From The Persian Of Hafiz II - Analysis

Renouncing Paradise to win back the present

The poem’s central insistence is that religious life becomes truer when it stops bargaining for reward. Right away, the speaker addresses a hermit wise and says, Let us renounce the thought of Paradise. It’s not atheism; it’s an attack on spiritual bookkeeping. In the next breath he claims that in the old Paradise our names of sin / Allah recorded not, a startling reversal: the paradise people fantasize about is not a place where your moral file is kept and tallied. The poem’s faith begins by refusing the anxious, scorekeeping version of faith.

Holiness without profit: the corn-grain test

Emerson’s Hafiz uses an earthy image to mock piety that is really self-interest. The person dear to God is described as one who No corn-grain plants—someone who does not invest in the ground as if salvation were a harvest you can force. That figure is still glad that life is had even though corn he wants. The tension here is sharp: the poem praises contentment while acknowledging lack. It’s not naive abundance; it’s a deliberate stance of not turning God into a supply chain. Want remains real, but it is no longer the lever that moves devotion.

Mosque versus drink-house: two kinds of devotion

The poem stages a playful but serious argument between ascetic discipline and sensual gratitude. Thy mind is the mosque and cool kiosk, full of fast and orisons. Mine is allowed the drink-house and even the sweet chase of the nuns. The tone is teasing, almost courtly, but the stakes are theological: is holiness defined by refusal, or by a wholehearted yes to what is given? The speaker doesn’t deny the hermit’s path; he refuses to let it become a law for everyone. That refusal is the poem’s first moral act.

Wine as origin story, not mere indulgence

When the speaker pleads, Forbid me not the vine, he makes a bolder claim: On the first day Hafiz was kneaded up with wine. Wine becomes a creation-myth, a way of saying that joy is not an afterthought or a temptation added later; it is in the dough of the self. The contradiction is deliberate and risky: the poem uses an image commonly coded as sin to argue for something like predestined gladness. If the self is baked with wine, then a spirituality built entirely on denial is a spirituality that denies one’s own ingredients.

The blanket in the banquet: what devotion costs

The poem then turns from permission to proof, measuring devotion by what you will risk for love. The false holy man is the one Heaven slights, who refuses, There in the banquet, to pawn his blanket for Schiraz’s juice. The blanket is survival, status, prudence—what keeps you warm and respectable. Pledging it is not just drinking; it is choosing communion over caution. The same logic intensifies: whoever won’t even pledge his friend’s shirt or the hem of it finds that Eden’s bliss and Angel’s kiss shall want their edge. Paradise itself grows dull when you have never risked anything for delight or friendship. Heaven isn’t denied; it is drained of flavor by timidity.

A daring consolation: don’t be shy of hell

The ending offers not complacency but a bracing kind of trust: Up, Hafiz—grace from high God’s face already Beams on thee pure. Because grace is depicted as present and shining, the speaker can say, Shy then not hell, and still conclude, Heaven is secure. The tone shifts here from bantering defense to exhortation: stand up, stop flinching, live as though grace is real. The poem’s final tension is unresolved on purpose: it invites a life that looks reckless—wine, pledges, banquets—while insisting that this is precisely what trust in God feels like when it’s not a transaction.

What if the poem’s scandal is its definition of faith?

If Heaven is secure, then the poem implies that moral caution can become a kind of unbelief: a refusal to accept that grace is already beams and not wages. The hermit’s fear of the vine begins to look less like purity and more like insecurity—an inability to live without guarantees.