Sitting silent in the twilight, faces of my former loves

Float about my fancy softly, like a silver flight of doves.

Brighter than the stars of heaven is the shining of their eyes,

Sweeter are their angel voices than the speech of Paradise.

I am old and grey and weary, winter in my blood and brain;

But to-night these haunting phantoms conjure up my youth again.

Lovingly I name them over, all that world of gracious girls,

Almond-eyed and jasmine-bosomed, like a poet stringing pearls.

In my tranquil cypress mazes just outside the sleepy town,

Blooms a tribe of laughing lilies fairer than a kingly crown.

Every lily in the garden wears a woman’s gracious name,

Every lily in the garden set my spirit once aflame;

And amongst that throng of lilies scarcely whiter than his hair,

Hafiz sits and dreams at sunset of the flowers no longer fair;

Of the sweethearts dead and buried whom I worshipped long ago,

When this beard as grey as ashes was as sable as the sloe.

I would weep if I were wiser, but the idle child of song

Leaves reflection to the Mullah, sorrow to the Sufi throng.

Am I wrong to be contented in the sunlight to rehearse

Pleasant tales of love and lovers in my honey-laden verse?

While the vinepress with the life-blood of the purple clusters drips,

I forget how slowly, surely, day by day to darkness slips,

Heedless how beyond the gateway in the field the nations jar,

Hand on throat and hand on sabre in the trampled lanes of war.

Ah! ’tis better on this pleasant river bank to lie reclined,

While the ghosts of old affections fill the harem of my mind.

Think no more of love and lasses, Hafiz; you can scarcely hold

The Koran with trembling fingers. Hafiz, you are growing old.