefully drunken.
8. How well the ancient Gardener put it to the Youth: "O light of my eyes, you shall reap nought but what you sow."
9. Did the Saqi give Hafiz more than his share, that the end of his divine's turban has become disarrayed?

The first segment (1-2) presents the nightingale (substituting for the court poet) and announces his lesson, that of the meaning of divine Unity, implicitly contained in the conceits of the poem which follows. Line 3 establishes the courtly setting in which the ghazal is performed. In lines 4 and 5 the speaker, as sage, delivers his own lesson: that of contentment with life's simple pleasures, a "station" which cannot be gained by those who, like kings, concern themselves only with worldly things. In lines 6 and 7 the speaker, now in the role of lover (yet still, implicitly, the admonishing court poet), addresses his beloved, complains of his cruelty, and conveys another piece of advice: the warning not to be too proud. The eighth line is a sententia which glosses both the nightingale's lesson and that of the sage: as ye sow so shall ye reap; the "Unity" which emerges from this lesson is that of sincere dedication to an ethical ideal, what Hafiz calls in other contexts ya-krangi, matching deeds to principles, being virtuous in fact as well in aspiration. The final cap puts us directly back into the courtly gathering, as a somewhat hostile listener, probably bored with this combination of lyricism and moralizing, asks whether the poem itself is motivated by ethical intent or by more mundane causes: is it not because he has received more than his share of the wine that Hafiz (the poet-figure within which are subsumed the various identities of the persona) is carrying on this way? Such effusions, it is suggested, are unbecoming to a divine—that class of which Hafiz is in fact a member, but from which he dissociates himself in much of his poetry.

It is thus not merely "themes" (as Shah Shudja', and many others since him, have supposed) which are mingled in Hafiz's ghazals, but voices as well; and it is with reference to these voices that various segments of their implied audience, as well as the addressee, can be established, their identities contingent on that of the implied speaker. It is the voice of the rind (in his manifestation of lover or of sage) who criticizes the mudda'i, the zahid, the muhtasib, the hypocritical Sufi; it is the voice of the sage (conflating lover and rind) who proffers advice, whether directly or indirectly, to the prince (who may be depicted as an inexperienced lover, a cruel beloved, an arrogant rose). Such persons constitute the dramatis personae of the fictive world of the ghazal, a world which mirrors, but is not co-extensive with, the real world in which the poet lives.

Notes

¹ Roger Lescot, "Essai d'une chronologie de l'oeuvre de Hâfiz," BEO 19 (1944), pp. 57-100.

² Gilbert Lazard, "Le langage symbolique du ghazal," Poesia di Hâfez (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1978), pp. 59-71.

³ Lescot, "Essai," pp. 96-97.

⁴ Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968), p. 86.

⁵ Robert Rehder, "Unity in the Ghazals of Hafiz," Der Islam 51 (1974), p. 65.

⁶ Ibid., p. 78.

⁷ Leo Spitzer, "Note on the Poetic and the Empirical 'l' in Medieval Authors," Traditio 4 (1946), pp. 415-16.

⁸ Ibid., p. 415.

⁹ "Persona," Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (=PEPP), ed. Alex Preminger, enlarged ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 959.

¹⁰ Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.ii.3-6.

¹¹PEPP, p. 960.

¹² Robert C. Elliott, The Literary Persona (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 43.

¹³ Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (London: 1968), p. 93.

¹⁴ See Frederick Goldin, "The Array of Perspectives in the Early Courtly Love Lyric," in: In Pursuit of Perfection, ed. J. Ferrante and G. Economou (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975), pp. 51-100.

¹⁵ Martin Stevens, "The Performing Self in Twelfth-Century Culture," Viator 9 (1978), pp. 193-212.

¹⁶ Goldin, "Array of Perspectives," p. 51.

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 52-53.

¹⁸ Ibid., pp. 54-55.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 57.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 58.

²¹ Ibid., pp. 67-68.

²² Ibid., p. 68.

²³Der Diwan, ed. J. von Hammer (Stuttgart: 1812; rept. Hildesheim, 1973), 1:vii; cf. Annemarie Schimmel, "Hafiz and His Critics," Studies in Islam 16 (1979), p. 15.

²⁴ Goldin, "Array of Perspectives," pp. 76-78.

²⁵ KH 3; see Appendix.

²⁶ All texts cited are from the Diwan, ed. H. Pizhman, Tehran 1318/1939 (=P); translations, unless otherwise indicated, are the author's.

²⁷ KH 9; see Appendix; for a French translation see Mme Kappler's article, p. 73

²⁸ Alessandro Bausani, "The Development of Form in Persian Lyrics: A Way to a Better Understanding of the Structure of Western Poetry," East and West, n.s., 9 (1958), pp. 145-53; see also EI², s.v. "ghazal". The translation is Bausani's.

²⁹ See J.S. Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton: 1987), pp. 285-98.

³⁰ KH 81; see Appendix.

³¹ KH 477; see Appendix.