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Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ-e Shīrāzī (Persian: خواجه شمسالدین محمد حافظ شیرازی), known by his pen name Hafiz was a Persian poet who "lauded the joys of love and wine but also targeted religious hypocrisy". His collected works are regarded as a pinnacle of Persian literature and are often found in the homes of people in the Persian speaking world, who learn his poems by heart and still use them as proverbs and sayings. en.wikipedia.org/…
Hafiz is the most popular poet in Iran, and his works can be found in almost every Iranian home.[3] October 12 is celebrated as Hafiz [Hafez] Day in Iran.[19]
Hafiz was born in Shiraz, Persia, in about 1315, and died in Shiraz circa 1389. (The exact dates are uncertain.) Shiraz is known as the city of roses and nightingales.
Hafiz’s principal verse form, one that he brought to a perfection never achieved before or since, was the ghazal, a lyric poem of 6 to 15 couplets linked by unity of subject and symbolism rather than by a logical sequence of ideas.
Prior to Hafiz, ghazals were primarily used to write songs celebrating wine and earthly pleasure. Hafiz revolutionized the form by utilizing the stock symbols of wine and pleasure as metaphors for spiritual experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Hafiz: "He fears nothing. He sees too far, he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see or be." And Emerson gave Hafiz that grand and famous compliment, "Hafiz is a poet for poets."
Garcia Lorca praised the Sufi poet. Johannes Brahms was so touched by his verse he used several in his compositions. And even Queen Victoria was said to have consulted Hafiz in times of need – which has been a custom in the Middle East for centuries. The Fal-e Hafiz, is an ancient tradition in which a reader asks Hafiz for advice when facing a difficulty or at an important juncture in their life – treating his books as an oracle and opening them with a deep wish from their soul for guidance.
Both Goethe and Emerson translated Hafiz. Goethe's deep study of him simply stated, "Hafiz has no peer."
In hundreds of ways Hafiz addresses what impedes us from living a more fulfilled life. With unique, charming metaphors that he seems able to rain from the ground up, he longs to help the highest aspects in us lead all the other parts to a place where we can breathe easier and kick back more and say: "Ahhhh, this world isn’t so bad, as a matter of fact – it is amazing!"
The mountain's face lifted me higher than
itself.
A song's wink aligned me with joy.
And a tune paradise hums I came to know.
The forest, letting me walk amongst its naked
limbs, had me on my knees again in silence
shouting – yes, yes my holy friend, let your
splendour devour me
So many of Hafiz’s poems are precisely about unfettering the senses and refining the will, so that we do more “wine-tasting of the sky”, and more tenderly holding—in thought or with arms—the things we most love and know as precious nourishment. He unsnares our “emerald wings”.
IT FELT LOVE
How did the rose ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light
Against its being,
Otherwise, we all remain too frightened.
THE GOD WHO ONLY KNOWS FOUR WORDS
Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don'ts,
Not the God who ever does anything weird.
But the God who only knows four words
And keeps repeating them, saying:
"Come dance with Me."
Come dance.
Hafiz or Hafez is a title given to those who memorise the Quran by heart.
When he was 21 his father, who was a coal merchant, died leaving him and his mother in deep debt. Hafiz went with his mother to live with his uncle. He left school to work in a drapery shop and later in a bakery.
While still working at the bakery, Hafiz delivered bread to a wealthy quarter of town and saw Shakh-e-Nabat, a young woman of immense beauty. Many of his poems are addressed to her.
Hafiz became a copyist of the Quran and, later, a court poet. He also taught at a religious college.
The political situation in Shiraz was unstable and, having lost the favour of the Shah, Hafiz fled, going into self-imposed exile in Isfahan. His poems often express his longing for Shiraz, for Shakh-e-Nabat, and for his spiritual Master, Attar (not the famous Farid-uddin Attar of Neishabour—who predates Hafiz by a couple of centuries—but the lesser known Attar of Shiraz).
He did not regain his position as a court poet until 20 years later, just before his death.
The works of Hafiz are inspired by the Sufi teachings of his time, in which passionate love and the drinking of wine are metaphors for ecstatic religious states that cannot be otherwise described.
His mausoleum, referred to as the Hafezieh, is in the Musalla Gardens along the banks of the Ruknabad River in Shiraz.
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadow and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new watermark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
A Suspended Blue Ocean
The sky
Is a suspended blue ocean.
The stars are the fish
That swim.
The planets are the white whales
I sometimes hitch a ride on,
And the sun and all light
Have forever fused themselves
Into my heart and upon
My skin.
There is only one rule
On this Wild Playground,
For every sign Hafiz has ever seen
Reads the same.
They all say,
"Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,
In the Beloved's Divine
Game,
O, in the Beloved's
Wonderful
Game."