Introduction

This week looks at the Persian poet Hafiz (also transliterated as Hafez) and the poetic form of the ghazal which he mastered. Hafiz’s was a lyrical poetry, with his ghazals often celebrating love or expressing feelings of loss. He was born in Shiraz, Iran, where he lived and wrote – the same Shiraz from which the wine grape comes. Indeed, the culture of Shiraz was one of wine-drinking, mysticism and pleasure, with Hafiz’s poetry expressing ideas of ecstasy and freedom from restraint. He was also a Sufi Muslim, a branch of Islam interested in artistic expression, music and dance.

For students, one of the key aspects of the ghazal which this week focusses on drawing out it is serial nature. The couplets in a ghazal link together like beads in a chain, with each couplet having a quality in itself as an image. Perhaps the other defining feature is the inclusion of the name of the poet in the final couplet, either explicitly or sometimes half-hidden in a pun, as a kind of ‘signing off’ of the poem.

Hafiz’s Ghazals

We begin by looking at some of Hafiz’s own ghazals, focussing in the first on the content of the poem, and in the second on its form.

This poem, about the end of a fast, shows well one of the distinctive formal features of the ghazal: the use of a ringing end-rhyme in tandem with a refrain: ‘past’s over’, ‘passed over’, ‘path’s over’ etc. Students can see this too in the Farsi version, the original Arabic script, by carefully examining the characters: remind them that it is read right to left!

This emphasis on the ringing ends of the lines is reflected further in the way that Hafiz’s collection of ghazals, The Divan, is arranged: the poems are ordered alphabetically by the last character in the line.

Mimi Khalvati

Mimi Khalvati is an Iranian-born British poet who has both translated and written her own ghazals. She uses the ghazal form to write about today’s situations.

Zeina Hashem Beck

Hashem Beck is Lebanese poet who lives in the U.S.A. Whereas Khalvati’s work brings the ghazal into a European tradition of love poetry, Hashem Beck often wields the ghazal for political purposes, as we see in the following poems.

Zeina Hashem Beck

Hashem Beck is Lebanese poet who lives in the U.S.A. Whereas Khalvati’s work brings the ghazal into a European tradition of love poetry, Hashem Beck often wields the ghazal for political purposes, as we see in the following poems.

Ghazal: With Prayer

The herons were no longer safe in the sky. They flew with prayer,

then fell to us. We hid them from the cats. What to do with prayer? Decades after the civil war, we enter the sniper’s hole, sew
the sandbags, read words for his boyfriend on the wall, true with prayer. Write my name & invite me to a wedding. I want a parade
of cars with flashers on, each blinking red, two times two with prayer. Dear Eurydice, what good a heart that can’t resist looking back?
Foolish, music-laden Orpheus. Almost saved you with prayer. In the museum of memory, the missing accumulate.
They shoot out of the tiles like grass blades, damp & new with prayer. I found a photo in a library book: lovers holding hands.
I felt chosen, then lost it. & I didn’t pursue with prayer. When I interviewed God, I said I moved the plants toward the light,
forgot the water. Is love a lack, always imbued with prayer? Tarot cards, make me beautiful. Abundance me, O Three of Cups,
spin luck O Wheel of Fortune, I’m through, I’m through, I’m through with prayer.

Like Khalvati does in ‘Ghazal: To Hold Me’, we see Hashem Beck here bringing the ghazal into a wider context, drawing in references to Greek mythology, the tarot pack and astrology. The poem is full of different kinds of danger, with the poet coming to the conclusion at the end that prayer is an insufficient response to that danger: ‘I’m through, I’m through, I’m through with prayer’.

Goethe and Lorca

How then did the ghazal travel from ancient Iran to become a popular modern form? The last third of this week’s course traces the missing links…

‘To Hafiz’ is taken from the West-East Divan, a long collection of poems by Goethe which were inspired by Hafiz, and meditated on the relationship between the East and West, the Occident and Orient. Goethe here is taking up the name of the Hafiz’s collection and writing his own east-meets-west version, with a very Romanticised, Orientalised view of the Arabic world. (Note that the name was also the inspiration for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Edward Said and conductor Daniel Barenboim, which brings together Palestinian and Israeli musicians.)

The poem ‘To Hafiz’ keeps the rhyme scheme of the ghazal form but loses many of the other aspects we have been looking at: the sense of each couplet having itss own meaning like a bead in a chain; the ringing rhyme followed by a refrain; the signiature of the poet in the final couplet; indeed, the final couplet itself. Students can discuss to what extent this poem can be considered a ghazal, and how loose one can be in adapting a poetic form before one is writing a different kind of poem altogether.

Gacela de la muerte oscura

Federico García Lorca Quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas
alejarme del tumulto de los cementerios.
Quiero dormir el sueño de aquel niño
que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar. No quiero que me repitan que los muertos no pierden la sangre;
que la boca podrida sigue pidiendo agua.
No quiero enterarme de los martirios que da la hierba,
ni de la luna con boca de serpiente
que trabaja antes del amanecer. Quiero dormir un rato,
un rato, un minuto, un siglo;
pero que todos sepan que no he muerto;
que haya un establo de oro en mis labios;
que soy un pequeño amigo del viento Oeste;
que soy la sombra inmensa de mis lágrimas. Cúbreme por la aurora con un velo,
porque me arrojará puñados de hormigas,
y moja con agua dura mis zapatos
para que resbale la pinza de su alacrán. Porque quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas
para aprender un llanto que me limpie de tierra;
porque quiero vivir con aquel niño oscuro
que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar.

Lorca also wrote poems which he called ‘gacela’, a Spanish adaptation of the ghazal. The gacela carries on the ghazal’s sense of a string of independent images, though it largely dispenses with the rhyme scheme and the organisation into couplets.

In this gacela, Lorca uses the form for dark, surrealistic imagery: hearts cut out, a decaying mouth, the ‘scorpian claws of the dawn’. There is a sense of being in a dangerous country: these were poems written towards the end of his Lorca’s short life, when Spain was getting darker politically, with the arrival of fascism in the early days of the Spanish civil war. Lorca was later murdered by Spanish nationalists, casting over the poem an even darker poem.

This gacela is slightly nearer to the rhyming scheme of the ghazal, although the poet has arranged it in quatrains; it also retains the ghazal’s sense of a running rhyme. We see here the form being used quite loosely in a modernist, surrealist way. Lorca tips his hat to the mixed heritage of Andalusia, where he was from; the gacela is a way, for him, of bringing in something of the Islamic world into his contemporary Spanish poetry, similarly to the way, in his early poems, he drew on Gypsy traditions.

Tasks

One

Students can write poems – in either a strict ghazal form or a looser one – experimenting with a repeated mono-rhyme, possibly on the penultimate syllable. These rhymes might be thought of in advance, perhaps even as a group, or else allowed to emerge naturally in the composition of the poem. The focus should be on considering the different possible effects that this combination of a ringing rhyme with a refrain can have.

Two

Students can write a series of linked but separate couplets, each of which have their own individual weight, each focussing on a particular image, but which are also linked together to give them a second, cumulative weight. The focus should be on playing around with that balance between each couplet having its own individual sense and each couplet being linked together.