Symbols and Metaphors

Almost all of Hafez's ghazals contain sentiments of romantic Love, images of nature, and moral counsel. But the overriding subject is the Love of God, symbolized by the metaphor of wine. In Hafez's case, the ghazals are used mainly as a vehicle or voice to express his divine longing.

This Love and longing are represented in his work symbolically in many ways and many images, in keeping with the rigors of the ghazal "rules" of the time.

The metaphor of wine, for instance, while referring principally to divine Love, can also mean truth, grace, or knowledge. At the same time, the analogy of the wineglass or cup is a direct reference to the heart.

So, when Hafiz says, "O Winebringer, fill my cup to the brim with your best wine," he is really saying: "O God, pour your divine love into my heart!" In his collection of Ghazals such charming occupational surnames as Winebringer, Winemaker, and Wineseller allude to God or, more particularly, His representative in the human form of the master. The quickening qualities and effects of wine upon the spirit – wine being used here as an allegory for the elixir of Love and its intoxication.

Regarding Hāfez and the School of Love, it relishes the spirit and conveys the taste of this wine and gives a small glimmer of the grandeur of the sublime station of Love.

"The Beloved" is an even more direct reference to the spiritual master who is one with God. And here, it might be helpful to note that in the Persian language, the pronouns do not indicate gender, doing the business of translating all this longing and love somewhat nonspecific concerning gender or sex, literalness or symbology.

Similarly, there may be questions as to who or what, in fact, "the Beloved" is in Hafez's mind. Symbolically, the Beloved appears at times in the guise of the rose, the sun, the falcon, the Friend, the Painter, the Architect, and the Gardener, in whose Garden the lover and the Beloved meet.

In these conversations or meetings, the lover may appear as the moth, the enslaved person, the pearl diver, or the nightingale. The field (the physical world) upon which the game of Love is played can be the desert (waiting, longing, thirst), the sea (the ocean of Love or turbulence), or the sky (change, fate). Regardless of the venue, the waxing and waning love affair between the lover (Hafez) and the Beloved (God) continues.

Other essential and often-repeated symbols appear throughout these poems: the Breeze (the messenger of God, usually bearing good news or divine inspiration), the Boat (the vehicle that carries the lover to union with God), the Winehouse (the place a lover of God goes to be with the Beloved), the Moon (physical beauty), the Nightingale (the poet, minstrel), the Parrot (the unenlightened, and/or the followers of religion).

While some of these images may not be mainly "modern" in a twenty-first-century western sense, they are universally accessible enough to have allowed us to leave them intact in a more contemporary language.

While much of the action of these ghazals takes place in the Winehouse or in Wineseller's Street, and much of the talk is of wine and drunkenness, with a cup or glass in hand, we must be careful not to read too much literalness into these scenes, even though it may be familiar and fun to do so!

The Winehouse of Hafez's ghazals is clearly not simply a tavern or bar; the wine drinkers to whom Hafez directs his monologues are rarely common drunks. Hafez's recitations of his poems usually took place, as far as we know, in the context of spiritual or literary gatherings where music and poetry were traditional pastimes.

Because wine was and is forbidden to pious Muslims, this particular poetic image becomes even more potent in the context of Hafez's Winehouse poems. All this superimposed "decadence" was used merely as a sort of camouflage for the more profound spiritual messages hidden beneath the veil of symbolic imagery. The ultimate effect was that the poems reached a larger and more diverse audience, especially in centuries following the fourteenth, the peasant and working classes.

From an introduction to Drunk of the wine of the Beloved
by Thomas Rain Crowe