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Sonnets from Hafez & Other Verses

Chapter 31: 28
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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.

28

What madness ’twas, I know not, that thus enchanted me;
What wine, nor who the bringer, nor wherefore enter’d he.
—Lament no more, O full heart, thy love so close confin’d!
O rosebud, ope thy glory, thy beauty nought shall bind!
Behold the flower-fill’d meadows; thou too, O wistful Dear,
Take in thine hand the goblet, & lend to me thine ear!
Lo, for our wintry sorrow I hold the certain cure!
Lo, stern fate kneels before us! Lo, rapture evermore!
—What madness ’twas I know not, that thus entrancéd me;
What wine, nor who the bearer, nor whither vanished he.