Chehel Asrar 25 - Twenty Fifth Ghazal

Ghazal 25

17 couplets  |  Riaz 1991, printed p. 465–467

اِی گِرِفْتارانِ عِشْقَت فارِغ اَز مال وُ مَنال

ey gereftārān-e ʿeshq-at fāregh az māl o manāl

1a  O you whose captives in love are free of concern for wealth and possessions,

والِهانِ حَضْرَتَت را اَز خُود وُ جَنَّت مَلال

vālehān-e hazrat-at rā az khod o jannat malāl

1b  those lost in wonder at your presence are weary of themselves and paradise.

Commentary on couplet 1

The speaker addresses a beloved whose divine identity becomes explicit in the later references to Abraham and the Eternal One. Captivity in love brings an unexpected freedom: those held by the beloved cease to be held by their possessions. The second half carries this reversal beyond worldly wealth to the self and even paradise. Its weariness expresses the intensity of wanting the beloved beyond any reward. A relevant distinction appears in Hamadani’s Dhakhīrat al-mulūk: the higher gratitude values the gift for its giver, rather than the giver for the gift. [6] This provides a prose parallel without making the poem’s extravagant language a rejection of paradise or a rule requiring material destitution.

مُفْلِسانِ کُویِ شَوْقَت را غُلامی کَرْدِه چَرْخ

moflesān-e kū-ye showq-at rā gholāmī karde charkh

2a  The heavens have served the paupers in the lane of longing for you;

سالِکانِ راهِ وَصْلَت را دُو عالَم پایْمال

sālekān-e rāh-e vasl-at rā do ʿālam pāymāl

2b  both worlds lie under the feet of those who travel the road to union with you.

Commentary on couplet 2

The heavens become servants of people who possess nothing, while both worlds lie beneath the travellers’ feet. The two halves enlarge the opening reversal: outward poverty acquires a sovereignty greater than ordinary wealth or rank. Moflesān suggests those without resources, but the location of their poverty matters: they belong to the beloved’s lane of longing. Their dignity arises within that relationship. Charkh, the revolving heaven, makes the scale of the reversal immense. What ordinarily stands above human fortune is pictured serving the seekers. The image measures freedom by the collapse of ordinary rank: those the world would overlook are the very people before whom its splendours lose their authority.

عارِفانِ وَصْفِ تُو مَغْبُوطِ اَشْرافِ مَلَک

ʿārefān-e vasf-e to maghbūt-e ashrāf-e malak

3a  Those who know your attributes are envied by the noblest angels; [1]

مُدْبِرانِ دَرْگَهَت سَرْگَشْتِهٔ تِیهِ ضَلال

modberān-e dargah-at sar-gashte-ye tīh-e zalāl

3b  those who turn away from your threshold wander in the desert of error.

Commentary on couplet 3

Those who know the beloved’s qualities stand in a position desired by the noblest angels; those who turn away lose direction in a wilderness. Knowledge and refusal are thus represented as orientation toward, or movement away from, the same threshold. Maghbūt, rendered “envied,” can describe a blessing another wishes to share without wishing its possessor to lose it. [7] The praise therefore need not attribute hostile jealousy to angels. The supplied reading of malak is retained. Knowledge of the beloved’s vaṣf, qualities or description, also leaves room for the confession of unknowing in couplet 7: recognizing what is disclosed does not amount to comprehending the beloved without remainder.

شَمِّه‌ای اَز فَیْضِ لُطْفَت بُوی بُرْدِه نُه فَلَک

shamme-ī az fayz-e lotf-at būy borde noh falak

4a  The nine heavens have caught a mere trace of your overflowing kindness

گَشْتِه سَرْگَرْدان بِگِرْدِ آسْتانَت ماه وُ سال

gashte sar-gardān be-gerd-e āstān-at māh o sāl

4b  and circle your threshold in bewilderment, month after month, year after year.

Commentary on couplet 4

The heavens have received only a fragrance of kindness, yet that slight encounter sets their whole existence circling the beloved’s threshold. Shamme and būy bordan sustain the delicate image of apprehending a trace rather than possessing its source. Against this smallness stand the nine heavens and the repeated passing of months and years. Sar-gardān joins revolving motion with bewilderment, turning celestial movement into the gesture of an astonished lover. Fayz suggests overflowing generosity here, apprehended through a fragrance that awakens desire without becoming the heavens’ possession. The verse measures the beloved’s abundance by its effect: even a trace is enough to keep the heavens endlessly attending.

آتَش اَز لُطْفَت گُلِسْتان گَشْتِه دَر پِیشِ خَلِیل

ātash az lotf-at golestān gashte dar pīsh-e Khalīl

5a  Through your kindness, fire became a rose garden before Abraham; [2]

خُورْدِه نَمْرُودی بِقَهْر اَز نِیمِ پَشِّه گُوشْمال

khorde Namrūdī be-qahr az nīm-e pashshe gūshmāl

5b  through your wrath, a Nimrod was chastised by half a gnat. [3]

Commentary on couplet 5

The speaker places Abraham’s deliverance beside Nimrod’s humiliation, showing kindness and overpowering judgment through opposite reversals. Fire loses its destructive force before the divine friend; a tyrant receives chastisement through an almost negligible creature. Qurʾān 21:69 commands the fire to become cool and safe for Abraham. The garden and the half-gnat belong to the wider literary telling: both motifs occur together in ʿAṭṭār’s opening praise in Manṭiq al-ṭayr. [8] These parallels do not establish direct borrowing. Namrūdī, “a Nimrod,” also allows the tyrant to become a type of arrogant power. The half-gnat intensifies the disproportion between his pretensions and the means of his defeat; the poem supplies no explanation of why the insect is described as half.

بُلْبُلانِ نَغْمِهٔ تَسْبِیح دَر بُسْتانِ غَیْب

bolbolān-e naghme-ye tasbīh dar bostān-e ghayb

6a  The nightingales singing praise in the garden of the unseen

وَحْدِهُ‌گُویان بِزِیرِ گُلْبُنِ باغِ وِصال

waḥdahu-gūyān be-zīr-e golbon-e bāgh-e vesāl

6b  sing “He alone” beneath the rosebush of the garden of union. [4]

Commentary on couplet 6

The scene becomes a garden filled with praise, where the nightingales’ song resolves into a proclamation of divine oneness. Tasbīḥ is praise that declares God free of imperfection; waḥdahu, preserved within the Persian line, concentrates the singers’ attention upon the One alone. The birds can suggest worshippers of the unseen without requiring identification with a particular angelic rank. Qurʾān 17:44, in which creation glorifies God, offers a scriptural context for this imagined chorus. [9] The rosebush and garden give fulfilled nearness a sensuous setting. They make praise seem alive and abundant, while the repeated garden imagery carries forward the transformation of Abraham’s fire in the preceding couplet.

طُوطِیانِ طارَمِ عُلْوی بَرآوَرْدِه زِ جان

tūtīyān-e tāram-e ʿolvī bar-āvarde ze jān

7a  The parrots of the heavenly vault cry out from their souls:

نَعْرِه‌هایِ «مَا عَرَفْنَاکَ»، اِی قَدِیمِ ذُو الْجَلال

naʿre-hā-ye “mā ʿarafnāka,” ey qadīm-e zū-l-jalāl

7b  “We have not known you,” O Eternal One, Lord of Majesty. [5]

Commentary on couplet 7

The heavenly singers now proclaim the inadequacy of their own knowledge. Their exalted location and wholehearted cry make the confession stronger: even these voices cannot finish knowing the One they praise. The parrots’ articulate speech answers the nightingales’ song, but its highest utterance acknowledges a limit. Mā ʿarafnāka is retained as a devotional confession, without assigning it an authenticated Prophetic attribution. Qurʾān 20:110 provides a relevant parallel concerning the inability to encompass God in knowledge. [9] Qadīm here means beginningless, not simply ancient. The verse need not cancel the knowledge praised in couplet 3; it distinguishes recognition of divine qualities from exhaustive comprehension of the Eternal One.

پَرْتَوِی اَز عَکْسِ رُویَت تافْتِه بَر آب وُ خاک

partovī az ʿaks-e rūy-at tāfte bar āb o khāk

8a  A ray of your reflected face has shone upon water and earth;

خاک اَز آن پُوشِیدِه چَنْدِین خِلْعَتِ حُسْن وُ جَمال

khāk az ān pūshīde chandīn khelʿat-e hosn o jamāl

8b  through it, earth has donned so many robes of grace and beauty.

Commentary on couplet 8

A reflected ray reaches the simplest earthly materials, and the earth answers by clothing itself in innumerable forms of beauty. The two halves place a minute illumination beside its abundant effects, continuing the disproportion between a trace of kindness and the circling heavens. Partov and ʿaks, ray and reflection, keep the manifestation mediated: the poem does not present the earth as containing the beloved’s face. Khelʿat evokes a robe of honour, making beauty something bestowed. A spiritual reading can understand the world’s loveliness as a disclosure that directs attention toward its giver. The image retains both the dignity of created beauty and its dependence upon a source beyond itself.

خامِهٔ صَنْعَت چُو بَسْت اِین نَقْشِ تِمْثالِ وُجُود

khāme-ye sanʿat cho bast īn naqsh-e temsāl-e vojūd

9a  When the pen of artistry drew this design, the likeness of existence,

مُهْر شُد بَر تَخْتِهٔ غَیْب اِین مِثال اَز بِی‌مِثال

mohr shod bar takhte-ye ghayb īn mesāl az bī-mesāl

9b  this likeness from the Incomparable was stamped upon the tablet of the unseen.

Commentary on couplet 9

The beloved’s creative artistry appears as writing, drawing, and sealing: existence receives a form impressed upon an unseen tablet. These joined images suggest purpose and intelligibility without giving the reader a literal account of how creation occurs. The decisive wordplay is between mesāl, likeness or exemplar, and bī-mesāl, the One without a like. A produced form can bear witness to its source without becoming an adequate portrait of that source. Qurʾān 42:11 supplies a relevant statement of divine incomparability. [10] Neither the “tablet of the unseen” nor mesāl must automatically be identified with a particular technical cosmology. The verse lets created form signify while preserving the unlikeness of its maker.

عاشِقانِ دَرْگَهَت اَز مَفْخَرِ خاصّان شُدَنْد

ʿāsheqān-e dargah-at az mafkhar-e khāssān shodand

10a  The lovers at your threshold have become a source of pride for the elect;

گُمْرَهانِ آسْتانَت گَشْتِه دَر دُوزَخ نَهال

gom-rahān-e āstān-at gashte dar dūzakh nahāl

10b  those who stray from your threshold are planted like saplings in hell.

Commentary on couplet 10

The threshold again divides two conditions: lovers become a distinction even among the elect, while those who stray acquire a terrible rootedness in hell. The second half darkens the poem’s garden imagery. A sapling ordinarily promises growth and flowering; planted here, it makes estrangement seem established and enduring. The image preserves the force of judgment rather than reducing hell to a harmless figure of speech. At the same time, the poem names no community whose members the reader is invited to condemn. Its concern is the relation to the beloved’s threshold. This repetition of welcome and loss gives the praise moral gravity before the speaker’s own position becomes uncertain at the close.

واصِلانِ بَزْمِ تُو شاهانِ هَر دُو عالَمَنْد

vāselān-e bazm-e to shāhān-e har do ʿālam-and

11a  Those who reach your feast are kings of both worlds;

رانْدِگانِ کُویِ تُو مَهْجُور اَز کُویِ وِصال

rāndegān-e kū-ye to mahjūr az kū-ye vesāl

11b  those driven from your lane are banished from the lane of union.

Commentary on couplet 11

Those admitted to the beloved’s feast receive the dignity of kings, while those expelled remain outside the place of encounter. The feast gathers intimacy, welcome, and abundance into one image; its sovereignty recalls the paupers served by the heavens in couplet 2. Vesāl can here express fulfilled nearness without asserting a fusion of divine and human substances. Al-Qushayrī’s discussion of proximity treats spiritual nearness through the conditions of the heart rather than physical distance. [11] The passive force of “driven” also matters: unlike the people who turn away in couplet 3, these figures experience exclusion. Arrival appears as a welcome that cannot simply be claimed as an entitlement.

هَرکِه بَر خاکِ دَرَت رَه یافْت عِزَّت یافْت اُو

har-ke bar khāk-e dar-at rah yāft ʿezzat yāft ū

12a  Whoever found a way to the dust of your door found such honor

کَز بَیانِ وَصْفِ اُو فَرْسُودِه شُد پَرِ مَقال

k-az bayān-e vasf-e ū farsūde shod par-e maqāl

12b  that the wing of speech wore out trying to describe him.

Commentary on couplet 12

A person reaches the dust at the beloved’s door and receives an honour that speech cannot adequately describe. The first half makes the lowest place the occasion of elevation; the second measures that elevation by language’s exhaustion. The pronoun ū naturally refers to the person honoured, so it is the transformed lover whom speech struggles to portray. Par-e maqāl, the wing of speech, gives language the flight already associated with the poem’s celestial birds. Here that wing wears out. Humility is pictured through access to the threshold, while praise admits its own limits. This inability to complete a description prepares the later uncertainty about what longing can finally attain.

پِیشِ مَجْرُوحانِ هِجْرَت نِیش نُوشی پُرْشِفا

pīsh-e majrūhān-e hejr-at nīsh nūshī por-shefā

13a  For those wounded by separation from you, a sting is healing nectar;

تِشْنِگانِ وَصْل را هَر آتَشی چُون صَد زُلال

teshnegān-e vasl rā har ātashī chūn sad zolāl

13b  for those thirsty for union, every fire is like a hundred springs of clear water.

Commentary on couplet 13

The speaker describes how separation changes the lovers’ experience: a sting becomes restorative sweetness, and fire answers thirst like clear water. Pīsh, “for” or “in the eyes of,” locates these reversals within the condition of those wounded by longing. Nīsh and nūsh bring sting and nectar close in sound, allowing the language itself to perform the transformation. The return of fire recalls Abraham’s deliverance, now transposed into the lover’s inward experience. The verse concerns the pain of separation acquiring meaning through love. It does not prescribe seeking injury or accepting mistreatment. Its paradox is that what exposes the heart’s lack can also keep it turned toward the one it desires.

کُشْتِگانِ تِیغِ عِشْقَت زِنْدِگانِ جاوِدان

koshtegān-e tīgh-e ʿeshq-at zendegān-e jāvedān

14a  Those slain by the sword of your love live forever;

صَیْدِ شاهِینِ غَمَت شاهانِ مُلْکِ بِی‌زَوال

sayd-e shāhīn-e gham-at shāhān-e molk-e bī-zavāl

14b  the prey of the falcon of your sorrow are kings of an imperishable realm.

Commentary on couplet 14

Those struck down by love live enduringly, and those captured by sorrow’s falcon become sovereigns. The second half restates the first reversal through hunting imagery, with shāhīn and shāhān drawing falcon and kings together in sound. The apparent defeat is loss of self-command before the beloved, not a report that the speaker has literally died. Fanā, the passing away of self-preoccupation, offers a possible Sufi comparison, though no formal stage is named. [11] Hamadani’s Dhakhīrat al-mulūk provides a particularly close prose parallel: lovers sustained by remembrance are described as possessing kingship that does not decline, while they remain dependent on God for existence. [6] Endurance here need not mean becoming independent of God.

بادِه‌نُوشانِ غَمَت داوُد وُ مَعْرُوف وُ جُنَیْد

bāde-nūshān-e gham-at Dāvūd o Maʿrūf o Jonayd

15a  The wine-drinkers of your sorrow are Dāwūd, Maʿrūf, and Junayd;

جانْفُرُوشانِ رَهَت عَمّار وُ سَلْمان وُ بِلال

jān-forūshān-e rah-at ʿAmmār o Salmān o Belāl

15b  those who sell their souls on your path are ʿAmmār, Salmān, and Bilāl.

Commentary on couplet 15

The praise acquires human names: three figures associated with early Sufism drink sorrow’s wine, and three Companions give themselves on the divine path. Beside Maʿrūf al-Karkhī and Junayd al-Baghdādī, Dāwūd is probably Dāwūd al-Ṭāʾī. ʿAṭṭār’s portrait of him joins pervasive sorrow with an account of the wine of intimacy, offering a relevant literary parallel. [12] The second group evokes ʿAmmār ibn Yāsir, Salmān al-Fārisī, and Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ. “Selling” their souls means giving themselves in devotion; Qurʾān 9:111 supplies a scriptural background for such language of exchange. [12] The wine describes an overwhelming attachment in this context, while the named exemplars connect the poem’s paradoxes with remembered lives rather than establishing a particular initiatic chain.

ذَرِّه‌ای دَرْدِ تُو دارُویِ دِلِ هَر با خَبَر

zarre-ī dard-e to dārū-ye del-e har bā-khabar

16a  A particle of your pain is medicine for every awakened heart;

زِیوَرِ ذِکْرِ تُو زِیبِ جانِ هَر صاحِبِ کَمال

zīvar-e zekr-e to zīb-e jān-e har sāheb-e kamāl

16b  the jewel of remembering you adorns every soul of spiritual attainment.

Commentary on couplet 16

A particle of longing becomes medicine, and remembrance becomes the soul’s adornment. The first half continues the healing paradox of couplet 13, but now the measure is minute: even a little dard can awaken the heart. Dard-e to is pain occasioned by longing for the beloved, not a claim that God suffers. The second half turns from the ache of absence to the practice of dhikr, remembrance of God. Qurʾān 13:28 offers a relevant context for the heart’s reassurance through remembrance. [13] The language of jewellery also answers the opening dismissal of possessions. What now beautifies the lover is an inward orientation, making remembrance both response to longing and a form of spiritual richness.

دَر تَمَنّایِ وِصالَت شُد عَلایی جان‌فِشان

dar tamannā-ye vesāl-at shod ʿAlāʾī jān-feshān

17a  Longing for union with you, ʿAlāʾī poured out his soul;

تا چِه خواهَد بُرْد آخِر زِین تَمَنّایِ مُحال

tā che khāhad bord ākher z-īn tamannā-ye mohāl

17b  what will he gain in the end from this impossible desire?

Commentary on couplet 17

The closing couplet replaces the earlier companies of lovers with a named, vulnerable figure: ʿAlāʾī, who has poured out his soul in desire. The question that follows refuses to announce his success. Mohāl, “impossible,” may express his inadequacy, the boundlessness of his desire, or the impossibility of possessing the Incomparable; the wording leaves these possibilities unresolved. The signature is preserved without using it to authenticate an attribution. Hamadani’s discussion of spiritual gifts offers a limited parallel: effort cannot command divine bestowal. [6] Yet that prose teaching should not answer the poem’s question for it. After so many assertions of arrival, the speaker remains exposed to a longing whose outcome he cannot secure.

Understanding this ghazal

This ghazal sustains a direct address to a divine beloved while describing those transformed by love. Its opening paradox supplies the pattern for much that follows: captivity frees, poverty confers sovereignty, and the lowest dust becomes a place of honour. The lovers’ dignity is relational. They are rich because of whom they seek, rather than because they have accumulated possessions, recognition, or even heavenly rewards. Repeated lanes, doors, thresholds, gardens, and a feast turn that relation into a landscape of approach and admission. The heavenly spheres participate in it, making human longing part of a much larger chorus.

The poem repeatedly holds abundance beside limitation. A trace of kindness moves the heavens; a reflected ray clothes the earth in beauty; a particle of pain becomes medicine. These small measures indicate the giver’s inexhaustibility rather than the insignificance of the gift. Yet praise never becomes complete knowledge. Those honoured for knowing divine qualities are followed by heavenly singers confessing that they have not known the Eternal One. Likewise, created likenesses proceed from the Incomparable without adequately reproducing their source. The beloved is encountered through beauty, praise, and transformed experience while remaining beyond the speaker’s power to encompass.

Its delight is crossed by severe images of exclusion, judgment, wounds, and death. These prevent the gardens from becoming merely decorative. Abraham and Nimrod display contrasting outcomes of divine kindness and overpowering judgment; the lovers experience stings and fire through a longing that changes their significance. Later, the named Sufis and Companions give this language a remembered human setting. Remembrance then emerges as a practice within the praise. Hamadani’s prose supplies relevant parallels in love directed toward the giver, remembrance associated with enduring kingship, and gifts that cannot be secured by effort alone. These are documented affinities through a consulted translation, not proof of this poem’s authorship or an explanation of every image. [6]

The final signature alters the emotional balance. ʿAlāʾī has praised those who arrive, yet cannot confidently place himself among them. His “impossible desire” leaves a tension between the nearness celebrated throughout and the uncertainty of his own attainment. The couplets resonate through that tension without requiring a continuous spiritual itinerary. The closing question also returns to the opening freedom from acquisition: what can the lover expect to gain? The poem leaves desire alive at the point where the speaker can no longer guarantee its reward.

Sources and textual notes

Reading notes

[1] 3a: Malak is read as “angel,” collectively, rather than molk, “kingdom.”

[2] 5a: Khalīl, “the intimate friend,” is Abraham. The fire recalls Qur’an 21:69; its becoming a garden belongs to the wider poetic tradition.

[3] 5b: Pashshe, “gnat,” is restored from the 1968 edition. The line alludes to the traditional tale of Nimrod’s defeat by a tiny insect.

[4] 6b: Waḥdahu is Arabic for “him alone”; here it functions as an abbreviated proclamation of divine oneness.

[5] 7b: Mā ʿarafnāka is an Arabic devotional confession: “We have not known you.” It is not a Qur’anic quotation.

Editorial references

6. Hamadani, Dhakhīrat al-mulūk, consulted in Mohammad Umar Farooq, Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani’s Dhakiratul Muluk: An Annotation and Translation (PhD thesis, University of Kashmir, 2009): printed pp. 330–331, gift and giver; p. 338, love, remembrance, and enduring kingship; p. 414, effort and divine bestowal. These passages were verified in the English translation; their Persian wording was not independently collated.
7. Dehkhodā, Loghat-nāma, maghbūt, consulted through Vajehyab, for the distinction between wishing to share a blessing and wishing its removal.
8. Qurʾān, al-Anbiyāʾ 21:69; ʿAṭṭār, Manṭiq al-ṭayr, opening praise of divine oneness, for flowers upon fire and the half-gnat. The literary parallel supports the motifs, not a claim of direct borrowing.
9. Qurʾān, al-Isrāʾ 17:44, for creation’s praise; Ṭā Hā 20:110, for the limits of encompassing knowledge. These are contextual parallels to couplets 6–7.
10. Qurʾān, al-Shūrā 42:11, for divine incomparability, used as context for the wordplay in couplet 9.
11. Al-Qushayrī, Al-Qushayrī’s Epistle on Sufism, translated by Alexander D. Knysh (Garnet, 2007), chapter 2: printed pp. 103–105, proximity and distance; pp. 89–91, fanā and baqā. Used comparatively, without identifying a completed spiritual stage in the poem.
12. ʿAṭṭār, Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ, account of Dāwūd al-Ṭāʾī, for sorrow and the wine of intimacy; Qurʾān, al-Tawbah 9:111, for giving lives and possessions in exchange for paradise. The identification of the poem’s Dāwūd remains probable.
13. Qurʾān, al-Raʿd 13:28, for the heart’s reassurance through remembrance, used as a contextual parallel to couplet 16.

Editorial note: The supplied Riaz 1991 reference, the reported restoration from the 1968 edition, and the signature ʿAlāʾī are retained unchanged. Those editions and the attribution of this ghazal have not been independently verified. The commentary’s prose and literary parallels do not authenticate the poem or resolve its final question.

The manuscript line order below differs from the Riaz sequence on my blog: it runs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 6, 7, 11, 8, 9, then 12–17 straight through. All seventeen couplets are present though:

Chehel Asrar 24 - Twenty Fourth Ghazal

Ghazal 24

7 couplets  |  Riaz 1991, printed p. 465

دَر مُحِیطی فِکَنْدِه‌اَم زَوْرَق

dar mohītī fekande-am zowraq

1a  I have launched my skiff upon an ocean

کِه دُو عالَم دَرُوسْت مُسْتَغْرَق

ke do ʿālam dar-ū-st mostaghraq

1b  in which both worlds are submerged.

Commentary on couplet 1

The speaker begins with a deliberate action: he has launched a small vessel into an ocean whose reach immediately overwhelms that action. The second half enlarges the scene until “both worlds,” plausibly this life and the next, are themselves submerged. The skiff may stand for the individual self or its means of seeking knowledge, but the poem initially leaves that identification open. Mohīt means “ocean” while also carrying the sense of something encompassing; Qurʾān 4:126 uses the cognate Arabic term for God’s encompassing of everything. [2] This is a possible verbal resonance, not a quotation. The opening joins aspiration with disproportion: the seeker moves, yet cannot find a position outside what surrounds him.

نَه زِ زَوْرَق تَوان شِناخْت مُحِیط

na ze zowraq tavān shenākht mohīt

2a  The ocean cannot be known through the skiff,

نَی مُحِیط اَز وُجُودِ آن زَوْرَق

nay mohīt az vojūd-e ān zowraq

2b  nor is the ocean aware of that skiff’s existence. [1]

Commentary on couplet 2

The skiff now fails as an instrument of knowing the ocean; the second half, in the supplied provisional translation, denies the ocean’s awareness of the skiff. Mohīt can mean “aware,” although Persian ordinarily uses it with bar, making the supplied az construction difficult. [3] The existing note therefore remains essential. Supplying the first half’s verbal expression in the second would instead suggest that the ocean cannot be known from the skiff’s existence; this is an alternative parsing, not an established correction.

If the ocean signifies divine reality, the provisional rendering cannot straightforwardly be taken as divine ignorance: Qurʾān 4:126 affirms that God encompasses all things. [2] One possible spiritual reading is that the apparently separate skiff has no independent standing before the ocean. That interprets the image without settling its grammar.

آب شُد زَوْرَق وُ زِ سَیْل آسُود

āb shod zowraq o ze sayl āsūd

3a  The skiff became water and found rest from the flood:

اِینَت مَعْنِیِ مُشْکِل وُ مُغْلَق

īn-at maʿnī-ye moshkel o moghlaq

3b  what a difficult, impenetrable meaning this is!

Commentary on couplet 3

The vessel finds rest by becoming the very water that threatened it. Its safety is expressed through the disappearance of the boundary that made it vulnerable to the flood. The second half interrupts this astonishing image with an admission of difficulty: īn-at marks wonder, while moshkel and moghlaq resist an easy explanation. [3]

Fanā, or passing away, offers a possible Sufi reading: self-preoccupation fades in awareness of God. Al-Qushayrī’s account includes both the removal of harmful qualities and the loss of awareness of oneself; these help distinguish spiritual transformation from a claim of physical fusion. [4] The verse’s impossible transformation remains poetry, whose force exceeds a conceptual paraphrase. It says that the skiff became water, leaving the reader to ponder how disappearance could be experienced as repose.

بِتَفاوُت مَبِین کِه اَصْلِ وُجُود

be-tafāvot ma-bīn ke asl-e vojūd

4a  Do not perceive division, for the essence of existence

نَشَوَد مُخْتَلِف بِهِیچ نَسَق

na-shavad mokhtalef be-hīch nasaq

4b  does not become different in any way.

Commentary on couplet 4

The speaker turns from a startling event to an instruction about seeing. The first half asks the listener to reconsider division; the second grounds that request in the unchanging basis of existence. Asl-e vojūd can suggest the root or fundamental reality of being. The supplied “essence” need not mean that all things have identical characteristics.

This may be read in an Akbarian sense by comparison with Qūnawī, who distinguishes the Real’s undivided being from the diverse relations through which things appear. [5] Here that comparison illuminates a claim about being, beyond the previous couplet’s experience of release. It does not establish the poet’s precise doctrinal intention. The imperative invites a change in how multiplicity is understood: visible differences need not make existence itself a collection of independent foundations.

کُفْر وُ اِسْلام وُ بِدْعَت وُ سُنَّت

kofr o Eslām o bedʿat o sonnat

5a  Unbelief and Islam, innovation and tradition:

اِخْتِلافی‌سْت دَر مِیانِ فِرَق

ekhtelāfī-st dar miyān-e feraq

5b  these are differences among the sects.

Commentary on couplet 5

The abstract language of difference now acquires the charged names through which religious communities distinguish themselves. Sonnat points toward authoritative religious practice, especially Prophetic precedent; bedʿat names innovation in that religious setting. The second half places these oppositions among feraq, groups or sects. Read after couplet 4, the provocation is substantial: communal divisions cannot simply be projected onto the fundamental reality of existence.

The verse does not, however, explain whether every doctrine is equally true or every practice equally warranted. Its challenge becomes sharper when the next couplet identifies self-worship within “we” and “I.” A relevant parallel in Hamadani’s Dhakhīrat al-mulūk joins immersion in divine oneness with the dependent creature’s continuing devotion. [6] That prose passage provides context for retaining both the poem’s challenge to division and its seriousness about spiritual responsibility.

خُودپَرَسْتِی وُ ما وُ مَن گُفْتِی

khod-parastī o mā o man goftī

6a  You worship yourself and have spoken of “we” and “I”—

راه گُم کَرْدِه‌ای زَهی اَحْمَق

rāh gom karde-ī zahī ahmaq

6b  you have lost the way: what a fool!

Commentary on couplet 6

The speaker abruptly addresses someone whose religious or spiritual claims conceal self-worship. The first half exposes the attachment; the second declares its consequence as losing the way. Khod-parastī makes the accusation stronger than ordinary vanity: the self has become the object of devotion. Following the mention of sects, mā, “we,” may suggest collective self-importance as well as the individual assertion carried by man, “I.”

The cutting exclamation zahī ahmaq gives the rebuke its severity. The next couplet’s address to ʿAlī makes an inward direction especially plausible: the poet’s own voice comes under judgment. The passage concerns what speakers claim through their pronouns. Indeed, the poem began with a first-person verb, making its criticism a searching reconsideration of its own opening confidence.

اِی عَلِی لَفْظِ ما وُ مَن حُمْق اَسْت

ey ʿAlī lafz-e mā o man homq ast

7a  O ʿAlī, speaking of “we” and “I” is folly;

چُون زِ ما بِگْذَری چِه مانَد؟ حَقّ

chūn ze mā be-gzarī che mānad? Haqq

7b  when you pass beyond “we,” what remains? The Real.

Commentary on couplet 7

The closing address names ʿAlī, bringing the warning home to the speaking voice. As a poetic signature, the name implicates the poet in the folly he condemns; it cannot by itself authenticate authorship. The second half then answers its own question with the single word Haqq, the Real or Truth, a divine designation also found in Qurʾān 22:6. [7]

The question of what remains recalls Qurʾān 55:26–27, where earthly creatures pass away and the Lord’s Face abides. [7] This is a thematic echo, not a quotation. It can also invite comparison with baqā, abiding through God as self-preoccupation falls away, although the poem names no formal spiritual stage. [4] Passing beyond “we” thus discloses what self-assertion neither produces nor sustains; the final word belongs to the Real.

Understanding this ghazal

This ghazal asks how a seeker can approach a reality that already encompasses the seeker and every possible destination. Its opening gives us an active first-person speaker and a small vessel, then enlarges the waters beyond the scale of either world. The closing returns to that first person in a changed register: the language of “I” and “we” has become something to pass beyond. Although the couplets need not form a continuous narrative, this verbal movement gives them a shared pressure. The central longing is for an encounter no longer governed by the seeker’s claim to independence.

Three different questions meet within the ocean image. How can the vessel know what exceeds it? How can its dissolution become rest? How can differences exist without dividing the basis of existence? These concern knowledge, spiritual experience, and being respectively. The poem brings them into relation without supplying a systematic account of their connection. Its admission that the meaning is difficult belongs to that encounter. In particular, the uncertain second couplet should retain its instability; neither its grammar nor its personification can securely bear a doctrine of divine ignorance.

The religious vocabulary prevents this meditation from remaining impersonal. Names that separate communities are followed by pronouns through which both communities and individuals assert themselves. The accusation of self-worship suggests that even a claim to religious truth can become entangled with self-importance. Yet the speaker does not finish by establishing a superior group above the others: he addresses ʿAlī. This turn makes the poem’s severity answerable to the person uttering it. Its ethical demand arises within its language of unity, as a scrutiny of the self that speaks.

A documented parallel in Hamadani’s Dhakhīrat al-mulūk helps hold these dimensions together. In the account of prayer consulted through Farooq’s English translation, currents of mercy through creation lead to immersion in divine oneness; recognition of the creature’s dependence then leads into worship. [6] This is a prose parallel, not evidence that the passage explains this ghazal. It nevertheless gives the skiff’s repose a meaningful devotional context. The final Haqq does not celebrate a self that has mastered the ocean: it closes upon the reality that the self can no longer claim as its possession.

Sources and textual notes

Reading notes

[1] 2b: The syntax is compressed and uncertain. Provisionally, mohīt is taken as “aware of,” with an omitted copula, rather than supplying a repeated “can be known.”

Editorial references

2. Qurʾān, al-Nisāʾ 4:126. The divine encompassing of all things provides a possible verbal resonance for mohīt and a necessary qualification when considering the provisional reading of couplet 2.
3. ʿAlī Akbar Dehkhodā, Loghat-nāma, entries mohīt and īn-at, consulted through Vajehyab. Lexical evidence supports the comments on awareness, the usual bar construction, and exclamation; it does not settle the syntax of 2b.
4. Al-Qushayrī, Al-Qushayrī’s Epistle on Sufism, translated by Alexander D. Knysh (Garnet, 2007), chapter 2, discussion of fanā and baqā, printed pp. 89–91. Used as comparative Sufi terminology, without claiming a direct borrowing.
5. Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī, the first chapter of Miftāḥ al-ghayb, also included in al-Nuṣūṣ, consulted in William C. Chittick’s translation, “Qūnawī on the One Wujūd”, Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. The distinction between undivided being and diverse relations is used comparatively.
6. Hamadani, Dhakhīrat al-mulūk, consulted in Mohammad Umar Farooq, Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani’s Dhakiratul Muluk: An Annotation and Translation (PhD thesis, University of Kashmir, 2009), printed p. 94. The passage was checked in this translation; its Persian wording was not independently collated.
7. Qurʾān, al-Ḥajj 22:6, for al-Ḥaqq as a divine designation; al-Raḥmān 55:26–27, for passing away and the abiding of the Lord’s Face. These are contextual parallels, not identified quotations in the ghazal.

Editorial note: “Riaz 1991, printed p. 465” is retained as supplied. That edition and this ghazal’s attribution have not been independently verified. The supplied wording, transliteration, translation, and reading note remain unchanged.

Chehel Asrar 23 - Ghazal Twenty Three

  

Ghazal 23

9 couplets  |  Riaz 1991, printed p. 464

گَر نَسِیمِ وادِیِ اَسْرار خواهی تَن گُداز

gar nasīm-e vādī-ye asrār khāhī tan godāz

1a  If you want the breeze of the valley of mysteries, melt away your body;

وَر تَجَلّیِ جَمالِ یار خواهی جان بِباز

var tajallī-ye jamāl-e yār khāhī jān be-bāz

1b  if you want the beloved’s beauty to shine forth, stake your soul.

Commentary on couplet 1

The speaker addresses an aspiring seeker with two uncompromising conditions: bodily melting for the breeze of mysteries, and staking the soul for the beloved’s disclosure. The gentleness of a breeze stands against the extremity demanded of its recipient. Tajallī names a making manifest, here the shining forth of beauty, while jān includes life as well as soul and makes the second demand total. The opening gives renunciation an intensity that a mild change of attitude would not adequately convey. Within the poem’s ascetic rhetoric, body and life become the stakes of surrender; it describes no procedure for injuring them. The repeated if you want establishes the question pursued throughout: whether the seeker will accept what the professed desire entails.

تَن چُو زِنْدان اَسْت وُ جانَت بَنْدِ راهِ جانِ‌جان

tan cho zendān ast o jān-at band-e rāh-e jān-e jān

2a  The body is a prison, and your soul a shackle on the path to the Soul of souls;

جانِ‌جان گَر بایَدَت با بَنْد وُ با زِنْدان نَساز

jān-e jān gar bāyad-at bā band o bā zendān na-sāz

2b  if you seek the Soul of souls, do not settle for shackles and a prison.

Commentary on couplet 2

The body is a prison, but the soul itself is also a shackle on the way to the Soul of souls. The second image makes the demand more searching than a simple escape from bodily appetite. Even attachment to one’s inward identity may obstruct approach to the beloved who gives life its deepest meaning. Jān-e jān intensifies the language of life and intimacy; the couplet does not define a technical World Soul. Its imperative is to refuse accommodation with captivity. In the surrounding language of surrender, this can be read as relinquishing claims over both bodily comfort and spiritual possession. The promised freedom requires the seeker to question even the self that would claim to have become spiritual.

هَرچِه غَیْرِ اُوسْت دُشْمَن دان تُو اَنْدَر راهِ دُوسْت

har-che ghayr-e ū-st doshman dān to andar rāh-e dūst

3a  On the path to the Friend, count all that is other than him an enemy;

دَر حُضُورِ دُشْمَنان با دُوسْت نَتْوان گُفْت راز

dar hozūr-e doshmanān bā dūst natvān goft rāz

3b  you cannot share a secret with the Friend while enemies are present.

Commentary on couplet 3

The seeker must count everything other than the Friend as an enemy, because confidential speech cannot take place before hostile witnesses. The second half turns the first half’s comprehensive exclusion into an intimate scene: a secret shared with one trusted presence. The language demands undivided allegiance, allowing no competing object to claim the heart while it seeks that confidence. Its force belongs to the path and the encounter described, rather than identifying a group of people to be attacked or mistreated. On a spiritual reading, distractions and rival attachments become the intruders that prevent inward candor. The verse asks who or what is being admitted into attention when the seeker says he wants the Friend alone.

شِیوِهٔ رِنْدانِ اِین دَرْگاه جانْبازی بُوَد

shīve-ye rendān-e īn dargāh jān-bāzī bovad

4a  The free spirits of this threshold stake their lives;

چُون تُو اِین بازی نَداری دَر رَهِ اُو کَج مَباز

chūn to īn bāzī na-dārī dar rah-e ū kaj ma-bāz

4b  since you lack the skill for this game, do not play false on his path.

Commentary on couplet 4

The threshold’s free spirits stake their lives, and the addressed seeker is challenged to stop playing falsely at a game he has not mastered. Jān-bāzī, staking life, answers bāzī, game, and ma-bāz, do not play, so the seriousness emerges through verbal play itself. The supplied skill captures one implication of lacking this game, though the phrase can also question whether the seeker possesses its disposition. Rendān here receive their value from frank surrender, preparing the next couplet’s attack on religious display. Their freedom cannot be reduced to social respectability. The rebuke asks for honesty about commitment: presenting oneself as a participant while withholding the decisive stake would make the very performance of devotion crooked.

طاعَت وُ زُهْدِ رِیایی را بَرِین دَر قَدْر نِیسْت

tāʿat o zohd-e riyāyī rā bar-īn dar qadr nīst

5a  Ostentatious worship and asceticism have no worth at this door;

تُحْفِه‌ئی آنْجا نَیارَد کَس بِجُز سُوز وُ گُداز

tohfe-ī ānjā na-yārad kas be-joz sūz o godāz

5b  no one brings a gift there except burning and melting with love.

Commentary on couplet 5

Worship and asceticism performed for display have no value at the beloved’s door; the acceptable gift is love’s burning and melting. Riyāyī is decisive: the criticism falls on ostentation, while the second half measures the offering by inward involvement. The Darwīshiyya printed under Hamadani’s name similarly contrasts the harm of worship producing conceit with the benefit of acknowledging fault and seeking pardon.[2] An Akbarian comparison concerns a different distortion of motive: Ibn ʿArabi describes worship freed from preoccupation with reward while retaining obligatory and customary devotional acts.[3] Display and reward are distinct concerns, but both comparisons illuminate the question of motive. The melting first demanded of the body now becomes the language of a sincere gift.

پِیشِ بارانِ بَلایِ دُوسْت هَرکُو سَر نَهاد

pīsh-e bārān-e balā-ye dūst har-k-ū sar nahād

6a  Whoever bows his head beneath the Friend’s rain of affliction

بَر فَرازِ طارَمِ عُلْوی کُنَنْدَش سَرْفَراز

bar farāz-e tāram-e ʿolvī konand-ash sar-farāz

6b  will be exalted above the vault of heaven.

Commentary on couplet 6

The person who lowers his head under the Friend’s rain of affliction is raised above the heavenly vault. Sar nahād, laying down or bowing the head, turns into sar-farāz, having the head raised: the same bodily image carries surrender and honor. Rain makes affliction something that descends around the lover, while the outcome moves upward beyond the sky. The agents of this exaltation are left unnamed in the Persian, so the verse need not be expanded into a scene involving specified heavenly beings. Its assurance concerns a transformed relation to what befalls the lover. The Friend’s affliction becomes honorable through that relation; the couplet does not establish that every instance of suffering has the same meaning.

با غَمِ عِشْقَش تُو اَز لَذّاتِ جِسْمانی مَگُو

bā gham-e ʿeshq-ash to az lazzāt-e jesmānī ma-gū

7a  With the sorrow of his love, do not speak of bodily pleasures;

با وُجُودِ رَوْضِهٔ رِضْوان تُو اَز گُلْخَن مَناز

bā vojūd-e rowze-ye rezvān to az golkhan ma-nāz

7b  while paradise’s garden exists, do not boast of the bathhouse furnace.

Commentary on couplet 7

The seeker is told to stop discussing bodily pleasures beside love’s sorrow, just as one should not boast of a bathhouse furnace when paradise’s garden is available. The comparison rearranges the scale of desire through spaces of oppressive heat and flourishing delight. Ma-nāz targets boasting, exposing the smallness of what the seeker takes pride in possessing. Paradise remains a positive measure in this particular couplet; the verse does not ask the reader to despise its promise. The furnace also complicates the earlier valued burning of love: heat has no automatic spiritual meaning. Its significance changes with its object and setting. What matters is whether desire is confined to immediate gratification or opened toward a greater good.

فَیْضِ رُوحُ الْقُدُس اَگَر خواهی تُو اَنْدَر سَیْرِ جان

fayz-e rūh-ol-qodos agar khāhī to andar sayr-e jān

8a  If you want the Holy Spirit’s grace on the soul’s journey,

مَرْکَبِ حِرْص وُ هَوا را دَر پَیِ غُولان مَتاز

markab-e hers o havā rā dar pay-e ghūlān ma-tāz

8b  do not spur the mount of greed and desire after ghouls.

Commentary on couplet 8

The desired grace of the Holy Spirit is set against a rider spurring greed and desire after ghouls. Rūḥ al-qudus has Qur’anic grounding: Jesus is supported through the holy spirit in 2:87, and the phrase names the bearer of revelation in 16:102.[4] Here it lends sacred authority to the soul’s hoped-for assistance without identifying a specific revelatory event. The ghoul belongs to the lore of deceptive beings that lure travelers astray.[5] The mount gives appetite momentum, and the rider remains involved by urging it onward. Thus the obstacle is not merely an external deceiver: the seeker’s own desires make the false direction attractive. Spiritual travel requires discernment about what is moving the traveler and whom he follows.

چَتْرِ رِفْعَت بَر سَرِ کَیْوان عَلایی مِی‌زَنی

chatr-e refʿat bar sar-e Kayvān ʿAlāʾī mī-zanī

9a  O ʿAlāʾī, you will raise the canopy of eminence above Saturn

چَشْمِ هِمَّت گَر اَزِین دُونان بِه بَنْدی هَمْچُو باز

chashm-e hemmat gar az-īn dūnān be-bandī hamcho bāz

9b  if, like a falcon, you close the eye of aspiration to these lowly people. [1]

Commentary on couplet 9

ʿAlāʾī’s promised eminence exceeds Saturn if he closes aspiration’s eye to the people called dūnān, a harsh judgment of unworthiness rather than a precise economic category. Kayvān, Saturn, occupied the seventh planetary sphere in the inherited cosmological picture.[5] The canopy gives spiritual elevation a royal form. The falcon’s closed eye has a close poetic parallel in Ḥāfiẓ, where shutting the eyes to the world accompanies seeing the beloved.[6] The line specifies no particular falconry procedure. Hemmat, directed aspiration, is therefore disciplined through what it refuses to pursue. The Darwīshiyya also connects a person’s worth with the object of aspiration.[2] The closing returns the public promise of height to a demanding choice about attention.

Reading notes

[1] 9b: The printed به بندی is retained with its spacing; it is read as the verb be-bandī, “you close.”

Understanding this ghazal

This ghazal challenges a seeker who wants spiritual disclosure while retaining the comforts and claims that obstruct it. Its repeated conditions and prohibitions give the speaker the voice of an exacting instructor, until the closing signature turns that instruction toward ʿAlāʾī himself. The beloved appears as Friend, source of beauty, and Soul of souls. Desire is taken seriously enough to be tested: if the seeker wants the mysteries’ breeze, what is he prepared to relinquish? The body’s melting and the soul’s wager establish an ascetic intensity that governs the succeeding images.

The poem’s oppositions repeatedly change the value of an apparent loss. The prison and shackle must be refused; life is staked in a game whose false players are exposed; the bowed head becomes an exalted head. Burning can name the only worthy offering, yet a furnace later becomes the image of a limited pleasure. These shifts keep the imagery from functioning as a fixed code. The threshold and confidential meeting ask for undivided commitment, while the mount pursuing ghouls exposes how the seeker can help produce his own misdirection. The danger lies as much in attractive appearances as in obvious reluctance.

Sincerity gives this severity its ethical center. The Darwīshiyya transmitted under Hamadani’s name criticizes devotion that produces conceit and measures aspiration by what it seeks; those comparisons remain subject to the work’s attribution dispute.[2] The Akbarian passage cited here offers a related distinction between devotional action and a motive preoccupied with reward.[3] Its scope is limited: the ghazal expressly rejects ostentation and, elsewhere, still invokes paradise as a desirable measure. The opening’s bodily extremity and the language of enemies consequently require attention to their poetic setting. They articulate total surrender and exclusive allegiance without supplying rules for bodily injury or hostility toward other people.

In the final couplet, the movement above the sky depends upon a restriction of the gaze. The seeker does not attain height by collecting more objects of admiration; aspiration changes through refusing those judged unworthy of its attention. That closing gathers the soul’s wager, the sincere gift, and the disciplined journey into one question about what the heart continues to pursue. Its promise also leaves a tension: eminence is offered to the one asked to abandon the motives that ordinarily seek it. The poem tests spiritual ambition by requiring the seeker to relinquish the very attachments through which ambition might disguise itself as devotion.

Sources and textual notes

The supplied Persian, vocalization, transliteration, translation, numbering, bibliographical line, and reading note are preserved. The couplet commentaries and overview are editorial additions. The poem was checked against Riaz’s printed p. 464, including the spacing discussed in the supplied reading note. The prose parallels below come from a work printed under Hamadani’s name whose attribution is disputed; the Akbarian and other comparisons do not establish the poet’s intended interpretation.

2. Darwīshiyya, printed under Hamadani’s name in Muhammad Riaz, Aḥvāl o āsār o ashʿār-e Mīr Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī, second edition, Islamabad, 1991, printed pp. 490 and 497; consulted scan. Page 490 contrasts worship that produces conceit with acknowledgment of fault and seeking pardon; p. 497 relates a person’s worth to aspiration and its object. Riaz discusses attribution to Nūrbakhsh and argues for Hamadani on p. 486. These are qualified prose parallels, not an independently authenticated commentary on this ghazal. The poem itself appears on p. 464.
3. Ibn ʿArabi, Kitāb al-fanāʾ fī l-mushāhada, translated by Layla Shamash and Stephen Hirtenstein, “The Book of Annihilation in Contemplation”, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society 9 (1991), section “The Divine Address,” from annotation 23 through the discussion of obligatory and customary devotional acts. The comparison concerns freedom from preoccupation with reward while devotional practice continues. Reward-seeking and the ghazal’s ostentation are distinguished rather than treated as identical motives.
4. Qur’an, al-Baqara 2:87 and al-Naḥl 16:102, consulted for rūḥ al-qudus. The first associates the Holy Spirit with support given to Jesus; the second associates it with bringing revelation. These establish scriptural contexts for the phrase, without making couplet 8 a direct quotation of either verse.
5. ʿAlī Akbar Dehkhodā, Loghat-nāma, entries ghūl and Kayvān, consulted through Vājehyāb. The former records lore about a deceptive being that misleads travelers; the latter identifies Saturn and its position in the seventh sphere in the inherited cosmological account. These provide lexical and historical context for couplets 8 and 9.
6. Ḥāfiẓ, ghazal 40, couplet 7, as presented in Ganjoor’s Persian text. Closing the eyes to the world like a falcon is paired there with keeping the eye open to the beloved’s face. This is a close poetic parallel for the directed gaze in couplet 9; no claim of borrowing or of a particular falconry technique is required.

Chehel Asrar 22 - Ghazal Twenty Two

  

Ghazal 22

7 couplets  |  Riaz 1991, printed p. 463–464

اَز کِنارِ خویش مِی‌یابَم دَمادَم بُویِ یار

az kenār-e khīsh mī-yābam damādam bū-ye yār

1a  At every moment I catch the beloved’s scent from my own embrace; [1]

زان هَمِی گِیرَم بِهَر دَم خویشْتَن را دَر کِنار

zān hamī gīram be-har dam khīshtan rā dar kenār

1b  that is why I clasp myself in my arms at every breath.

Commentary on couplet 1

The speaker catches the beloved’s scent within his own embrace and responds by clasping himself repeatedly. Fragrance makes another’s presence perceptible where the arms seem to encounter only the self. Damādam and the repeated breath give the action an intimate rhythm, as though each fresh perception renews it. The image accommodates remembered bodily affection as well as a spiritual reading of inward nearness. It also closely parallels the opening of Rūmī’s Dīvān-e Shams, ghazal 1077, whose second half asks why the speaker should not embrace himself each night.[4] Here that question becomes a causal declaration. The shared image does not erase the distinct wording or settle the authorship and transmission of the complete poems.

چُون کِنارَم را مِیانی نِیسْت پَیْدا هَر زَمان

chūn kenār-am rā miyānī nīst paydā har zamān

2a  Since no waist ever appears within my embrace,

دَر مِیانِ خُونِ دِل جانَم غَمَش گِیرَد کِنار

dar miyān-e khūn-e del jān-am gham-ash gīrad kenār

2b  amid my heart’s blood, his sorrow embraces my soul.

Commentary on couplet 2

No waist becomes perceptible within the embrace, and sorrow takes the missing beloved’s place amid the lover’s anguish. Miyān moves from the desired waist to the midst of the heart’s blood, turning bodily intimacy into an inward scene of suffering. In the supplied translation, grief for the beloved embraces the soul; the compressed syntax can also permit the soul embracing that grief. Either way, the relation is reciprocal in feeling, even where the wording leaves its precise agency open. Khūn-e del evokes deep anguish. The couplet therefore complicates the opening’s apparent possession: scent can assure the lover of nearness while the desired body remains elusive, and the embrace becomes inseparable from longing.

چُون مِیانَش را کِناری نِیسْت زان دَر حَیْرَتَم

chūn miyān-ash rā kenārī nīst zān dar hayrat-am

3a  Since his waist has no edge, I am bewildered

کان چُنان نازُک‌مِیانی هَسْت دایِم دَر کِنار

k-ān chonān nāzok-miyānī hast dāyem dar kenār

3b  that one so slender-waisted is always in my embrace.

Commentary on couplet 3

The beloved’s waist has no discernible edge, yet that slender figure is always in the speaker’s arms. The two halves produce bewilderment by bringing incompatible scales together. Slenderness makes the waist almost impossible to grasp, while having no edge suggests something that cannot be bounded. Miyān also retains the sense of a middle: how can there be a center without an enclosing limit, or an embrace that never secures its object? These are possibilities generated by the words, rather than a settled geometry. Hayrat, bewilderment, names the speaker’s response to that collision. A spiritual reading may hear intimacy exceeding the lover’s power to contain it, while the erotic delicacy of the image remains fully active.

نَی مِیانَش را کِناری نَی کِنارَم را مِیان

nay miyān-ash rā kenārī nay kenār-am rā miyān

4a  His waist has no edge; my embrace has no waist;

دَر مِیانِ آتَشِ عِشْقَش نَمِی‌یابَم کِنار

dar miyān-e ātash-e ʿeshq-ash na-mī-yābam kenār

4b  amid the fire of his love, I can find no shore.

Commentary on couplet 4

The first half folds the preceding impossibilities together: no edge belongs to the beloved’s waist, and no waist appears within the lover’s embrace. The second places the speaker amid love’s fire and denies him a shore. Kenār now turns a word of holding into the imagined boundary of an engulfing element. Fire acquires the spatial force of a sea, making the lover’s lack of escape tangible without supplying a stable landscape. The repeated negations intensify experience rather than simply emptying the scene: neither body, embrace, nor burning can be securely bounded. What the lover cannot grasp also leaves him nowhere outside its effect. The wordplay makes intimacy and helplessness sound through the same recurring term.

بَر کِنار اَسْت آنْکِه سَوْدایِ مِیانَش دَر سَر اَسْت

bar kenār ast ān-ke sowdā-ye miyān-ash dar sar ast

5a  Whoever has a longing for his waist in mind stands apart;

اَز مِیان آن بَرْخُورَد کَز خُود شَوَد اُو بَرکِنار

az miyān ān bar-khorad k-az khod shavad ū bar-kenār

5b  only one who withdraws from himself can enjoy that waist.

Commentary on couplet 5

The person preoccupied with the beloved’s waist stands apart; the person who stands aside from himself can enjoy it. The reversal turns on what withdrawal separates the seeker from. In the first half, longing remains lodged in the head; in the second, attachment to one’s own standpoint yields. The Darwīshiyya printed under Hamadani’s name offers a relevant parallel by connecting spiritual opening with relinquishing one’s own wishes.[5] An Akbarian comparison likewise treats apparent ascent toward God as departure from one’s desire and recognition of a presence already given.[6] These illuminate the paradox of approach through self-withdrawal. They do not require the waist to lose its embodied meaning, and the closing couplet will still give thought an active part in transformation.

نِیسْت کَس را اَز مِیانَش جُز کِنار اَنْدَر دُو کَوْن

nīst kas rā az miyān-ash joz kenār andar do kown

6a  In both worlds, his waist offers no one anything but an embrace; [2]

اَز مِیانِ اِینْچُنِین دَوْلَت کَسی جُویَد کِنار؟

az miyān-e īn-chonīn dowlat kasī jūyad kenār?

6b  would anyone seek to withdraw from such good fortune?

Commentary on couplet 6

Across both worlds, the beloved’s waist gives only kenār, followed by a question about abandoning such fortune. The supplied translation takes the first kenār as embrace, making the question an astonished refusal to leave intimacy. Yet the supplied note keeps distance or withdrawal audible there too: what one receives may remain inseparable from what escapes possession. The second half turns the same word unmistakably toward departure, while miyān becomes the midst of good fortune. The couplet’s delight therefore retains an edge of uncertainty. Its language offers no translation that can display every sense at once. Preserving the alternative allows the reader to hear how apparent exclusion and the wish to remain can coexist within love.

اَز کِناری گَر عَلِی بُویِ مِیانَش یافْتی

az kenārī gar ʿAlī bū-ye miyān-ash yāftī

7a  If ʿAlī caught the scent of his waist from some corner,

دَر خَیالِ آن مِیان اَز خویش گَشْتی با کِنار

dar khayāl-e ān miyān az khīsh gashtī bā kenār

7b  in the thought of that waist he would draw apart from himself. [3]

Commentary on couplet 7

The signature enters a conditional scene: if ʿAlī caught the beloved’s scent from some corner, thought of the waist would draw him apart from himself. The repeated forms yāftī and gashtī belong to that conditional construction; they do not report an accomplished encounter. Kenār returns as the place from which fragrance arrives, then participates in the unusual bā kenār, retained provisionally in the supplied note and visible in the print.[7] Khayāl can remain thought or imagining here. The ending accordingly qualifies the earlier suspicion of mental preoccupation: an image of the beloved can also loosen the thinker’s hold on himself. The opening’s self-embrace finds its counterpart in a possible departure from self-possession.

Reading notes

[1] 1a: Throughout this poem, miyān means both waist and middle; kenār shifts between embrace, edge, shore, and withdrawal. The overlapping senses are intentional.

[2] 6a: Kenār can also mean distance or withdrawal here; the next line turns the same word into departure from good fortune.

[3] 7b: The unusual bā kenār is retained and provisionally understood as apart, in keeping with the poem’s wordplay.

Understanding this ghazal

This ghazal makes intimacy difficult to separate from withdrawal. Two ordinary words carry its argument and its feeling: miyān names both a waist and a middle, while kenār moves among embrace, edge, shore, and standing apart. Each recurrence changes the relation between lover and beloved. The speaker begins by holding himself because he detects the beloved’s fragrance there, but the following couplets make the desired waist impossible to locate or contain. The paradox remains bodily: arms, slenderness, scent, the aching heart, and the fire of love give the verbal play its emotional weight.

The changing spatial language prevents either possession or absence from becoming a complete account. The beloved is always in the embrace, yet no waist appears within it; an edge cannot be found, yet the seeker can remain at the edge. The crucial change comes when withdrawal turns toward the self that wants to possess. Even then, the poem does not simply abolish thought or longing. Its final conditional gives an imagined waist the power to draw ʿAlī beyond himself. These couplets resonate through repeated reversals rather than requiring a sequence of clearly separated spiritual stages.

The poem also has a documented history of comparison and interpretation. Its opening closely resembles Rūmī’s ghazal 1077, and Riaz reports both that connection and an allegorical reading from Khulāṣat al-manāqib.[4][7] The latter assigns spiritual meanings to particular terms, but it is consulted here through Riaz’s report, not as an independently verified statement of Hamadani’s intention. The Darwīshiyya passage about relinquishing personal wishes supplies a narrower practical parallel, with its own attribution reservation.[5] The Akbarian comparison similarly helps explain self-withdrawal without turning the whole poem into a fixed dictionary of symbols.[6] Human affection and spiritual nearness remain available together within its language.

The final turn from confident self-embrace to a conditional glimpse preserves the poem’s instability. ʿAlī does not announce that he has secured the beloved; even a scent from a corner might change the one who receives it. Meanwhile, the question about abandoning such fortune keeps the wish to remain alive. The poem’s particular insight arises from that double movement: the lover can be held by a relation he cannot hold as an object. Its embrace becomes most searching where the repeated word also makes room for an edge, an escape, or a departure from oneself.

Sources and textual notes

The supplied Persian, vocalization, transliteration, translation, numbering, bibliographical line, and reading notes are preserved. The couplet commentaries and overview are editorial additions. The wording and order were checked against Riaz’s printed pp. 463–464, including the unusual bā kenār. The additional evidence below distinguishes a verified poetic parallel, a prose comparison with disputed attribution, and an allegorical interpretation known here through Riaz’s report. None replaces the supplied readings or their reservations.

4. Rūmī, Dīvān-e Shams, ghazal 1077, opening couplet, consulted in Ganjoor’s Persian transcription. It shares the image of finding the beloved’s scent from oneself and embracing oneself. Its second half asks why the speaker should not embrace himself each night; the supplied poem makes an affirmative statement at every breath. The wording and the remaining poems differ. This establishes a close correspondence, not an independently reconstructed transmission history; Furūzānfar’s printed edition was not directly collated here.
5. Darwīshiyya, printed under Hamadani’s name in Muhammad Riaz, Aḥvāl o āsār o ashʿār-e Mīr Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī, second edition, Islamabad, 1991, printed p. 498; consulted scan. The prose links spiritual opening with relinquishing one’s own wishes, providing the limited parallel in couplet 5. Riaz discusses attribution to Nūrbakhsh and argues for Hamadani on printed p. 486. The comparison retains that reservation and does not treat the prose as an explanation of this exact ghazal.
6. William C. Chittick, “Presence with God”, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society 20 (1996), final translated Futūḥāt passage, associated with annotation 27. Ibn ʿArabi interprets apparent ascent through departure from one’s desire and recognition of a divine presence already given. This supports the comparison in couplet 5, without fixing the meaning of the beloved’s waist or the closing khayāl.
7. Riaz, Aḥvāl o āsār o ashʿār-e Mīr Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī, printed pp. 463–464, consulted scan. The note on p. 463 identifies a Mawlavī connection for the opening and reports an allegorical explanation in Khulāṣat al-manāqib, including particular occurrences of kenār as heart or contemplation and miyān as absolute being. Those glosses are reported reception, not independently verified authorial definitions; the original commentary was not consulted. Printed p. 464 confirms bā kenār in the closing line, without resolving its provisional interpretation.