their verse in the here and now. These are not legends, but living facts of the heart
that appear constantly in their verse; they are, as Emily Dickinson says, ‘Bulletins all
Day from Immortality’. In a single verse, Sa‛dī thus summarizes the entire epic
romance ofKhusrawandShīrīnby Niẓāmī:
I realized it then, that very first day when
With Shīrīn my affair began: I knew that in
The end, sweet life itself I would abandon.^99As Niẓāmī relates, a beautiful Armenian princess named Shīrīn (‘Sweet one’) was a
concubine of the Sasanian monarch Khusraw Parvīz II (reg. 591–628 AD). A stone
sculptor called Farhād,^100 renowned for his physical prowess, was a rival with the
king for her affections. Recognizing the all-consuming nature of his rival’s attach-
ment to his concubine, Khusraw declines to murder him, thinking it more prudent
to give his mighty sculptor rival the seemingly impossible task of carving a canal
through a mountain to allow for the flow of milk from the pasture to her palace.
Even more smugly, Khusraw promised Farhād his concubine as a reward for his
efforts should they succeed. When, surprisingly, Farhād meets the challenge and
carves out the canal, Khusraw dupes him by telling him that Shīrīn has died, leading
Farhād to cast himself off the mountain in despair to his death.
Ḥāfiẓ, in a single verse, summarizes another romantic legend from Firdawsī’s epic
(TheBookofKings,Shāh-nāma) as follows:
I have fallen into Patience’s lowest pit
Where, empassioned by the candle of Chigil^101
And, enkindled by love’s flame, I have been burnt.
The prince of Turks knows not my good or ill...
Where’s Rustam the champion?^102Ḥāfiẓ here compares his condition with that of the Persian hero Bīzhan, son of Gīv
and nephew of Rustam.^103 During an adventure in the lands of Turan (Central Asia),
Bīzhan encounters Afrāsiyāb’s daughter Manīzha, who falls in love with him.
Afrāsiyāb,^104 referred to here by the poet as ‘the prince of Turks’, was the most
prominent of the Turanian Turkish kings. When he discovers their illicit romance,
Afrāsiyāb imprisons the hated Iranian hero Bīzhan in the well of Arzhang. Rustam,
the renowned champion of the Iranian forces, eventually goes to Turan in disguise
and rescues Bīzhan from the well, bringing Manīzha with him back to Iran.
Likewise, the Sufi poets consider the appearance of Jesus as an ever reoccurring
event sustaining them in the present, using in this context the metaphor of the
‘Messiah’s breath of inspiration’ (dam-imasīḥ). Ḥāfiẓ alludes to this in two verses:
Love’s physician is compassionate and endowed
With the breath of Jesus,ḤāfiẓandtheSchoolofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry 101