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love for God. All questions posed in Love’s catechism can be answered with one
single riposte: ‘Service’.
This ‘bitterness’ was given an even more creative exegesis by the Persianfedeli
d’amore, who compared it to relishing the sapiential ‘taste’ of drunken rapture
(dhawq-imastī) in contemplation of the beloved. The pleasure of that vision and
their acquiescence to the Beloved’s will cause its whole bitter taste to turn to sweet-
ness, an experience which Sa‛dī’s memorable verse celebrates:
For others, the wine of the torments of love
Is gall, but for us, the liquor we imbibe
We take from the hand of the Friend
So it becomes sweet and delicious.^82A number of Ḥāfiẓ’s verses underscore the same bittersweet sentiment:
Although the thorn hurts your spirit, the rose asks pardon
For this wound; the sourness of wine is more easily tolerated
When one remembers the sweet flavour of drunkenness.^83Ḥāfiẓ also boasts of being famed as a drunkard from the very first day of the pre-
Eternal Covenant (rūz-ialast),^84 and rails against the ascetic who cannot understand
that his intoxication with human beauty is a necessary consequence of his vow in
pre-Eternity to follow love’s religion:
Oh, ascetics, go away. Stop arguing with those
Who drink the bitter stuff, because it was precisely
This gift the divine ones gave us in Pre-Eternity.^85Elsewhere, he directs his attention beyond this temporal sphere and speaks of being
drunk on the wine of the Covenant:
How blessed is the man who, like Ḥāfiẓ,
Has tasted in his heart the wine made before Adam.^86That wine is exactly the same whose cup-bearer Niẓāmī invokes in hisSāqī-nāma
within his romantic epicSharaf-nāma:
Cast sleep away, O Saki, from your eyes
and pass to lovers who are pure that wine
That is purest claret, which all the schools
of law accept and sanction as divine.
Come, Saki, from the village-elder’s cask
that honey-sweet wine pour into our flask;ḤāfiẓandtheReligionofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry