"And since round lines are áiyátofOmarKhayyámandSalámánandAbsádrawn My darling's lips about, The very Moon looks puzzled on, And hesitates in doubt If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth Be not her true way to the South."
"Ah could I hide me in my song, To kiss thy lips from which it flows!"
and plays in a thousand pretty courtesies:--
"Fair fall thy soft heart! A good work wilt thou do? O, pray for the dead Whom thine eyelashes slew;"
And what a nest has he found for his bonny bird to take up her abode in!--
"They strew in the paths of kings and czars Jewels and gems of price: But for thy head I will pluck down stars, And pave thy way with eyes.
"I have sought for thee a costlier dome Than Mahmoud's palace high, And thou, returning, find thy home In the apple of Love's eye."
Then we have all degrees of passionate abandonment:--
"I know this perilous love-lane No whither the traveller leads, Yet my fancy the sweet scent of Thy tangled tresses feeds.
"In the midnight of thy locks, I renounce the day; In the ring of thy rose-lips, My heart forgets to pray."
And sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment:--
"Plunge in your angry waves, Renouncing doubt and care; The flowing of the seven broad seas Shall never wet thy hair.
"Is Allah's face on thee Bending with love benign, And thou not less on Allah's eye, O fairest turnest thine."
We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few specimens from other poets.
"While roses bloomed along the plain, The nightingale to the falcon said, 'Why of all birds must thou be dumb? With closed mouth thou utterest, Though dying, no last word to man. Yet sitt'st thou on the hand of princes, And feedest on the grouse's breast, Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewels Squander in a single tone, Lo! I feed myself with worms, And my dwelling is the thorn.'-- The falcon answered, 'Be all ear: I, experienced in affairs, See fifty things, say never one; But thee the people prizes not Who, doing nothing, say'st a thousand. To me, appointed to the chase, The king's hand gives the grouse's breast; Whilst a chatterer like thee Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!'"
The following passages exhibit the strong tendency of the Persian poets to contemplative and religious poetry and to allegory.
"A painter in China once painted a hall;-- Such a web never hung on an emperor's wall;-- One half from his brush with rich colours did run, The other he touched with a beam of the sun; So that all which delighted the eye in one side, The same, point to point, in the other replied.