The Mongolian power had fallen. Persia was coming to her own. Sultan Sedscha, son of the conquering Mosaffer, was friend and companion poet of Hafiz. During this lull in war’s alarms each gave himself to the joy of living, and life in the blessed city of Shiraz was good to remember. He says that nowhere did roses bloom so luxuriantly. And we are glad to believe him. Sultan Sedscha was the man to value Hafiz. He, too, liked better flower-faced, almond-eyed beauties of the harem, dance, song, than fast, meditation or the swinging prayers of the mystics. Religion was the worn-out side of pleasure. It was the old clothes of men’s pleasures gone to rags. For a little while there was general inclination among the people to turn to real life and give over vain dreaming.
Of this healthful, sane impulse, Hafiz was poet, uniting as he did the imaginative reach of Rûmi, with the firm grasp on material things, the worldly wisdom of Saadi. But he was greater than either in artistic sense of form, which in the quatrain attained grace and distinction comparable with Anacreon. After the winter of war this was fertile spring, when life blossomed, and with it, genius.
Genghis Khan preceded Hafiz. Tamerlane came along in his old age and devastated the valley whose charm transferred to literature is unique in history, which lay between the peaks of purple, monstrous Persian mountains, and which he loved so greatly he never wished to go elsewhere. After fall of the Mongolian power, founded by Genghis Khan, the cities of Persia, Shiraz, Jesd, Ispahan, Bagdad, Hormus, became independent cities after the manner of independent cities of Italy, in the Middle Age. And like them, too, centers of art, of dominant thought.
Hafiz belonged to religious order of the Sufis, which he is said to have joined in youth. Later it is probable he became their head, although we know his free, vigorous mind could not long be bound by tenets of an order. The Vizier, Kiwam-eddin, founded a public school for him that he might have an assured income. These duties Hafiz discharged more faithfully than the founder who acquired the disagreeable habit of forgetting pay day, and the fact that poets share with the world the vulgar need of eating. The following is Hafiz’ effective manner of reminding him of negligence:
Thou jingling rhyme with the kernel of wit
Away to the master! Make quick work of it!
When the place shall be right and with it the hour
From your eloquent lips let a gay jest flower.
In case it should please him, brighten his heart,
Within it conceal this question with art: