Transfiguring Love: Perspective Shifts
and the Contextualization of
Experience in the Ghazals of √Æfiæ
JamesMorris
The following observations grow out of several decades of experience teaching
theghazals of Ḥāfiẓ to students lacking any direct access to the original Persian –
and out of an even longer period of immersion in the multilingual complex
of now largely unfamiliar spiritual, philosophic, scientific and theological disci-
plines which provided the original cultural context and network of symbolic
allusions that were once intimately familiar to this poet and his original learned
courtly audiences, together with his connoisseurs and imitators throughout
subsequent centuries. Not surprisingly, the greatest challenge and frustration of
that contemporary pedagogical situation is how to communicate clearly and
adequately those implicit structures and assumptions which must be understood,
in order to begin to appreciate the full poetic richness and spiritual depths of
Ḥāfiẓ’slyrics.
Thefocusofthischapterisononlyonekeydimensionofthatwiderhermeneu-
tical and pedagogical problem: the characteristic progression of metaphysical and
existentialshiftsinperspective–firstrevealing,andthenpotentiallytransforming
each reader’s love, desire, will and self-understanding – that typically structures
and unifies each of Ḥāfiẓ’sghazals. As we shall see, that distinctive underlying
structuralfeatureofḤāfiẓ’swriting(whichisnormallyinvisibleinEnglishtransla-
tion)alsohelpstoexplainsomeofthemysteriousspiritualefficacyofhispoetryin
the therapeutic process of spiritual divination and illumination, the longstanding
ritualoffa’l,parallelingthefamiliarusesoftheIChing.
Onewaytobeginexplainingthatdistinctiveprocessoftransformationistostart
withthefundamentalexistentialchallengewithwhichthispoetactuallyconcludes
eachofhislyrics,withallthatisactuallyevokedandintendedbythefar-reaching
implicationsofhispoeticpenname‘Ḥāfiẓ’,adeeplyproblematicexpressionwhich
istoooftentakensimplyinitsfamiliarsocialusagereferringtosomeonewhohas
memorized the Qur’ān. With a heightened appreciation of the potential aims and
demands highlighted by that repeated concluding reminder, we then move on
to introduce the intended effects and forms of participation suggested by this
poet’sdistinctiveunifyingrhetoricofcarefullyorchestrated,progressivelyshifting