Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/740

Nor shall Death snatch her from his pursuit :—

“If my darling should departAnd search the skies for prouder friends,God forbid my angry heartIn other love should seek amends !

“When the blue horizon’s hoopMe a little pinches here,On the instant I will dieAnd go find thee in the sphere.”

Then we have all degrees of passionate abandonment:—

“I know this perilous love-laneNo whither the traveller leads,Yet my fancy the sweet scent ofThy tangled tresses feeds.

“In the midnight of thy locks,I renounce the day;In the ring of thy rose-lips,My heart forgets to pray.”

And sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment:—

“Plunge in yon angry waves,Renouncing doubt and care;The flowing of the seven broad seasShall never wet thy hair.

“Is Allah’s face on theePending with love benign,And thou not less on Allah’s eyeO fairest! turnest thine.”

We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few specimens from other poets.

CHODSCHU KERMANI.

THE EXILE.

“IN Farsistan the violet spreadsIts leaves to the rival sky,—I ask, flow far is the Tigris flood,And the vine that grows thereby?

“Except the amber morning wind,Not one saluted me here;There is no man in all BagdadTo offer the exile cheer.

“I know that thou, O morning wind,O’er Kerman’s meadow blowest,And thou, heart-warming nightingale,My father’s orchard knowest.

“Oh, why did partial FortuneFrom that bright land banish me?go long as I wait in Bagdad,The Tigris is all I see.

“ The merchant hath stuffs of price,And gems from the sea-washed strand,And princes offer me graceTo stay in the Syrian land;

“ But what is gold for but for gifts?And dark without love is the day;And all that I see in BagdadIs the Tigris to float me away.”

NISAMI.

“WHILE roses bloomed along the plain,The nightingale to the falcon said,‘ Why, of all birds, must thou be dumb?With closed mouth thou utterest,Though dying, no last word to man.Yet sitt’st thou on the hand of princes,And feedest on the grouse’s breast,Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewelsSquander in a single tone,Lo! I feed myself with worms,And my dwelling is the thorn.’—The falcon answered, ‘Be all ear:I, experienced in affairs,See fifty things, say never one;But thee the people prizes not,Who, doing nothing, say’st a thousand.To me, appointed to the chase,The king’s hand gives the grouse’s breast;Whilst a chatterer like theeMust gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!’“

The following passages exhibit the strong tendency of the Persian poets to contemplative and religious poetry and to allegory.

“ A PAINTER in China once painted a hall;—Such a web never hung on an emperor’swall;—One half from his brush with rich colors did run,The other he touched with a beam of the sun;So that all which delighted the eye in one side,The same, point for point, in the other replied.

“In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found;Thine the star-pointing roof, and the baseon the ground:Is one half depicted with colors less bright?Beware that the counterpart blazes with light!”