Hafez turned wine and love into spiritual double meanings
Shams-od-Din Mohammad Hafez of Shiraz (about 1325–1390) remains a summit of Persian lyric poetry. His Divan of ghazals braids the beloved, wine, and hypocrisy so that earthly taverns and mystical rapture share the same lines.
Solid facts about his life are scarce. He was born in Shiraz, most scholars think in 1315 or 1317, identified as a Sufi, and memorised the Quran as a boy, which earned him the title hafez that became his pen name. Jami records his death in 1390. He found patrons among a string of local rulers, from Shah Abu Ishaq, who took power when the poet was a teenager, to the severe Mubariz ud-Din and, near the end, Timur. Even in his lifetime poets across the Islamic world copied him and patrons from Baghdad to India courted him.
Legend filled the gaps. One story makes him a baker's delivery boy who fell for a beautiful woman named Shakh-e Nabat before finding his Sufi teacher, Hajji Zayn al-Attar. Another has him, at 60, sitting inside a self-drawn circle for forty days and nights and reaching illumination over a cup of Shirazi wine. In a third, Timur rebukes him for trading the conqueror's prized cities for a girl's beauty spot, and Hafez's witty reply about his own poverty wins him rich gifts.
His ghazals fuse love, wine and the tavern with religious rapture and a jab at hypocrisy, and they resist easy reading. William Jones, who first put him into English in 1771, heard a Petrarch-like love poet; Henry Wilberforce Clarke saw a pure mystic in Rumi's mould. The confusion arises because Persian mystics had long since claimed the vocabulary of love poetry. His trademark pun, īhām, lets one word such as gowhar mean both pearl and essential truth at once, a nightmare for translators. No definitive Divan exists, and editions range from 573 to 994 poems.
In Iran he is the best-loved poet, celebrated on October 12, and families open his Divan at random on Nowruz or Yaldā Night to read their fortunes. His tomb in Shiraz, redesigned by André Godard in the late 1930s among roses and orange trees, draws singing crowds. Goethe, Thoreau and Yeats all felt his pull.
Source: Hafez
