Sonnets from Hafez & Other Verses

Chapter 23: 21 ATTAINMENT

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About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sonnets and short poems ranging from intimate meditations to more formal exercises. Many pieces probe impermanence, longing, and the pursuit of beauty, alternating quiet elegies on loss and weariness with assertions of resilience, desire, and contemplative rest. The final sequence adapts and reimagines Persian odes, evoking Hafez’s spirit rather than literal translation. Poetic forms shift between sonnet-like structures and freer lyrics, unified by musical diction, images of nature and wandering, and a tone that balances elegiac restraint with vivid sensory detail.

21

ATTAINMENT

When the strong climber his last mountain-crest
Attaineth, & the point for which he strove
Is reached, & his desire made manifest,

& seating him the topmost heights above
He gazeth on each aspect leisurely,
Considering the path by which he clomb

& which so many attempted, & how he
The first of all his race had strength to come
Unto that eminence, & how this throne

Shall men hereafter to his name recall;
Then more than ever is he strangely lone,
Seeing earth’s dwellings spread out far & small;

& more unfathom’d seemeth & more high,

Eternal heaven’s unchanged immensity.