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Sonnets from Hafez & Other Verses

Chapter 42: INDEX OF FIRST LINES
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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.

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

NO.
 
When sunlight faileth 1
 
I called to fading day 2
 
O youth’s young cloudlet, O freshness free 3
 
Wend I, wander I, past all worlds that be 4
 
Eyes that o’er the landscape fly 5
 
O what availeth thee thy melting mood 6
 
All things born to break 7
 
If there be any power in passion’s prayer 8
 
In love’s great ocean, whose calm-shelter’d shore 9
 
When sorrow hath outsoar’d our nature’s clime 10
 
O gentle weariness 11
 
Peace, for whose presence we did erewhile call 12
 
Beauty is a waving tree 13
 
Wheresoever beauty flies 14
 
When first to earth thy gentle spirit came 15
 
For sake of these two splendours do the wise 16
 
She hath not beauty, that ill-fortun’d gem 17
 
When thou art gone, & when are gone all those 18
 
Play thou on men as on a harp’s string 19
 
Go, book: go, vessel laden with the mind 20
 
When the strong climber his last mountain-crest 21
 
Since neither man’s proud pomp & kingly name 22
 
Pureness of pale moon, loneness of far skies 23
 
 
After Hafez
 
I saw fair Fortune, one clear morning, touch 24
 
Come let us drink & deeply drown 25
 
Once more, O happy hill & peaceful plain 26
 
Tell me not, mournful Preacher, that to prize 27
 
What madness ’twas, I know not, that thus enchanted me 28
 
She went.—O whither too, O one true love 29
 
I said, ‘O heavenly Leader, O truth’s day 30
 
Where is the pious doer? & I the estray’d one, where? 31
 
I said, ‘Thou knowest, O all-knowing Friend 32
 
My heart the chamber of His musing is 33
 
Fair is the leisure of life’s garden-ground 34
 
Thus spake at dawn to the fresh-open’d rose 35
 
Though beauty’s tress be strayed, ’tis beauteous still 36
 
Arise, O cup-bearer, & bring 37
 
Our toil is He, & eke our journey’s end 38