Abstract
Hāfez and John Donne are both outstanding love poets. The multilayered implications of the universal theme of love and its relation to the two poets' historical, cultural as well as political contexts have encouraged the present comparative study of Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and Hāfez's "Sonnet 193". The study is based on the hypothesis that the most dominant features of Donne's love poems are the unity of sense and sensibility as well as congruity of reason and passion, whereas in the poems of Hāfez one can witness disjunction and incongruity between love and reason. In addition to explaining the concept of love, both poets have wittily reflected upon the political conflicts of their time, too. This research, therefore, aims at investigating how Hāfez and Donne have used the mathematical tool, the compass, as a conceit, not only to concretize their notion of love but also to express the symbolic significance of the circular movement of that instrument to comment on the meaning of love in opposition to reason and to criticize the political issues of their time.
Highlights
1 Hāfez and Donne are both acknowledged to be spectacular love poets of their own time and culture
There are plenty of ways to concretize love using the literary devices, one of the most interesting ones deployed by the 14th-century Persian poet, Hāfez, the supreme connoisseur of the Persian sonnet form, and the 16th-17th-century English metaphysical poet, John Donne, is conceit, or the far-fetched metaphor
Hāfez uses compass as a conceit to be able to convey his mystical as well as political ideologies of and about love; Donne uses it to elaborate on his metaphysical notion of body versus soul in light of the idea of love
Summary
Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī (1315-1390) known by his pen name, Hāfez, was the arch practitioner of the Persian sonnet form whose collected poems (Dīwān) is considered to be the "pinnacle of Persian literature" ("Hafez"). Hāfez gained international attention a few centuries after his birth in Shiraz when the foremost English orientalist, William Jones, translated his works in the late 18th century. This fame spread throughout Europe to the extent that "the name Hāfiz [became] synonymous with Persian poetry in the literary culture of Europe" "He is famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits" ("John Donne")
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