Starting as he did on his literary career at the time when Goethe's Divan and Rückert's Östliche Rosen had inaugurated the Hafizian movement in German literature, it would have been strange if he had remained entirely outside of the sphere of its influence. As a matter of fact, he took some interest in Persian poetry almost from the outset of his poetical activity, as his letters clearly show. As early as 1821, he mentions Saʻdī with the epithet herrlich, calls him the Persian Goethe and cites one of his couplets (Gul. ii. 48, qiṭʻah; K.S. p. 122) in the version of Herder.[198] In April, 1823, he writes from Berlin that during the preceding winter he has studied the non-Semitic part of Asia,[199] and the following year in a letter to Moser[200] he speaks of Persian as "die süsse, rosige, leuchtende Bulbulsprache," and goes on to imagine himself a Persian poet in exile among Germans. "O Firdusi! O Ischami! (sic for Jāmī) O Saadi! Wie elend ist euer Bruder! Ach wie sehne ich mich nach den Rosen von Schiras." Such a rose he calls in one of his Nordsee-poems "die Hafisbesungene Nachtigallbraut" ("Im Hafen," vol. i. p. 218).
Yet, judging from the familiar epigrams of Immermann, which Heine cites at the end of Norderney (Reiseb. i. vol. v. p. 101) as expressive of his own sentiments, he seems to have held but a poor opinion of the West-Eastern poetry that followed in the wake of Goethe's Divan. He certainly never attempted anything like an imitation of this poetry, and Oriental form appealed to him even less. In the famous, or rather infamous, passage of the Reisebilder (vol. vi. pp. 125-149), where he makes his savage attack on Platen, he ridicules that poet's Ghaselen and speaks derisively of their formal technique as "schaukelnde Balancierkünste" (ibid. p. 136). It is probable, however, that he judged the γazal form not so much on its own merits as on the demerits of his adversary. It is certain at any rate that he has nowhere made use of this form of versification.
Persian influence is not noticeable in his earlier poems;[201] his Buch der Lieder shows no distinctive traces of it. His later poems, Neue Gedichte (1844) and Romanzero (1851), on the other hand, show it unmistakably. The Persian image of the rose and the nightingale is of frequent occurrence. In a poem on Spring (Neue Ged. vol. ii. p. 26) we read:
Und mir selbst ist dann, als würd' ich
Eine Nachtigall und sänge
Diesen Rosen meine Liebe,
Träumend sing' ich Wunderklänge—.
The image recurs repeatedly in the Neue Gedichte, e.g. Neuer Frühling, Nos. 7, 9, 11, 20, 26; Verschiedene, No. 7, and in Romanzero (vol. iii.), pp. 42, 178, 253. Even in the prose-writings it is found, e.g. Florentinische Nächte (vol. iii. p. 43), Gedanken und Einfälle (vol. xii. 309).
Again, when Heine speaks of pearls that are pierced and strung on a silken thread ("Kluge Sterne," Neue Ged. vol. ii. p. 106), he is intensely Persian; still more so when he calls Jehuda ben Halevy's verses (Romanz. vol. iii. p. 136):
Perlenthränen, die, verbunden
Durch des Reimes goldnen Faden,
Aus der Dichtkunst güldnen Schmiede
Als ein Lied hervorgegangen.
The Persian fancy of the moth and candle-flame seems to have been in his mind when he wrote ("Die Libelle," vol. ii. p. 288):
Knisternd verzehren die Flammen der Kerzen
Die Käfer und ihre liebenden Herzen....