Amanda Lynch
Reading Poetry
April 30, 2014
The Glorious Journey: A Reflection on the Poetry of Hafiz “A poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, then raise it to nourish your beautiful parched, holy mouth.” With such a philosophy as this, it is unsurprising that the poetry of the legendary Sufi mystic Hafiz has survived and even remained influential for nearly 700 years. Born somewhere around the year 1320, in Shiraz, Persia, Hafiz was born into an Islamic family. After memorizing the Koran when he was a teenager, he began to practice mysticism and to write poetry in his early 20s. It is estimated that he wrote somewhere around 5,000 poems, each of them divinely inspired, before he died in 1389. Of these five thousand poems, only 500-700 have survived, and there is some doubt as to whether or not all the poems ascribed to him are authentic. The majority of his work is thought to have been destroyed by the religious and political authorities of the time who were threatened by the ideologies of Hafiz. Regardless of this, his poetry remained hugely influential, with his Divan, or collected works, becoming a classic part of Sufi literature. People who find themselves in need of guidance will often use his poetry as an oracle, a practice that began shortly after his death and continues to be used today. They will use randomly selected couplets or poems to find wisdom and make important decisions. It is perhaps fitting that Hafiz’s greatest impact would be on Sufism, the very thing which greatly influenced his own life and work. Sufism is the “belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God. It consists of a variety of mystical paths that are designed to ascertain the nature of humanity and of God and to facilitate the experience of the presence of divine love and wisdom in