CHAPTER X.

PERSIAN POETRY.

SEVEN ERAS—THE FIRST PERIOD—THE HOMER OF ĪRĀN—THE SHĀH NĀMAH—HISTORY OF THE PERSIAN EPIC—FIRDUSĪ—INVECTIVE—MŪTESHIM—THE SHĀH’S REPENTANCE— DEATH OF FIRDUSĪ—THE POEM.

The history of Persian poetry may be divided into seven distinct periods of from one to two centuries each.

The first period reaches from the beginning of the tenth century to the close of the eleventh, and it may be said to represent the national poetry in its original purity. Previous to this time, there had been fragments of verse, which had been composed by Bāhram Gor, a Sassanian king, and a few other authors, but this early literature had perished at the hands of the Moslem invaders. The conquerors not only destroyed, as far as possible, the literature of Īrān, but even discarded the language, using Arabic in all official documents. The vitality of the Persian tongue, however, was so great that the patriotic people finally founded another national literature, under the patronage of the Samanian kings.

To this period belonged, Rūdāki, who has been called “The father of Persian poetry,” and who was said to be the author of one hundred volumes of verse, besides his metrical version of the work which has been discussed in the previous chapter under the Persian name of Anwār- i-Suhali. To this period also belonged Omar Khayyām, who was a mathematician as well as a poet. His beautiful quatrains are a great improvement upon the rubā’ī of Abu Sa’īd, who was his predecessor in this peculiar style of verse, and his rhapsodies upon love and wine resemble those of Hāfiz.

The position of “King of Poets,” which was established by Mahmūd the Ghaznevide, is still maintained at the court of Persia, as well as in England, where Tennyson so long filled the office of Poet Laureate. Firdusī was the great literary light of the first period of Persian poetry, indeed he was the Homer of Īrān, and his great epic will always command the first position among the poetical productions of his native land.

THE SHĀH NĀMAH.

During the reigns of the Sassanian and Ashkanian princes over Persia, extensive researches were made to collect the most authentic materials[232] for a general history of that country. This work having been accomplished during the reign of Yezdejird, that monarch called upon the priests of the Fire worship to write out the annals of Persia from the reign of Keiūmers down to the end of that of Khosru Parviz. Their work was completed, but this and other valuable manuscripts were carried away with the spoil of the conquerors after the great victory of Saad Vekas over Yezdejird.[233] It was brought before Omar, and he sent it, with other portions of the spoils to the king of Abyssinia, who had several copies made, and distributed them among his friends in different portions of the East. In this way the valuable work was preserved, and in the course of years reached Khorasān. In the ninth century[234] the Persian king, Yakub bin Leith called a council of the most learned Fire- worshippers, and with their assistance selected the best materials for continuing the history of Persia down to the final defeat of Yezdejird, and they also added to it the ancient history by Danishber Dehkan, which in the meantime had been translated into modern Persian.

When Shāh Mahmūd Sabuktugīn came to the throne, he conceived the idea of having the history of Persia versified in such a form that it would be appreciated by his poetry-loving people, and after many tests of the poetic ability of his literary subjects, he finally confided the works to the hands of

FIRDUSĪ.

This celebrated poet, whose true name was Abul Kāsin,[235] was a native of Tus, a city of Khorasān, and many happy hours of his boyhood were spent on the banks of the beautiful river that swept along its course near his home. But the rebellious waters occasionally flooded their banks, leaving ruin in their path, and the dream of the young poet’s life was the hope that some day he might command the means to build a suitable bridge over this turbulent stream, and also to confine its rising waters within banks of solid masonry. When, therefore, he received the royal commission to write the long Persian epic, he felt that this great public improvement was within his reach, and he gladly undertook the task. After several samples of his poem had been presented to the Shāh, the prime minister was ordered to pay the poet a thousand drachms of gold for every thousand couplets which he produced until the work was completed.

A magnificent residence was erected for Firdusī near the palace of the king, and the best painters of the age were employed to cover the walls with the portraits of kings and heroes, with paintings of battles and sieges, with the most imposing military scenes, and everything that could excite the martial valor and fire the imagination of the writer.

The only member of the court with whom the poet was not upon friendly terms was the conceited prime minister, who expected, and generally received, almost as much adulation from the court poets as the king himself. Firdusī refused to render him this servile homage, and not only so, but finally ignored him to such an extent that he would not go to his house to receive the payment of gold coin which became due upon the completion of each thousand couplets. The only reason he gave for this was that he preferred to receive the whole amount at once, and thereby be enabled to carry out his favorite project and build a bridge in his native city.

All of these little exhibitions of animosity on the part of the poet combined to make him offensive to the vizier, and gave opportunities to other envious courtiers to cultivate the favor of the prime minister by flatteries of himself, and curses upon the head of Firdusī.

At the end of thirty years of hard work the Shāh Nāmah was completed, consisting of sixty thousand couplets. The vizier then revenged himself upon the poet by misrepresenting the condition of the treasury to the king, and, urging upon him the absurdity of paying such an enormous price for a poem, he finally induced him to send to the poet sixty thousand drachms of silver instead of the gold which he had promised.

Firdusī was coming out of his bath when the bags of silver arrived from the treasury, and learning the value of their contents he contemptuously gave them away, giving recklessly, and without judgment, until the sum was exhausted.

This insult to the Shāh was duly reported and exaggerated by the prime minister, and while the monarch was furious with rage, the poet, at the suggestion of the vizier, was condemned to be trampled to death by elephants. His apartments, however, being close to the royal residence, he took advantage of that fact and threw himself at the king’s feet, suing for pardon, and this was granted upon the condition of his immediate departure from the city. Sick at heart, and burning with indignation, he sought the apartment of the king’s favorite attendant, Ayaz, who had always been a faithful friend to the bard. To him Firdusī related his story, and from him received the fullest sympathy. Here he wrote a bitter poetic invective against the Shāh, and having sealed it up, requested Ayaz to deliver it to him after the poet’s departure, and also to choose the time for doing so when some defeat had rendered the Shāh more low-spirited than usual.

INVECTIVE.

“In Mahmūd shall we hope to find One virtue to redeem his mind? A mind no generous transports fill, To truth, to faith, to justice chill.

“Son of a slave. His diadem In vain may glow with many a gem. Exalted high in power and place, Outbursts the meanness of his race.

“Place thou within the spicy nest, Where the bright phœnix loves to rest A raven’s egg—and mark it well, When the vile bird has chipped its shell, Though fed with grains from trees that grow Where Salesbel’s[236] sweetest waters flow— Though airs from Gabriel’s wings may rise To fan the cradle where he lies; Though long these patient cares endure, It proves at last a bird impure.

“A viper nurtured in a bed Where roses all their beauties spread, Though nourished with the drops alone Of waves that spring from Allah’s throne, Is still a poisonous reptile found, And with its venom taints the ground.

“This truth our holy prophet sung— All things return from whence they sprung. Pass near the merchant’s fragrant wares, Thy robe the scent of amber bears; Go where the smith his trade pursues, Thy mantle’s folds have dusky hues.

“Let not those deeds thy mind amaze A mean and worthless man displays. An Ethiop’s skin becomes not white, Thou canst not change the clouds of night. What poet shall attempt to sing The praises of a vicious king?

“Hadst thou, degenerate prince, but shown One single virtue as thy own, Had honor, faith, adorned thy brow, My fortunes had not sunk as now; But thou hadst gloried in my fame, And built thyself a deathless name.

“Oh Mahmūd, though thou fear’st me not, Heaven’s vengeance will not be forgot. Shrink, tyrant, from my words of fire, And tremble at a poet’s ire.”

The indignant and unfortunate bard escaped from Ghizni by night, on foot and alone, for his friends dared not incur the enmity of the king by rendering him any assistance. Ayaz alone had the generous courage to brave the Shāh’s displeasure by aiding the refugee. He sent a trusty slave after him, who soon overtook him, and giving him the horse and a sum of money and other little comforts for his journey, besought him in the name of Ayaz to hasten out of the territory of Shāh Mahmūd if he valued his life.

MŪHTESHIM.

In the meantime reports of the vizier’s animosity and of the sultan’s cowardice were spread all over the country, exciting universal detestation of the king and his minister. The accounts of the poet’s misfortunes and the king’s injustice reached Mūhteshim, the prince of Kohistan, about the time the fugitive approached his seat of government. This prince was the dear friend of Shāh Mahmūd, and bound to him by ties of gratitude for countless favors, but he hesitated not to show his respect for genius, and he sent a deputation of learned and distinguished men to meet Firdusī and invite him to the royal presence. In the midst of this flattering and honorable reception Mūhteshim learned that the offended poet intended to publish a satirical work, holding up to the detestation of the world the treachery of Mahmūd, and he endeavored to dissuade him from this act of revenge, which he considered unworthy of the greatest literary genius of the age. The poet afterward sent him an hundred indignant couplets, that the prince might destroy them himself. Firdusī stated in a letter sent with the lines that, although he dreaded not the anger of Mahmūd, still, out of grateful friendship for the generous Mūhteshim, he gave up the cutting rebuke. The closing paragraph states that—

“On thy account, most amiable prince, do I now consent to transfer my just revenge from this vain world to a higher court.”

Mūhteshim presented Firdusī with a goodly sum of money and forwarded him on his journey, fearful lest the sultan’s rage or the vizier’s malice might overtake and ruin him.

This proved to be a wise precaution, for the king had discovered a sarcastic epigram which Firdusī had written on the wall of the great mosque the night of his departure, and on the next day Ayaz delivered to the furious monarch the insulting letter which the poet had left with him for that purpose, and a large reward was offered for the apprehension of the fugitive. At length, however, the sultan received a long letter from his friend Mūhteshim, who related his meeting with Firdusī, now, in his old age, a penniless wanderer, after having devoted the best years of his life in the constant exercise of his great talents for the execution of his king’s wishes, and gently reproached the Shāh for allowing himself to be imposed upon by the evil advice of malicious courtiers; he also informed him of the forgiving spirit the poet had manifested in destroying his own brilliant satire which was composed at the monarch’s expense, and closed the letter by quoting the couplet which Firdusī had used in the letter to himself.

The complaints from his subjects also began to come to the royal ears, and all of this, together with the reproaches of his own conscience, produced in his mind a strange combination of grief and rage, of indignation and regret. He disgraced the malicious vizier, and fined him sixty thousand drachms of gold, the same amount which he had prevented him from paying to Firdusī, and deeply regretted his own injustice to the gifted bard; but still, he could not forgive the cutting satire of the letter which had been brought him by Ayaz, in which the poet had taunted him with his low birth as being one of the causes of his cowardice and meanness.

DEATH OF FIRDUSĪ.

Firdusī was protected by the Arabian government, and after some years returned and lived with his family at Tus, but he was old, grieved and broken down, and at last he died in his quiet home, at the age of eighty-three. In the meantime Shāh Mahmūd, hearing of his return to Tus, and anxious to render justice, though tardily, to the man he had wronged, sent an envoy with sixty thousand drachms of gold, together with quantities of silks, brocades, velvets, and other costly presents, to Firdusī as a peace offering. But as the royal train of loaded camels entered one gate of the city a mournful procession went out of another, and followed the dead poet to the place of his burial.

The Shāh’s ambassadors offered the presents intended for Firdusī to his only daughter, but she possessed her father’s spirit, and haughtily dismissed the courtiers, rejecting their gifts with proud disdain.

The Shāh, wishing to make some offering to the memory of the departed poet, ordered the sum which had been intended for him to be expended in erecting a caravansera and bridge in Tus, in accordance with Firdusī’s life-long ambition. These monuments of the poet’s fame and of the king’s tardy justice existed for many years, until destroyed by an invading army of Ousbegs under Obeid Khan.

THE POEM.

This great epic, which was written under royal favor, though its author afterward suffered from royal scorn, is a valuable Persian classic. In the Persian tongue it exists only in manuscript form, and its text was corrupted by ignorant transcribers to such an extent that it excited the indignation of the sultan (a grandson of Timur, who reigned in the fifteenth century), and he collected a vast number of copies of the work; from these he had a transcript made, which was, perhaps, tolerably correct.

But since that time copies have been so greatly multiplied and their contents differ so widely, that it is only by a careful collation and comparison of manuscripts that scholars can hope to arrive at a reasonable degree of correctness. These manuscripts are finely executed and highly ornamental, having the frontispiece and titles beautifully illuminated and sprinkled with gold; the volumes are often profusely illustrated by colored drawings of exquisite finish. They cost about one hundred guineas, or about five hundred and twenty-five dollars each. But although these manuscripts can only be multiplied at such great expense, the original work has lived through eight centuries, and is still the most popular epic in the Persian tongue.

The author of the Shāh Nāmah[237] has often been called the Homer of the East, Firdusī occupying the same position in relation to other Persian poets that Homer has so long held in the West. Like Homer, too, he describes a rude age, where muscular strength and animal courage were chiefly valued. The correspondence is very striking between the old heroic times which were described by Firdusī and Homer, and the pictures which are sometimes given us of the age of European chivalry. It is well known that the Moors carried into Spain the poetry and romance of Arabia and Persia, and some of our best fiction is supposed to be derived from that source.

Although Firdusī wrote in the beginning of the eleventh century, it was not until the twelfth that the romances of chivalry began to amuse the Western world. The “Orlando Innamorato,” a poem by Bayardo, which was afterward improved and paraphrased by Berni, gave life and character to a great number of the stories of chivalry. In a similar way the Shāh Nāmah was largely indebted to the Būstān-Nāmah, which comprised the chronicles, histories, and traditions of the Persians, collected under the patronage of Yezdjird, the last king of the Sassanian race. Like the beautiful Rāmāyana and the martial Mahā-bhārata of the Hindūs, the Shāh Nāmah claims to be a history in rhyme. It is supposed to comprise the annals and achievements of the ancient kings of Persia from Kaiūmers[238] down to the Saracenic invasion and conquest of that empire,[239] an estimated period of more than three thousand six hundred years. But this bold lyric can lay but little more claim to historic accuracy than can the Hindū epics whose gorgeous colorings mock the very name of history. The Shāh Nāmah, like the other Oriental poems, abounds in adventures of the wildest description, in fabulous feats of strength and valor, and the heroines of the Persian bard are as intrepid and beautiful as the maidens who conquered the heroes of Western poetry.

The legends of all nations are rich with terrible dragons, which are vanquished by unconquerable knights. Even England has her St. George, and other countries boast of cavaliers who were equally valiant.

The hero of the Shāh Nāmah is Rustem, the Persian Hercules, and the strong similarity between the myths pertaining to them is another argument in favor of the common origin of various mythologies.[240] The labors of Rustem, however, were only seven, while those of Hercules were twelve. In the Shāh Nāmah, Isfendiyār has his seven labors as well as Rustem, and both succeeded in the overthrow of devouring monsters, and the destruction of talismans and works of enchantment. Isfendiyār is always accompanied, however, by a troop of horsemen, while Rustem performs his exploits alone, being mounted upon his magnificent horse Rakush. This splendid animal will often remind the reader of the horses of Indra, the Hindū “Lord of the Thunderbolt,” or Jove with his “steeds of light,”

“Adorned with manes of gold, and heavenly bright.” Indeed, the boldest heroes of all people rode to battle upon gallant chargers like those of Rhesus, which were “swift as the wind, and white as winter snow.”

The splendid picture of the Northern god would have lost its force without the presence of the fleet-footed Sleipnir, and Neptune were scarcely the king of ocean without his celestial steeds,

“Fed with ambrosial herbage from his hand, And their fetlocks linked with golden band.”

Achilles, too, drew the reins over

“Xanthus and Balius, of immortal breed, Sprung from the wind, and like the wind in speed. * * * * * * * * From their high manes they shake the dust, and bear The kindling chariot through the parted war.”

Būddha is represented, too, as deserting his wife and child, riding upon his coal-black steed, Kanthāka, which was said to be thirty feet in length, and able to clear the high gates of the palace, or the broad rivers that flowed across his pathway, at a single bound.

The Persian poem, like the colossal epics of India, is of such interminable length that the readers of modern times would not be willing to scan the many pages of endless description and hyperbole. We therefore give, in simple phrase, the best incidents of this heroic legend.

Footnote 232:

That there were historic materials of great antiquity, we have the testimony of Herodotus and Ctesius, and also of the book of Esther—“On that night the king could not sleep and he commanded to bring the books of records of the chronicles, and they were read before the king.”—Esther vi, 1. Also it is written. “And all the acts of his power and his might and the declaration of the greatness of Mordecai, are they not written in the books of the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia?”—Esther x, 2.

Footnote 233:

A.D. 636.

Footnote 234:

A.D. 837.

Footnote 235:

The name of Firdusi is said to have been given him by the Governor of Tus, because his garden, which was called Ferdus (Paradise), was looked after by the father and brother of the poet, and it was in this delightful spot that he began the versification of the great national epic, the Shah Namah.

Footnote 236:

The sacred well at Mecca, the waters of which are claimed to have wondrous healing power.

Footnote 237:

In addition to the Shah Namah, Firdusi composed a poem of nine thousand couplets on the loves of Yusuf and Zulaikha, that abounds in elegant and spirited diction, but it is inferior to the greater epic, partly in consequence of his adoption of the same metre which he used in the Shah Namah, and which was well adapted to that martial poem, but not at all appropriate for the expression of the gentle strains of a love song.

Footnote 238:

Kaiumers is represented as the grandson of Noah.

Footnote 239:

About A.D. 636.

Footnote 240:

See Hindu Literature, Chapters II and III.