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Sonnets from Hafez & Other Verses

Chapter 35: 32
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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.

32

I said, ‘Thou knowest, O all-knowing Friend,
My trouble for thee’. He said ‘Speak not so:
Thy sorrow came; thy sorrow too shall go.’
I said, ‘O light of Truth, when wilt thou spend
Thy radiance?’ Answer heard I, ‘It may be
This will not alway be denied to thee.’
I said, ‘O Merciful, when wilt to me
Show mercy?’ He replied ‘Till that time is
Endure thou patiently my tyrannies.’
I said again, ‘All-seeing, who dost see
How long is pain, behold’st thou not then too
How short sweet joy was?’—Answer’d he anew,
‘Be not thus comfortless, but comprehend:
Ev’n as thy joys, thy sorrows too shall end.’