North and South and West are quaking,

Thrones are cracking, empires shaking;

Let us free toward the East

Where as patriarchs we’ll feast:

There in loving, drinking, singing

Youth from Khidr’s well is springing.

Seeing rightly, seeing purely,

There I’ll penetrate most surely,

To the origin of nations,

When on earth the generation

Heard God’s words with human senses,

Heedless of their formal tenses.

When to fathers they gave honours

And rejected foreign manners;

I’ll rejoice in youth’s demotion:

Wider faith, narrower notion–

Words weighed then as value’s token

Since the word was one that’s spoken.

With the herdsmen I’ll go questing,

In oasis freshness resting,

Roam in caravans wide ranging

Coffee, shawls, and musk exchanging;

Every track my footstep traes

Through the sands to market-places.

On the mountain’s desolation

Hafiz, you give consolation

When our guide, afraid of capture

High upon his mule in rapture

Sings, to set the stars a-blazing,

Startled thieves with dread amazing.

You at wells and inns I’ll ponder,

Holy Hafiz, thinking fonder

When my love unveiled caresses,

Strewing fragrant amber tresses.

Yes, the poet’s whispered yearning

Even starts the Huris burning.

If your envy this despises,

Of belittles precious prizes,

Think awhile that poet’s diction

Is no commonplace of fiction,

Hovering soft in heaven’s portal

Life it seeks that is immortal.

Loeper, in his very elucidating foreword to the Divan, notes that we find in it only the expression of the active, living side of the Orient; it shows forth the submission to God, but not the Fatalism of the East. The urge in it is all towards joy, towards life, towards love, out of the depths of a serene and composed spirit. From out the narrow room and narrow local surroundings of his home the poet takes his Hegira into the open world, into the freedom of Nature.