The Mirror of the Beloved: A Reflection on Hafez’s Ghazal

Hafez speaks like someone who has lived inside a single, impossible longing and learned to name every shade of it. In this ghazal he turns the language of desire into a lens: every glance, every wound, every quiet absence becomes a mirror that reflects something larger than the beloved; the fragility and the courage of the heart, the comic and tragic theater of human love, and the thin threshold where carnal longing hints at the divine.

Read straightaway, Hafez’s voice is intimate, almost conspiratorial; an elder lover whispering secrets in the winehouse. Read more closely, and you’ll see a humble philosopher at work: he takes common scenes (a face, a kiss, an arrow, a ruined house) and asks, with a sly, aching seriousness, what those things reveal about us. The poem is a map of being lost and found, a sequence of small crises that open onto a single, stubborn truth: to love truly is to stand exposed before mystery and be changed.

Below I follow the ghazal line by line, then widen into a sustained meditation on its themes; the saintly witness, the sleepless longing, the double nature of the beloved, the passage from pain to remembrance, and the final plea for reconciliation.

The Sacred Witness and the Bird of Paradise

O celestial witness, who loosened your veil?
O heavenly bird, who gives seed and water to your kind?

Hafez begins with a pair of images that look like invitations to look: the “witness” (shāhed) who is both sacred …