Persian Literature, Volume 1, Comprising The Shah Nameh | Page 5

India. All these places were visited before he returned to Shiraz, the "seat of learning," to put to writing the thoughts which his sympathetic and observing mind had been evolving during all these years. This time of his mastership was spent in the seclusion almost of a recluse and in producing the twenty-two works which have come down to us. An Oriental writer says of these periods of his life: "The first thirty years of Sa'di's long life were devoted to study and laying up a stock of knowledge; the next thirty, or perhaps forty, in treasuring up experience and disseminating that knowledge during his wide extending travels; and that some portion should intervene between the business of life and the hour of death (and that with him chanced to be the largest share of it), he spent the remainder of his life, or seventy years, in the retirement of a recluse, when he was exemplary in his temperance and edifying in his piety."
Of Sa'di's versatility, these twenty-two works give sufficient evidence. He could write homilies (Risalahs) in a Mystic-religious fashion. He could compose lyrics in Arabic and Turkish as well as in Persian. He was even led to give forth erotic verses. Fondly we hope that he did this last at the command of some patron or ruler! But Sa'di is known to us chiefly by his didactic works, and for these we cherish him. The "Bustan," or "Tree-Garden," is the more sober and theoretical, treating of the various problems and questions of ethics, and filled with Mystic and Sufic descriptions of love.
His other didactic work, the "Gulistan," is indeed a "Garden of Roses," as its name implies; a mirror for every one alike, no matter what his station in life may be. In prose and in poetry, alternating; in the form of rare adventures and quaint devices; in accounts of the lives of kings who have passed away; in maxims and apothegms, Sa'di inculcates his worldly wisdom--worldly in the better sense of the word. Like Goethe in our own day, he stood above the world and yet in it; so that while we feel bound to him by the bonds of a common human frailty, he reaches out with us to a higher and purer atmosphere. Though his style is often wonderfully ornate, it is still more sober than that of H��fiz. Sa'di is known to all readers of Persian in the East; his "Gulistan" is often a favorite reading-book.
The heroic and the didactic are, however, not the only forms in which the genius of Persian poetry loved to clothe itself. From the earliest times there were poets who sung of love and of wine, of youth and of nature, with no thought of drawing a moral, or illustrating a tale. From the times of Rudagi and the Samanide princes (tenth century), these poets of sentiment sang their songs and charmed the ears of their hearers. Even Firdusi showed, in some of his minor poems, that joyous look into and upon the world which is the soul of all lyric poetry. But of all the Persian lyric poets, Shams al-Din Mohammed H��fiz has been declared by all to be the greatest. Though the storms of war and the noise of strife beat all about his country and even disturbed the peace of his native place--no trace of all this can be found in the poems of H��fiz--as though he were entirely removed from all that went on about him, though seeing just the actual things of life. He was, to all appearance, unconcerned: glad only to live and to sing. At Shiraz he was born; at Shiraz he died. Only once, it is recorded, did he leave his native place, to visit the brother of his patron in Yezd. He was soon back again: travel had no inducement for him. The great world outside could offer him nothing more than his wonted haunts in Shiraz. It is further said that he put on the garb of a Dervish; but he was altogether free of the Dervish's conceit. "The ascetic is the serpent of his age" is a saying put into his mouth.
He had in him much that resembled Omar Khayy��m; but he was not a philosopher. Therefore, in the East at least, his "Divan" is more popular than the Quatrains of Omar; his songs are sung where Omar's name is not heard. He is substantially a man of melody--with much mannerism, it is true, in his melody--but filling whatever he says with a wealth of charming imagery and clothing his verse in delicate rhythms. Withal a man, despite his boisterous gladsomeness and his overflowing joy in what the present has to offer, in whom there is nothing common, nothing low. "The Garden of Paradise may be pleasant," he