WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Sonnets from Hafez & Other Verses cover

Sonnets from Hafez & Other Verses

Chapter 41: 38
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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.

38

Our toil is He, & eke our journey’s end;
Our life-long ailment & our remedy,
Our foeman & our ever-pitying friend;
Who is more vanquishing than victory,
Fairer than beauty, more belov’d than life;
This is he who our peace is & our strife.
Our strenuous earth is He & eke our Heaven,
The crown of conquest & the armour riven,
The strength, the struggle, yea, the failing even.
Of Him all is, & unto Him also
Doth all return: torment & yearning woe
Surely shall pass, even as pleasures go.
Yea, all have end, beggar & bountied king,
Rapture & tears, resting & wandering.