Title: The Divan of Hafez Author: Hafez (Khwaja Shams-ud-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Shirazi) Creation Date: c. 1315-1390 Location: Shiraz, Persia (present-day Iran)
Summary
The Divan is a collection of approximately 500 ghazals — short lyric poems typically of seven to twelve couplets — along with a smaller number of qasidas, masnavis, and rubais. Each ghazal is an autonomous world: in the space of a few couplets, Hafez conjures the garden at dawn, the tavern at night, the anguish of the lover, the mockery of the hypocrite, the indifference of the beloved, the turning of the cosmic wheel. The recurring cast — the Beloved, the Cupbearer, the Sufi, the Preacher, the Rival — operates simultaneously on literal and allegorical planes, and the poems systematically refuse to resolve the ambiguity between sacred and profane love, between mystical ecstasy and erotic longing, between the wine of the tavern and the wine of spiritual intoxication. To read Hafez is to enter a hall of mirrors where every image reflects both earth and heaven.
Why This Book Matters
Hafez is, by common consent, the supreme lyric poet of the Persian language — and Persian is a language that produced more great lyric poets per century than perhaps any other. His Divan is the most widely read, most frequently memorised, and most deeply loved book in the Persian-speaking world. In Iran, it is used for bibliomancy (fal-e Hafez): people open the book at random seeking guidance, as if the poems were oracles. Goethe, upon reading Hafez in translation, was so overwhelmed that he composed his "West-Eastern Divan" in response, declaring Hafez his "twin." What makes Hafez irreplaceable is his perfection of the ghazal form: each couplet is simultaneously self-contained and part of a larger unity, creating a lyric structure of extraordinary density and resonance. He also represents the high-water mark of Persian literature's central project: the fusion of the erotic and the mystical, the insistence that human love is not a metaphor for divine love but its very substance.
Historical Context
Hafez lived his entire life in Shiraz, in southern Iran, during the turbulent 14th century — a period of political fragmentation, Mongol successor states, and Timurid conquests. Shiraz changed hands among rival dynasties multiple times during his life, and several of his patrons fell from power or were killed. Yet Shiraz was also a city of extraordinary cultural refinement — a centre of poetry, wine, gardens, and learning. Hafez's poetry emerged from a tradition of Shirazi lyric that included Sa'di before him, and it was nourished by centuries of Sufi thought, particularly the Ibn Arabi tradition of wahdat al-wujud (unity of being). His pen name, Hafez, means "one who has memorised the Quran," and his poetry is saturated with Quranic allusion and resonance.
Literary Significance
Hafez brought the Persian ghazal to its absolute formal perfection. Each couplet (beyt) functions as an independent unit of meaning — it can be extracted and quoted alone — yet the sequence of couplets creates a cumulative emotional and intellectual effect that transcends any individual line. His signature technique is iham: the deliberate use of words with multiple meanings so that a single line operates on several semantic planes simultaneously. A poem about drinking wine in a garden is also about spiritual intoxication in the presence of God; a poem about the cruelty of a human beloved is also about the inscrutability of divine will. This is not allegory — Hafez does not encode a "real" spiritual meaning beneath a "surface" erotic one. Both meanings are fully present and fully intended, creating a poetic texture of unresolvable richness. His influence on subsequent Persian, Turkish, and Urdu poetry is immeasurable.
Research Notes
Hafez was an essential inclusion as the apex of the Persian ghazal tradition. Davis's translation is the most reliable current rendering, though no English translation can capture the acoustic density of Hafez's Persian. Ladinsky's popular versions are beautiful English poems but are creative reimaginings rather than translations. The textual history of the Divan is complicated — there is no autograph manuscript, and the poems were collected after Hafez's death, leading to disagreements about which poems are authentic. The standard Persian critical edition is by Parviz Natel Khanlari.
The Reading
Last night, in the tavern at the edge of Shiraz where the old wine-master tends his vats and the lamp burns in the doorway for those who have lost their way to the mosque, I heard him say: Last night I went to the tavern and the wine-master said: "Give up your prayer rug and come. The pathway to God does not run through the mosque." So I gave it up. I left my prayer-rug rolled beneath the cypress where the rose was opening her first red letter to the morning, and I walked in, and I sat down on the bench that runs beside the wine-jar, and I have not since seen any reason to go back.
You — sober one, frowning preacher in the dust of your pulpit — you will ask me what kind of poem this is. It is a ghazal. It is what we have made in this language for as long as anyone can remember: a chain of couplets, seven of them or twelve, each one rhyming on the same closing word and the same returning phrase — radif, we call that small bell that rings at the end of every second line — so that the ghazal moves the way a string of beads moves through the fingers of one praying for what cannot be named. Each couplet stands alone. You can pluck a single beyt from the middle of any of mine and quote it at a wedding, at a funeral, on the lip of a wine-cup, on the threshold of a tomb; and yet, taken together, the couplets in their proper sequence make a music that no single beyt can make. The first couplet sets the rhyme; the last couplet, the maqta, signs my name into the poem — that is the convention of our form, the takhallus, the poet's mark, and I shall not apologise for it when it comes.
The Beloved at the Door
In the meantime, the Beloved. Where to begin? With the hair, that black snare in which whole caravans of lovers have been caught and never heard of again? With the glance, that arrow loosed with such carelessness from such ambush that the wound is dealt before the bow is even seen? With the lips, those two rubies from which a man is forever a thumb's-breadth and a thousand parasangs barred? I will begin where every lover begins: with the dust at the Beloved's doorstep. There I knelt. There I press my forehead. There I count each grain of dirt as treasure, because each grain has lain in the shadow of that doorway, and the doorway is everything I have left.
You ask me who this Beloved is. I cannot tell you. I will not tell you. Some who hear my ghazals say, Ah, he speaks of one of the young men of Shiraz whose beauty is famous in the gardens — a turn of the cheek, a sash, an embroidered cap. Others say, No, he speaks of God — the unknowable, the indifferent, the one whose grace is the only grace and whose silence is the only silence. I smile. I take another sip. The cup catches the candle-flame and throws a small ruby across the floor.
What I will say is this. The lover is the dust. The Beloved is the doorway. Whether the doorway opens onto a chamber where a beautiful body sleeps or onto the courtyard of the eternal, the dust at the threshold is the same dust, and the kneeling is the same kneeling. Choose your reading, friend. Both readings are true. To insist on one is to lose the other, and to lose either is to lose the poem.
And in the meantime, the Beloved does not answer. The Beloved walks past with a lifted chin, with one careless glance flung sideways like a coin tossed to a beggar, and is gone before the lover has thought to call out. The lover weeps. The lover rages. The lover drinks to forget and finds, in the cup, only another small ruby that is the colour of those lips. The lover reduces himself to nothing at the Beloved's gate and counts that nothing as the only wealth he has ever possessed. This is not, I should warn you, an accident of one ghazal or another. This is the weather of the entire Divan.
The Preacher and the Vintner
Now hear me on the matter of the pious. Preachers who display their piety in prayer and pulpit behave differently when they're alone. It puzzles me. Ask the learned ones of the assembly: "Why do those who demand repentance do so little of it?" Listen to me carefully. I am not making a small joke. I am making the largest charge a man can make in a city of muezzins and madrasas and grave commentators on the Holy Book.
The man on the pulpit who tells me wine is forbidden — and tells me with such relish, such a parade of beard and patched cloak and disapproving glance toward the wine-stained corner of my own garment — that man, I know, I have seen, was telling us that drink is forbidden. True. But from whom did he get those grapes? He sells them at the back door of the madrasa. He presses them in his cellar. He drinks them with his door bolted while he composes tomorrow's sermon against the very vintage that loosens his tongue against me. So I tell you, all of you, in the plainest line a ghazal can carry: I am a servant of the old man of the tavern, whose grace exceeds all others. For the piety of those in the cloister has never accomplished what the glance of a cup of wine has done.
This is not the noise of a man who hates religion. This is the lover of God speaking against the merchants of God. The greatest obstacle on the road to the Friend is the man who has set up a tollbooth on that road and demands a coin. The drunk in the gutter, weeping into his sleeve at the moon, is nearer to the Friend than the preacher who has built a high pulpit on his own certainty.
The Wine
Look at the wine in this cup. Look at the colour — the ruby that the candle pulls out of it, the small fire trapped at its centre, the way it warms the throat and loosens the spine and makes the dull conversation at the next table suddenly seem to be a conversation among angels. I love wine. I drink it. I have drunk it for years in the gardens of Shiraz and in the back rooms of the great houses where the patrons sit who keep me from starving when a Mongol prince or a Mozaffarid amir burns through the city and the city must be re-learned again. Wine has been the most reliable of my companions; it has outlived several of my friends.
But wine is also something older than the grape. There is a wine the soul drank before the body was made — the sharb-e azal, the cup of pre-eternity, the cup at the great covenant in which every soul, before it was breathed into flesh, looked up and said, Yes, I know you for my Lord. That wine never left the lip of the soul; the soul is drunk on it still, only the body has forgotten. Bring wine! For the foundation of repentance is weak, and this foundation is built on wind. Bring it because the cup in my hand and the cup at the covenant are, I have come to suspect, the same cup. They say that Hafez drinks too much. Yes. But compared to the cup the Beloved pours in paradise, this wine is only water.
Ask me, then, whether I write of grape-wine or of God-wine and I shall ask you in return whether the candle on this table is fire or is light. The two ecstasies are one ecstasy. The drunkenness of the tavern and the drunkenness of the saint differ only in the strength of the vintage. The cupbearer pours; we hold out our cups; the rest is mercy.
The Rose and the Autumn Wind
There is, however, a sorrow that walks beside this ecstasy, and I am too honest a poet to pretend it is not here. I live in a century in which kings rise and fall like the moths around a lamp. I have seen patrons crowned and patrons murdered; I have seen Shiraz pass through the hands of one dynasty and another and another within the span of a single beard's greying. The garden in which I sit this morning is the garden where, a year ago, a friend sat with me who is now under a stone. The rose that opens its red letter today will tomorrow be the brown crumple at the base of the stem.
The rose said, "I laugh because this garden is mine." I said, "Have you not seen the autumn wind?" The rose, of course, did not answer. The rose is incapable of answering, because the rose has only this one day, and to spend any of it on prudence would be to waste the whole gift. So she laughs. She laughs because that is what the rose is for. Where are the songs of yesterday's feast? The cup is broken. The wine is spilled. The musicians have gone home. The feast is over before we have understood that the feast has begun, and only afterwards, in the long autumn of our lives, do we notice that we were happy and did not know it.
The world and all its beauties are not worth a sigh, because the end of every song is silence. Hear this carefully. It is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of attention. Because every song ends in silence, sing the song now. Because every cup ends in dryness, drink while the wine is in it. Because every face you love will one day not be there to be loved, look at it now, look at it as a thirsty man looks at water. The Beloved laughs, and the garden burns, and we cannot stop either; what is given us is to sit in the garden and pour the wine and praise the burning while it lasts.
Hafez at the Foot of His Own Poem
And now I come to the maqta, and here I must do what the form requires. The takhallus. The signing of the name. Hafez, what has happened to your vow of repentance? Do not blame me — it was the fault of the spring wind, and the scent of the roses, and the eyes of the cupbearer. I name myself: Hafez. One who has memorised the Quran by heart in his youth in this same city of Shiraz. A scholar; a master of the sacred recitation; and also, by the strangest of slow miracles, the worst of penitents and the most faithful of tavern-haunters. The two are not at odds in me. I know the verses of the Book as I know the lines of my own palm, and I know the wine-stain on my own cuff as I know the dust at the Beloved's threshold.
When I name myself in the final couplet of a ghazal, I am putting my seal at the foot of a document, but I am also stepping into my own poem as a character — the Hafez who fails to repent, the Hafez who is bound by a single black curl, the Hafez whose master is the old man of the tavern and whose mosque is the garden in spring. They asked me, "What is the chain that binds you?" I said, "The curl of the Beloved's hair." They asked, "What was the beginning of this madness?" I said, "It had no beginning and will have no end." That Hafez is both me and not-me — a mask, a confession, a self the poem makes by speaking.
I said, "I will forget you." The Beloved laughed and said, "You cannot. I am the writing on the page of your heart, and ink does not wash away." That, friend, is the whole matter, set down in a single beyt. The Friend has written upon the heart; the writing is the heart; the heart cannot be washed clean without being unwritten, and to be unwritten is not to be.
The Closed Book as Oracle
There is a thing they do with my poems in this city and, I am told, will keep doing in cities I will never live to see. They take up the Divan when they cannot decide what to do, hold it closed against their forehead, speak the question in their thought, and open the book at random. The ghazal their eye falls upon is the answer. They call it fal-e Hafez — divination by Hafez. I have seen lovers part by it and lovers be reconciled by it; I have seen merchants set sail or stay home by it; I have seen the dying ask of it and the newly bereaved.
I will not pretend the practice surprises me, though it ought to humble me more than it does. The ghazals were written in such a way that any couplet, taken in any order, can speak to any condition — not because I planned this, but because the form itself, and the ambiguity I have laboured to perfect, leaves the meaning open at every door. The mosque is empty; the tavern is full; the rose is half-open; the cypress is praying without a tongue. Drop a question of your own into a line like that one and the line will answer it; drop another question and the line will answer that too. This is not trickery. It is what the ghazal, at full reach, has always been able to do.
Coda
So I lift the cup. The garden in the corner of Shiraz where I have sat for forty years is half-burnt by the autumn wind and half-burst with the spring rose, both at once, as gardens always are. Come, let us scatter roses and pour wine in the glass. We will shatter heaven's roof and lay a new design. If sorrow raises armies to shed the blood of lovers, the cupbearer and I will overthrow that army. With a sweet melody and a flask of wine, we will seal the mouth of fate.
That is one couplet of one ghazal of a Divan that holds five hundred. There will be more tomorrow, if the wind does not take me, and after that more, until I lie under my own stone here in the garden at Musalla beside the stream of Ruknabad and the Divan is closed for the last time by the hand that wrote it. The Divan does not end. It only continues to open — page after page, couplet after couplet — onto the same inexhaustible morning: the rose, the wine, the hypocrite, the Friend, the dust at the doorstep, the seal of my own name pressed once more into the wax of the final beyt.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Two translations of Hafez are recommended. Dick Davis's "Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz" (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) is the scholarly standard — accurate, beautifully introduced, and presented alongside two other 14th-century Shirazi poets. His earlier Mage Publishers edition presents selected poems with facing Persian text. Daniel Ladinsky's versions are widely read but are creative reimaginings rather than translations, and should be treated accordingly.
Trans. Dick Davis. The scholarly standard — accurate and beautifully contextualised.
Trans. Dick Davis. The earlier Mage Publishers bilingual edition.
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