This ghazal is one of Hafez’s most heart-wrenching meditations on separation, memory, and the soul’s exhaustion in love.
بی مِهرِ رُخَت روزِ مرا نور نماندست
وز عمر، مرا جز شبِ دیجور نماندست
هنگامِ وداعِ تو ز بس گریه که کردم
دور از رخِ تو، چشمِ مرا نور نماندست
می‌رفت خیالِ تو ز چشمِ من و می‌گفت
هیهات از این گوشه که معمور نماندست
وصلِ تو اَجَل را ز سرم دور همی‌داشت
از دولتِ هجرِ تو کنون دور نماندست
نزدیک شد آن دم که رقیب تو بگوید
دور از رُخَت این خستهٔ رنجور نماندست
صبر است مرا چارهٔ هجرانِ تو لیکن
چون صبر توان کرد که مقدور نماندست؟
در هِجرِ تو گر چشمِ مرا آبِ روان است
گو خونِ جگر ریز که معذور نماندست
حافظ، ز غم از گریه نپرداخت به خنده
ماتم زده را داعیهٔ سور نماندست
Hafez Starts by:
Without the radiance of your face, my day holds no light.
And of my life, nothing remains but the dark night.
Thus begins one of Hafez Shirazi’s most sorrowful laments, a ghazal woven entirely of shadow and absence. Here, love is not the sweet intoxication of union, but the long ache that follows its loss.
The poet speaks from a desolate landscape, where time has collapsed into a single endless night. Yet, beneath the lamentation, there is a strange serenity, the stillness of a soul that has stopped fighting its own pain, and begun to understand it as a kind of prayer.
🌑 The Light That Left
Without the radiance of your face, my day holds no light.
And of my life, nothing remains but the dark night.
In the mystic language of Persian love poetry, light is always more than sunlight; it is the presence of the Beloved, divine or human. The face of the Beloved is the mirror of truth, the source of being, the very reason the world is illuminated at all.
When that face is hidden, all of existence grows dim. Hafez is not merely mourning the loss of a lover; he is mourning the loss of meaning itself.
Every human heart knows a version of this darkness.
It arrives quietly, perhaps in the night after farewell, perhaps in the long season when prayers go unanswered.
The world remains as it was, but the light inside the world changes.
Things that once shimmered with beauty now feel pale and foreign.
In Sufi thought, this is the Night of Separation; the stage where the seeker, deprived of the Beloved’s nearness, must walk through the shadows of longing, learning to see by faith rather than by sight.
💧 The Eyes That Wept Their Sight Away
At the moment of parting, I wept so bitterly
that now, far from your face, my eyes hold no light.
This is one of the most intimate confessions in Hafez’s poetry. His vision, the very faculty by which he perceives beauty, is gone.
The act of seeing has been consumed by the act of weeping.
This verse carries a quiet paradox: the same eyes that sought the Beloved’s beauty are now blinded by their own devotion. The more he longed, the less he could see.
It is as though the tears have dissolved the boundaries of perception, leaving him not blind in despair, but blind in love, seeing nothing but the absence itself.
There is something holy in this exhaustion.
Many mystics describe this point as the end of effort: when the seeker has wept enough, prayed enough, searched enough, and finally surrenders to the stillness of loss.
In that surrender, a new kind of seeing may be born, not of the eyes, but of the heart.
🕯️ The Empty Corner of the Heart
The image of you was leaving my eyes, and said:
“Alas! This corner of the soul will not remain inhabited.”
Here, imagination itself, that tender guest who carried the memory of the Beloved, prepares to depart. Even fantasy can no longer sustain him. The house of the heart grows silent and empty.
It is a painful image: a deserted sanctuary where once there was worship.
But it also reflects the mystic’s progression. For in Sufi understanding, even the image of the Beloved, even the most beautiful dream, must eventually fade, so that the seeker may meet the Beloved as pure reality.
The absence becomes the doorway.
Sometimes, when love withdraws, it is not cruelty, it is calling us beyond the mirror.
🕊️ When Death Was Kept Away by Love
Your union once kept death far from me;
now the fortune of separation keeps it close.
Before, love was his protection, the warmth that made life radiant and worth living. Now, deprived of that nearness, he feels the chill of mortality itself.
It is as though the very presence of the Beloved had once held the cosmos in order; without it, everything begins to decay.
But Hafez is not simply speaking of physical death.
He is describing spiritual death, the withering that happens when the heart no longer feels connected to the source of meaning.
In that sense, death and separation are one and the same: both are experiences of being cut off from the infinite.
And yet, hidden in this grief is the seed of resurrection.
For every mystic must die before dying; must lose everything they thought they were, so that the eternal self, the one truly joined to the Beloved, might awaken.
💔 The Jealous Rival
Soon the jealous one will say:
“He who was parted from your face is no longer among the living.”
The rival, that ever-present figure in Persian ghazal, can be read as envy, ego, or the world itself.
It delights in seeing the lover undone.
But Hafez knows that even the rival’s mockery reveals truth: the one who is cut off from the Beloved truly no longer lives in the ordinary sense.
He exists, but in ashes, sustained only by memory and hope.
This is the paradox of love’s devotion: it kills the lover, but he would not trade that death for all the life in the world.
Because even half-alive in longing, he is still nearer to truth than those untouched by love’s fire.
⏳ The End of Patience
Patience is my only remedy in your absence
But how can I be patient when patience itself is gone?
Patience, in Sufi literature, is not passive endurance. It is active faith, the willingness to wait for what cannot yet be seen.
But there comes a time when even patience is burned away.
Hafez is at that threshold now, where endurance collapses into surrender.
The lover who can no longer endure must fall directly into the hands of the Beloved.
And this, perhaps, is what love desires all along: not composure, not perfection, but the soul made helpless and open.
🌧️ Tears of Blood
In your absence, my eyes flow like a stream.
If they pour blood instead of tears, let it be; they are forgiven.
In this line, suffering itself becomes sacred.
Hafez does not apologize for his excess of feeling; he consecrates it.
The weeping of the lover is not self-pity, it is liturgy, a ritual cleansing of the soul.
In classical Persian imagery, “tears of blood” signify the depth of passion where grief and love become indistinguishable.
The heart bleeds, yet it does not wish to stop, because the pain itself is a form of remembrance.
🕯️ When the World of Joy Is Closed
Hafez has wept so long from sorrow
that laughter no longer visits him
the one struck by mourning has no desire for feasts.
This final couplet is not mere sadness; it is a closing prayer.
It acknowledges that joy, as the world understands it, has lost its meaning for the soul who has tasted the fire of love.
The ordinary pleasures, celebration, laughter, comfort, cannot satisfy the one who has glimpsed eternity and lost it again.
But Hafez is not bitter. His tone, though full of pain, carries acceptance.
He has become one of those rare beings who understand that grief, too, can be holy; that sorrow can polish the heart into a mirror for the Infinite.
🌒 The Hidden Light of the Dark Night
This ghazal, for all its mourning, is not hopeless.
Its imagery of blindness, darkness, and burning tears conceals a deeper illumination: the mystical truth that the Beloved is never truly absent.
The apparent distance, the unending night, the loss of sight, these are stages of purification.
When all light is gone, when even patience fails, what remains is pure longing, and longing is itself a form of divine presence.
As Rumi once said:
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
Hafez’s wound has become vast enough to contain the stars.
🌌 The Poetic Theology of Separation
In Sufi thought, separation (hijrān) is not a punishment; it is the mirror image of union (wisāl).
The two alternate like breath, teaching the soul both ecstasy and endurance.
Union teaches joy, but separation teaches depth; it purifies love from desire, transforming it into remembrance.
The mystic’s path is not a straight road toward eternal bliss; it is a spiral of losing and finding, of seeing and being blinded, of weeping and awakening again.
Through every loss, something false is stripped away, until the lover no longer seeks the face of the Beloved in form, but in everything.
Hafez, the eternal witness of both wine and weeping, knows this truth intimately.
His poetry is not about romance alone, but about the human soul’s conversation with the divine, the long dialogue of absence and return.
🕊️ What Remains After Everything Is Gone
When the last tear has fallen, when laughter is silent, and even patience is burned away, something unexpected appears: a quiet awareness that cannot be taken.
This awareness is not joy, but peace.
It does not come from reunion, but from the realization that the Beloved was never truly gone.
The light that seemed lost was only hidden behind the veil of longing.
Separation, then, is a lesson in seeing through darkness, a training in invisible faith.
And Hafez, the master of paradox, turns even despair into devotion.
🌙 The Soul After Night
In the end, this ghazal is not a complaint, but a confession of fidelity.
The poet remains in love, though everything that once sustained him: sight, patience, joy, has been taken away.
It is love in its purest form: love that persists without reward, without hope of return, without light,
a flame that burns in absolute night.
That is the essence of mystical love:
To remain faithful to the unseen.
To trust that even when the lamp is extinguished, the fire still glows somewhere beyond perception.
💫 Epilogue: The Night as Prayer
Perhaps that is why this poem feels so quiet, almost like a whisper to the stars.
Hafez is not raging at heaven, nor pleading for mercy. He is simply naming what is: the darkness, the longing, the exhaustion, and in doing so, he transforms it into prayer.
Because every true prayer begins not with words, but with emptiness.
And in that emptiness, light is already returning.
Thus, the ghazal of “بی مهر رخت” (“Without the radiance of your face”) is not the end of faith; it is the deep night before dawn.
The Beloved’s absence becomes the seed of remembrance,
and even the dying flame becomes a star.
