Breathless First Love

Love poems have a way of using a lot of figurative language to describe delicate feelings in the most intricate of ways possible. Not only does it invite the audience into the poet’s mind, but it also paves a pathway of imagination and what it is like for one to feel when in love. In Ode 44, Hafez tells a story of a specific night with a woman and wine through metaphor usage for the purpose of conveying one’s deepest desires in a vulnerable position.

Hafez starts off with laying out the central setting of the poem, which I feel really helps set the scene and gives a visual to the audience of what the atmosphere is like before continuing on with his thoughts. He further continues to describe her appearance and body language by saying “Narcissus-eyes all shining for the fray” (Line 4, Hafez). This word choice lets the readers know that the woman has light, yellowish colored eyes. The second part of the line, especially ‘shining”, indicates that the poet sees a sense of lust in her light eyes, waiting to essentially undress and become exposed to him. Such body language gives the narrator ideas of what the woman might want to initiate. Immediately after the observations, the woman makes a move and gets into bed with him then proceeds to ask if he’s asleep or awake. This questions forces the narrator to literally springs in excitement to show her that he was ready to move forward towards wherever these actions were leading. Hafez then writes “Of Heaven’s own vine: he surely were a churl” (Line 14, Hafez). This line is intriguing in a few ways. For one, readers can notice that the poet capitalizes the word ‘Heaven’, showing the underlying respect he might have when it comes to religion, culture, and God. Going off of that thought, this creates an almost contradicting meaning in the line because it basically shows how an un-welcomed deed is committed while recognizing the respect to the ‘All Knowing’. Such assumptions are later backed up when towards the end Hafez mentions “Foredoomed to drink and foreordained forgiven” (Line 21). The poet is aware what he is doing is a sin, but decided to do it anyways. Taking in account the story and figurative language, this love rejects Islamic spirituality because a lot of things that take place goes against the religion and one can tell that the poet/author is well aware of it, but decided to pursue the love anyways. That’s how powerful this love is for him.

Simranpreet Kaur