Alireza Bemanian, May of 2017 (Author, Poet)
تمنای وجود (Tamannā-ye Vojud / “The Desire of Existence”) & My Desire, My Soul
Philosophical Analysis — Draft 003
Poem by Alireza Bemanian, July 3, 2017
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
I. The Ontology of Desire: Tamannā-ye Vojud
The Persian title of Dr. Alireza Bemanian’s poem, تمنای وجود (Tamannā-ye Vojud, literally “The Desire of Existence”), and its English counterpart, My Desire, My Soul, establish a foundational philosophical identity: to exist as an awakened soul is to desire, and the quality of one’s existence is determined by the object of one’s desire.
The Persian title can be read two ways, and both are the poem’s. It is “the desire for existence,” the longing to be fully, and it is “the desire of existence,” the desire that existence itself is made of. The English title takes the second reading and makes it personal: desire and soul are set side by side, joined by nothing but a comma, as if they were the same thing named twice.
Written six days after The Throne (Takht-e Soleymān), this poem shifts the philosophical inquiry from the mechanics of action (taqallā, struggle) to the orientation of volition (khāhesh, wanting). Every couplet in the Persian text turns on the refrain khāhi (“you desire / you seek”). Philosophically, Dr. Bemanian refuses the ascetic ideal of extinguishing desire. He holds that human beings are desiring creatures; the existential crisis lies not in desiring too much, but in desiring falsely (khod-khāhi, kaj-khāhi, zar-khāhi) or striving too little (kam-kushi).
II. Inward Epistemology vs. The Theater of the Raw (Khāmān)
The poem’s epistemological starting point in the first beyt is radical interiority: negar bi-tāb andar dide (“Look restlessly within the eye” / “Start searching your own soul”). Truth cannot be found by passively scanning the external social world, because the external arena (“Out there”) is dominated by what the poet calls نمایشها (namāyesh-hā, theatrical displays, spectacles), staged by the خامان (khāmān, the raw, unripened, “short sighted beings”).
Here Dr. Bemanian formulates a critique of social inauthenticity that belongs both to classical Sufism and to modern thought about the self. The “raw” individual lives in the mode of outward spectacle (namāyesh), driven by sowdā-ye khod-khāhi, the passion and the commerce of self-seeking, since sowdā means both. His vision is “short-sighted” because egoism shrinks the horizon of being to self-display. To perceive the Beloved’s rising presence (tāle’ash), the seeker must withdraw attention from the theater of ego and turn vision back upon the soul itself.
The inward turn is not a retreat into privacy. The same poem that begins “look within the eye” commands, five beyts later, “look upon every alley and bazaar of His,” and its English rendering of contemplation is “fulfill a gap of solitude, then observe his places, cornerstones, and offerings.” Solitude is a gap to be filled and then left. The seeker looks inward in order to see the world as His, not in order to stop seeing it.
III. Teleological Eclipse: When Purpose Outshines the Sun
In the second beyt, the poem introduces a cosmological hierarchy:
There is no glory, there is no capture of thoughts, even while observing the sun of universe, when?
When; the destiny, desire, intent, and goal of living is perpetually and purposefully perceived.
In classical metaphysics, the sun (khorshid-e falak) is the highest visible emblem of majesty, order, and illumination. Yet Dr. Bemanian asserts that even the physical cosmos loses its claim on human wonder (jāh o ta’ammol nist dar engār) once consciousness grasps its مقصود (maqsud, ultimate purpose, unpacked in English as “the destiny, desire, intent, and goal of living”). Material cosmology, however grand, is subordinate to a consciousness that knows what it is for. When human destiny merges wholeheartedly with the Beloved’s thoughts, interior purpose eclipses the physical sun.
It matters that the one who says this is a physicist. The claim is not that the sun is unworthy of contemplation; the poem restores ta’ammol, contemplation, three beyts later and points it at the world. The claim is about rank. A mind that knows its purpose can study the sun without being ruled by it, as the astronomer studies the sky without consulting it for his fortune.
IV. The Ethics of Potentiality: Against Kam-kushi and Stalemate
The third and fourth beyts articulate a philosophy of human agency and potentiality. The poet warns:
Do not seek shelter under any comforting roof, where not realizing the far stretched extent of your potentials and the outpours of your endurable efforts.
In Persian, the flaw condemned here is کمکوشی (kam-kushi, under-exertion, striving beneath one’s capacity), which is مخدوش (makhdush, marred, compromised, defective). Philosophically, comfort without growth is a form of self-betrayal. The “comforting roof” represents any premature ideological, social, or psychological settlement that halts growth.
Paired with kam-kushi is خاموشی (khāmushi, silence, translated in English as “silence and stalemate”). As in The Throne, silence is not treated as mystical peace, but as paralysis. The seeker must “set your silence and stalemate aflame” (bazan ātesh be khāmushi). And true vitality, the “youth of fortune” (shabāb-e bakht), is not an external stroke of luck awaited passively; it must be sought within the soul (dar khod ju) and filled with the Beloved’s melody (naghme), rendering the soul impervious to “dilemmas and drawbacks” (jafā).
The potential the poem speaks of is not self-generated, and this is the point at which its ethics parts from an ethics of self-realization. The fortune within is to be filled vaz ān naghme, “from that melody,” a sound that comes from elsewhere and is named only in the last line as His voice. The seeker’s task is to search, to strive and to burn the stalemate; the filling is done by what he is searching for. Effort prepares the vessel. It does not supply the content.
V. The Three Pathologies of False Orientation: Ego, Dogma, and Gold
Across the poem, Dr. Bemanian diagnoses three distinct pathologies that corrupt human orientation:
1. The Narcissistic Spectacle (Khod-khāhi, beyt 1): the short-sighted egoist trapped in performative self-seeking.
2. The Pledged Dogmatist (Zāhed-e Mashrut-e Kaj-khāhi, beyt 6): the pious preacher bound, by acceptance, promise or compulsion, to crooked and selfish wanting, so that even his oath to keep his word, and implicitly his thought, serves it. In English, Dr. Bemanian names him with the phrase “protractors of deterrence.” Rather than freeing the soul for direct contemplation of the Beloved across every alley and marketplace of life, dogmatic moralists build systems of deterrence that prolong spiritual alienation.
3. The Gilded Slumber (Khofte-didegān-e Zar-khāhi, beyt 7): the “arrogant and conceited entities” whose eyes are asleep (khofte-didegān) because their “essence of thoughts” is bent toward gold (zar-khāhi). Materialism is diagnosed not merely as greed, but as cognitive and perceptual sleep.
Against these three false orientations, the seeker must perform an act of individuation: جدا کن قبله را (jodā kon qeble rā, “Distinct your seeking direction”). One’s spiritual direction (qeble) must be separated from the herd and set by the “unique guiding star” (dordāne akhtar).
VI. The Phenomenology of Reciprocity: The Reverberant Song
The philosophical culmination of My Desire, My Soul arrives in the final couplet. After elevating “deliberations, deeds, and dreams” (nazar parvāz dārash) until standing beneath the roof of the Beloved’s love (bām-e mehr-e u), the seeker discovers the nature of the maqsud (destined goal):
Then, be aware your destined goal is not anything but to reciprocate to his reverberant songs, that is your ultimate dream, destiny, and desire; his adoring feelings towards you.
This closing revelation resolves the fundamental tension of mystical longing. Desire (tamannā) is not a solitary human projection into a silent universe. The Beloved’s “reverberant songs” (āvā-ye u) and “adoring feelings” (khāterash) are the primary reality, already resounding through existence. The entire labor of searching the soul, burning away stalemate, rejecting false roofs, and setting one’s guiding star is undertaken so that the human soul can become an instrument capable of reciprocating that divine resonance.
The grammar of the two languages makes the same claim from opposite ends. The Persian uses the pronoun to, “you,” once, in its first line, for the seeker as the one who wants: gar to tāle’ash khāhi, “if you want His rising.” The English uses “you” once, as its last word, for the seeker as the one who is wanted: “his adoring feelings towards you.” Between the first line of the one and the last word of the other, the seeker is moved from subject to object of desire. The poem’s philosophy of desire ends in the discovery that one’s own desire was an answer.
VII. Wanting as a Verb
The poem’s most exact philosophical claim is made by grammar and never stated. Its refrain, khāhi, ends nine lines. Six times it is a verb in the second person, present and conditional: if you want His rising, when you want the alley of His heart, since you want the jasmine, when you want the whisper of His face, if you want a sight of His holy stature, you want His heart. Three times it is not a verb. It has become the tail of a compound noun, the Persian way of naming a trait of character: khod-khāhi, self-wanting; kaj-khāhi, crooked-wanting; zar-khāhi, gold-wanting. And the three nouns are attached to three groups in the third person, the raw, the bound ascetic, and the sleeping-eyed. The seeker is never described by a noun of wanting. He is only ever told that he wants.
What the grammar says is that the vice is not desire but the hardening of desire into identity. A wanting that is still a verb is still directed: it has an object, it can be redirected, it can be answered. A wanting that has become a noun has stopped asking. The self-wanter has found his object in himself, the gold-wanter in gold, and the crooked-wanter in the selfishness he has pledged himself to, and in each case the want is no longer open; it is what the person is. This is why the poem can command desire, tamannā kon, “desire!”, in the same couplet in which it warns against the ascetic. The ascetic does not lack desire. His desire has set into a shape, kaj, crooked, and he calls the shape piety.
The same distinction governs the poem’s one word for the self. Khod appears twice. In the first beyt it is the first half of khod-khāhi, the self as the object of wanting, and it is the disease. In the fourth beyt it is a place, dar khod ju, seek within yourself, and it is where the cure is looked for. The self is not to be abolished. It is not to be wanted. It is to be searched.
VIII. The Bound Ascetic and the Direction One Sets Oneself
Beyts 6 and 7 together make the poem’s argument about religious authority, and they make it as an argument about direction.
The figure of beyt 6 is described with care. He is a zāhed, a renouncer; he is mashrut, bound: he has accepted, promised, or been compelled to support crooked wanting, and the bond reaches into his oath to keep his word, and implicitly into his thoughts; he makes a da’vi, a claim, a word that in the court is a lawsuit; and his wanting is kaj, crooked. The English calls him a “protractor of deterrence,” an instrument for measuring angles that measures out fear. The poem’s command concerning him is precise. It does not say “refute him” or “obey him.” It says masho hamdam, do not become his companion, his sharer of breath. The danger lies in proximity, in living by his claims.
The command of beyt 7 is the alternative: jodā kon qeble rā, set your qibla apart. The qibla is the direction of prayer, and by definition it is held in common; it is what makes many people face one way. To set it apart is to take one’s bearing oneself. But the poem is careful about what one takes it by. Not by oneself alone, which would be the khod-khāhi of the first beyt, and not by the community’s appointed measurers, which would be the protractor of the sixth. It is taken by a star, dordāne akhtar, chosen for one purpose, bahr-e edrākash, for the perceiving of Him. Between self-will and borrowed direction the poem places a third possibility: a direction set personally, by a fixed point outside the self, for the sake of understanding.
The second line of beyt 7 shows what happens otherwise. The many with sleeping eyes are ma’tuf, turned, inclined. They are not without a direction; they face gold. The poem’s account of faithlessness is not the absence of a qibla but a qibla no one chose, a bearing taken while asleep.
The poet’s own sense of mashrut explains why the danger is companionship. This ascetic is not a hypocrite whose words and deeds diverge. His word is given, to selfishness, and he keeps it; and because a man bound by his word comes to think within it, his thoughts are bound as well. Such a man cannot be argued out of his position, since his position is a promise. What he can do is draw others into it. To become his hamdam is to share the breath of a fidelity that has already decided what may be thought. The poem’s answer to him is the answer of the whole: do not borrow your bearing.
IX. Two Accounts of Inward Turning: Ali ibn Abi Talib and Marcus Aurelius
Two thinkers, neither drawn on elsewhere in this series, set the poem’s philosophy in relief: one from the tradition the poem inherits, one from outside it. Each holds part of what Tamannā-ye Vojud holds, and each, by where it differs, shows what is the poem’s own.
The first is a saying of Ali ibn Abi Talib, preserved as number 237 among the short sayings of Nahj al-Balagha. In the widely used English translation it reads: “A group of people worshipped Allah out of desire for reward, surely this is the worship of traders; another group worshipped Allah out of fear, this is the worship of slaves; and another group worshipped Allah out of gratefulness, this is the worship of free men.” The same threefold saying, in nearly the same Arabic words, ‘ibādat al-tujjār, ‘ibādat al-‘abād, ‘ibādat al-aḥrār, is recorded by Ibn Kathir as a saying of Ali’s grandson Ali ibn al-Husayn, Zayn al-‘Abidin. Whichever mouth first spoke it, it belongs to the inheritance of the poem’s language, and it maps the poem’s three pathologies of devotion with uncomfortable precision.
The worship of traders is worship conditioned on reward. It is the zāhed-e mashrut, the ascetic bound to crooked wanting, whose piety serves the self it claims to renounce, and it is the sowdā, the bargain, of the first beyt. The worship of slaves is worship driven by fear. It is what the English calls “deterrence,” and the ascetic who measures it out is its instrument. The worship of the free is worship from gratitude, and gratitude is the response of one who has already received. The poem’s last line is exactly this. Its purpose is “to reciprocate to his reverberant songs,” and reciprocation is gratitude made active: an answer to something already given. The poem moves its seeker out of the trader’s bargain and the slave’s fear and into the freedom of answering.
Where the poem goes beyond the saying is in what it makes of desire. In the saying, raghba, desire, belongs to the traders; it is the motive of the lowest worship. In the poem, desire is commanded, tamannā kon, and it is the seeker’s own; it is only the desire that has hardened into a noun of character that the poem condemns. Dr. Bemanian does not ask the seeker to rise above wanting into gratitude. He asks him to keep wanting, as a verb, until he discovers that what he wanted was to answer. The poem reaches the saying’s freedom by way of desire, not by leaving it.
The second thinker is the emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations is the classical West’s great book of the inward turn. In the seventh book (section 59 in the modern numbering) he writes, in Meric Casaubon’s translation of 1634: “Look within; within is the fountain of all good. Such a fountain, where springing waters can never fail, so thou dig still deeper and deeper.” It is the poem’s first line and its fourth beyt in Stoic dress: negar bi-tāb andar dide, look within; shabāb-e bakht dar khod ju, seek the youth of fortune in yourself. Both send the reader inward for what the world cannot give, and both expect him to work at it, to dig “still deeper and deeper,” to look bi-tāb, without rest.
The difference is the poem’s whole theology. Marcus’s fountain is self-sufficient; its waters “can never fail” because they are the self’s own. In the fourth book (section 3) he describes the inward turn as a refuge: “At what time soever thou wilt, it is in thy power to retire into thyself, and to be at rest, and free from all businesses. A man cannot any whither retire better than to his own soul.” The poem refuses both halves of this. Its inward search is not a rest: the comfortable roof is forbidden, and silence is to be set on fire. And its interior is not a fountain but a vessel, to be filled “from that melody,” by a voice that is not the self’s. Marcus retires into the soul to be free of the world’s business; the poem looks into the soul in order to go out into “every alley and bazaar of His.” Marcus finds at the bottom of the self a good that is already his. The poem finds a capacity to be filled and a song to be answered.
Read together, the two thinkers mark the poem’s position exactly. With Ali’s saying it rejects devotion as trade and as fear, and arrives at an answering gratitude. With Marcus it sends the seeker inward and demands labor there. Against the saying, it keeps desire alive as the road to that gratitude. Against Marcus, it denies that the inward turn ends in self-sufficiency. The self, for Dr. Bemanian, is where one searches, not what one finds.
X. The Epistemology of Edrāk: Comprehension vs. Blind Imitation (Taqlid)
Why does the seeker of beyt 7 separate his qibla and point it toward a single star? The Persian gives the reason in two words: بهر ادراکش (bahr-e edrākash, “for the sake of perceiving / comprehending Him”).
In the history of Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence, a sharp line divides knowledge acquired through ادراک (edrāk, direct rational and intuitive apprehension) from conformity based on تقلید (taqlid, imitation, following the authority of another without independent verification). When a community faces a shared qibla merely by habit, or when a follower accepts the da’vi (claim) of the zāhed-e mashrut (the bound ascetic) out of fear, the act is one of taqlid: the angle of devotion has been set from outside by someone else’s protractor. Even the gold-seekers of beyt 7b follow a collective taqlid of the marketplace—they are ma’tuf (passively bent or turned) toward gold while their eyes are asleep (khofte-didegān).
By commanding jodā kon qeble rā … bahr-e edrākash, Dr. Bemanian makes edrāk (comprehension) the sole legitimate ground of spiritual orientation. A direction of prayer that is not chosen for the sake of understanding is indistinguishable from sleep. This is why the mihrab in beyt 5 must be “compared and gauged” (namā mehrāb rā), and why the triad of beyt 6 places ta’ammol (reflection) and negar (observation) immediately after tamannā (desire). Faith, in this philosophical architecture, is not the surrender of the intellect to a preacher’s deterrence; it is the calibration of the intellect and the soul toward a truth they seek to comprehend directly.
XI. Time, Shadow, and Presence: The Ontology of Beyt 5
At the exact center of the poem stands its only verbless line:
نگارش بر وجودت سایه ها پربار و پر گردش
The only portray with its secure revolving shadows, the one that is surrounding and overwhelming your existence and presence.
In both Platonic philosophy and much of classical asceticism, a “shadow” (sāye) is a privation—an emblem of unreality, fleetingness, or ignorance contrasted with the pure light of the sun. Here Dr. Bemanian reverses that metaphysics. The physical sun of beyt 2 (khorshid-e falak) held no glory or contemplation in the mind’s reckoning; the shadows of beyt 5, cast by the Beloved’s inscription (negārash) upon the seeker’s existence (vojudat), are پربار (por-bār, fruitful, heavy with yield) and پر گردش (por-gardesh, full of revolution, turning through time), and the English calls them “secure revolving shadows.”
Philosophically, this rehabilitates finite, temporal existence (vojud). Because the shadows are por-gardesh (revolving, like the shadow of a gnomon across a sundial as the day turns), they belong to time and change; because they are por-bār (fruitful) and secure, time and change are not a fall away from eternity, but the very medium in which the Beloved’s portrayal surrounds and overwhelms the seeker’s “existence and presence.” One does not escape existence (vojud) to find the Beloved; existence is the surface on which His image turns and bears fruit.
XII. Conclusion
Tamannā-ye Vojud argues that existence is desire and that the moral question is not how much one wants but whether one’s wanting is still a verb, still open, still directed outward, or has hardened into a trait: self-wanting, crooked-wanting, gold-wanting. It sends the seeker inward, but not into rest; it forbids him two things only, the wrong shelter and the wrong company; it tells him to take his bearing from a star rather than from the protractor of an authority pledged to its own interest; it grounds devotion in comprehension (edrāk) rather than blind imitation, and honors temporal existence (vojud) as the fruitful, revolving ground of the Beloved’s image; and it ends by turning his desire around, so that what he wanted is shown to be an answer to a voice that was there first. The poem’s last English word names him as the one who is wanted.
XIII. Biography of the Poet
Dr. Alireza Bemanian is a poet, physicist, systems architect, and historian whose bilingual work keeps returning to a single question: who sets the direction of a person’s life, and on what authority. In Tamannā-ye Vojud the question is asked of devotion. The bound ascetic, pledged to crooked wanting, who measures out other people’s angles of approach, the many who face gold without having chosen to, and the seeker told to set his own qibla by a star are the same three figures that his historical volumes on Iran examine at the scale of a society: authority bound to its own interest, a populace whose orientation is taken for it, and the individual judgment that both depend on suppressing. In those volumes he traces how unquestioned religious instruction, taqlid, came to stand between people and their own understanding. The poem, written years before that work, already refuses the intermediary, and does it without refusing faith: its seeker is not told to face nowhere, only not to borrow his bearing. Dr. Bemanian’s physics shows in the poem’s refusal to let the sun rule the mind that studies it, and his engineering in the instruments the English names, a protractor and a gauge. His conviction, here as elsewhere, is that understanding is the purpose of the search, bahr-e edrākash, and that desire, kept alive and pointed true, is how one gets there.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
تمنای وجود (Tamannā-ye Vojud / “The Desire of Existence”) & My Desire, My Soul
Formal Expanded Analysis — Draft 003
Poem by Alireza Bemanian, July 3, 2017
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
I. Introduction
Dr. Alireza Bemanian’s Tamannā-ye Vojud (literally “The Desire of Existence,” titled My Desire, My Soul in its English companion) is an eight-beyt ghazal composed on July 3, 2017, six days after Takht-e Soleymān (The Throne). If The Throne was a battle cry of outward action and mastery over the tumultuous ocean of existence, My Desire, My Soul turns the lens inward toward the typology of desire and the orientation of the soul. It asks a foundational question: What is it that you truly want, and toward what direction have you aligned your existence?
The formal engine of the Persian poem is its refrain (radif), خواهی (khāhi, “you want / you desire / you seek”). It closes both lines of the opening beyt and the second line of every beyt after it: nine of the sixteen hemistichs end on it. By alternating between what the true seeker desires (tāle’ash khāhi, najvā-ye rokhash khāhi, khāterash khāhi) and what the deluded world desires (khod-khāhi, selfishness; kaj-khāhi, crooked will; zar-khāhi, gold-lust), the grammar itself performs a separation between authentic spiritual longing and counterfeit worldly ambition.
The separation is exact, and it is made by grammar rather than by statement. In six of the nine lines khāhi is a verb in the second person, “you want,” and its subject is the one the poem addresses. In the other three it is not a verb at all. It has become the second half of a compound noun, the Persian way of naming a trait: khod-khāhi, self-wanting; kaj-khāhi, crooked-wanting; zar-khāhi, gold-wanting. And each of the three nouns is pinned on a group the poem names in the third person: the raw ones (khāmān, beyt 1), the bound ascetic (zāhed-e mashrut, beyt 6), and those with sleeping eyes (khofte-didegān, beyt 7). The seeker’s wanting is always an act, alive in the present tense and addressed to him. The world’s wanting has stopped moving and hardened into a character. The poem never once tells its reader not to want. It shows him what wanting becomes when it stops being a verb.
The two words of the title occur once each, and late. Vojud, existence, appears in the first line of beyt 5, the ninth of sixteen, at the poem’s midpoint: negārash bar vojudat, “His image upon your existence.” Tamannā, desire, appears in the first line of beyt 6, and as a command: tamannā kon, “desire!” Six days earlier, in The Throne, the same word was the poem’s refrain, set eight times as an object, tamannā rā, the longing to be acted upon. Here it is given its own verb and becomes the act itself.
The English companion text operates as an incisive philosophical and psychological exegesis of the Persian verse. Where the Persian speaks concisely of looking “restlessly inside the eye” (bi-tāb andar dide), the English translates the eye directly as the interiority of the self: “Start searching your own soul.” Where the Persian warns against settling on “every roof” (har bāmi) because of “little effort” (kam-kushi), the English unpacks this into a warning against premature comfort that betrays “the far stretched extent of your potentials and the outpours of your endurable efforts.” Together, the two texts form a unified treatise on spiritual discernment, effort, and reciprocal love.
The English keeps a discipline of its own, examined in Section IV. In 333 words it never says “I,” “me,” or “my.” It speaks to the reader as “your” fifteen times and of the Beloved as “his” ten times, and the word “you” occurs exactly once: it is the last word of the poem, and it names the one the Beloved’s feelings are turned toward.
Yet there is a single place where the first person is spoken, and that is the English title itself: My Desire, My Soul. The Persian title, Tamannā-ye Vojud, is impersonal and universal; the English title is the only utterance of “My” in the entire work. Because the body of the English poem speaks exclusively to “your soul” and “your desire,” the title functions as an inscription written by the reader after finishing the sixteen paragraphs. One enters the poem addressed from the outside as “your,” and once the final word, “you,” has been spoken, one claims the title in the first person as “My.”
II. A Reader’s Guide
The poem’s eight couplets trace a deliberate progression from inward self-examination to cosmic orientation and ultimate reciprocity with the Beloved.
| Beyt | Stage | What the Seeker Does / Experiences | Line-endings | Meaning & Contrast |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Inward Turn vs. Outward Vanity | Looks restlessly within the eye; rejects the spectacles of the raw | tāle’ash khāhi / khod-khāhi | Wanting His rising vs. self-wanting |
| 2 | The Eclipse of the Cosmic Sun | Grasps the purpose (maqsud), before which the sun loses its glory | dar engār / dar kuy-e delash khāhi | Mere cosmic observation vs. dwelling in the Beloved’s heart |
| 3 | The Rejection of False Shelter | Refuses rest on every roof; sets silence aflame | kam-kushi / dar vādi saman khāhi | Flawed under-exertion vs. seeking the jasmine of the valley |
| 4 | The Youth of Fortune Within | Seeks fortune’s youth in himself; fills it with “that melody” | vaz ān naghme / najvā-ye rokhash khāhi | Fearlessness before hardship vs. the whisper of His face |
| 5 | The Image, the Shadows, the Mihrab | Bears His image’s laden, turning shadows; measures the mihrab against His stature | por-gardesh / nazar khāhi | Shadows cast on existence vs. sacred contemplation |
| 6 | The Marketplace and the Bound Ascetic | Desires, contemplates, inspects every alley; shuns the crooked preacher | bāzārash / kaj-khāhi | Engagement with the world vs. religiosity pledged to crooked wanting |
| 7 | The Separated Qibla vs. the Gold-Seekers | Sets his own direction toward the pearl-star; avoids the sleeping eyes | bahr-e edrākash / zar-khāhi | Comprehending the unique star vs. slumbering greed for gold |
| 8 | The Winged Gaze and the Answering Voice | Gives wings to the gaze under the roof of His love; knows the purpose is His voice | bar sar / khāterash khāhi | The roof of love overhead vs. wanting His heart |
Twelve features of the form govern the architecture of the poem. The first four were identified in the first draft of this analysis (with the first corrected in the second draft); features five through ten were added in the second draft; the eleventh and twelfth are added here.
1. The Moral Spectrum of Khāhi (The Compounds of Volition).
Persian allows the verbal stem khāh (wanting, wishing) to bind with nouns to diagnose character. Dr. Bemanian exploits this morphological feature to construct an ethical taxonomy of human desire:
– خودخواهی (khod-khāhi, beyt 1): self-seeking, egoism, narcissism—the affliction of the khāmān (the raw, unripened).
– کجخواهی (kaj-khāhi, beyt 6): crooked, selfish wanting—what the zāhed-e mashrut (the bound ascetic) has pledged himself to serve.
– زرخواهی (zar-khāhi, beyt 7): gold-seeking, materialism—the obsession of the khofte-didegān (those with sleeping eyes).
The first draft also placed kam-kushi (beyt 3) and nazar-khāhi (beyt 5) on this list. Kam-kushi, under-exertion, belongs to another family: it is built on kushidan, to strive, and it rhymes inside beyt 3 with khāmushi, silence. And beyt 5 is better read with khāhi as a verb, nazar khāhi, “you want a sight,” like the other five addressed to the seeker. The spectrum, then, has three bands, all of them vices, all of them other people’s. What the seeker wants is never given a compound of its own.
2. The Ring of Sight (Nazar / Dide) and Purpose (Maqsud).
The poem opens with the imperative نگر (negar, “Look!”) directed into the dide (the eye), and closes in beyt 8 with نظر پرواز دارش (nazar parvāz dārash, “keep the gaze in flight”) and بدان مقصود (bedān maqsud, “know the purpose”). Sight begins as an anxious inward excavation (bi-tāb andar dide) and ends as an airborne ascension (nazar parvāz). Similarly, maqsud (the destined goal) appears first in beyt 2 as the threshold of realization and returns in beyt 8 as the final summation of existence: the Beloved’s voice.
3. The Architecture of the Two Roofs (Bām).
In beyt 3, the seeker is warned: be har bāmi mazan mā’vā (“Do not take shelter on every roof”), because settling on ordinary roofs represents kam-kushi (stunted effort). In beyt 8, the image of the roof returns redeemed and transfigured: tā ke bām-e mehr-e u bar sar (“until the roof of His love is overhead”). The seeker refuses all earthly roofs only to be covered by the roof of the Beloved’s love.
4. The Rhetorical Dialogism of the English Companion.
In the English companion text, Dr. Bemanian introduces a dramatic rhetorical pivot in beyt 2: “even while observing the sun of universe, when? / When; the destiny, desire, intent, and goal of living is perpetually and purposefully perceived.” By bridging the two hemistichs with an explicit question (“when?”) and an emphatic, layered answer (“When; … When; …”), the English text exposes the logical hinge of the Persian cho ke (“when, since”). The English also relies on conceptual triads, “deliberations, deeds, and dreams,” “dream, destiny, and desire,” “places, cornerstones, and offerings,” giving the prose-poetry a liturgical cadence.
5. Wanting as a verb, wanting as a noun. Of the nine lines that end on khāhi, six end on the verb and three on the noun, as set out in the introduction. The six verbs fall in beyts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8, and each is the last word of a condition or a purpose: if you want His rising, when you want the alley of His heart, since you want the jasmine, when you want the whisper of His face. The three nouns fall in beyts 1, 6 and 7. Beyt 1 holds one of each, the verb in its first line and the noun in its second, and so sets the poem’s whole argument in its opening couplet: the same word, said of you, is a wish; said of them, it is a diagnosis.
6. Thirteen commands and two prohibitions. The poem is spoken entirely in the second person, and its verbs are orders: negar (look), mazan (do not settle), bazan (set fire), ju (seek), por sāz (fill), namā (show), tamannā kon (desire), ta’ammol kon (contemplate), negar (look), masho (do not become), jodā kon (separate), dār (keep in flight), bedān (know). Of the thirteen, two are prohibitions, and both concern where one belongs: be har bāmi mazan mā’vā, do not make your refuge on every roof (beyt 3), and masho hamdam, do not become the companion (beyt 6). The poem forbids a dwelling and a companionship and nothing else. Two places in the poem hold no command at all: beyt 2, where the sun loses its glory, and the first line of beyt 5, where His image is laid upon the seeker’s existence. These are the two statements of what is already the case, and the commands are built around them.
7. No “I,” one “you,” and a Beloved who becomes a word only at the end. There is no first person anywhere in the Persian. The second-person pronoun to is used once, in the first line, gar to tāle’ash khāhi, “if you want His rising.” The Beloved is present throughout, but only as the suffix -ash, “his,” on eight words: tāle’ash, delash, rokhash, negārash, qodsash, bāzārash, edrākash, khāterash. (The same suffix also means “it,” and twice it does: por sāzash, “fill it,” and parvāz dārash, “keep it in flight,” said of the fortune and the gaze.) The free pronoun u, “He,” appears only in the last beyt, and twice there: bām-e mehr-e u, the roof of His love, and āvā-ye u, His voice. For seven beyts the Beloved is an ending attached to other words. In the eighth He is named.
8. One word for the disease and the cure. Khod, self, occurs twice. In beyt 1 it is the first half of khod-khāhi, self-wanting, the madness of the raw. In beyt 4 it is a place: shabāb-e bakht dar khod ju, “seek the youth of fortune within yourself.” The poem does not ask the seeker to give up the self. It asks him to stop wanting it and start searching in it.
9. Two kinds of showing. Namāyesh, a show, a spectacle, belongs in beyt 1 to the raw: ke khāmān rā namāyesh-hāst, “for the raw ones have their shows.” In beyt 5 the same root returns as a command to the seeker: namā mehrāb rā, “show the mihrab.” The world performs itself; the seeker is told to show his place of prayer, and to show it measured against the Beloved’s stature. Both display. One displays the self, and the other displays the self’s distance from what it faces.
10. The meter, and The Throne’s foot. The poem moves in the hazaj, the old four-syllable foot of one short and three long syllables, the meter of The Throne. The first line of beyt 6 shows it most plainly: ta-man-nā kon | ta-‘am-mol kon | ne-gar har kuy | o bā-zā-rash, four complete feet, each a complete phrase. Its first foot is The Throne‘s refrain with one syllable changed: there ta-man-nā rā, the longing as an object; here ta-man-nā kon, the longing as a command.
11. The Rhyme Before the Refrain (Qāfiyeh). In a Persian ghazal where the refrain (radif) is a single word like khāhi, the rhyme (qāfiyeh) that precedes it normally shares a phonetic ending without sharing a grammatical role. Here the qāfiyeh itself is divided into two grammatical classes that mirror the division of khāhi. In the three lines of false wanting (beyts 1b, 6b, and 7b), the rhyming elements are the stems of compound nouns: khod- (self), kaj- (crooked), and zar- (gold). In five of the six lines of true wanting (beyts 1a, 2b, 4b, 5b, and 8b), the word immediately before khāhi is a noun belonging to the Beloved—His rising (tāle’ash), His heart (delash), His face (rokhash), His holy stature (qodsash nazar), His regard (khāterash)—and in beyt 3b it is the emblem of His grace in the wilderness (saman, jasmine). The rhyme position itself is a diagnostic slot: before khāhi stands either the idol the world has bound itself to (khod, kaj, zar) or an attribute of the Beloved bearing the suffix -ash.
12. The Acoustic Arc: From Silence to Whisper to Voice. Alongside the visual ring that leads from the eye (dide, beyt 1) to the winged gaze (nazar parvāz, beyt 8), the poem builds an acoustic progression in four steps. In beyt 3, the seeker begins in خاموشی (khāmushi, “silence and stalemate”), the mute inertia that must be set on fire. In beyt 4, two sounds enter: آن نغمه (ān naghme, “that melody” / “the enchanted tune”) which overflows the inner vessel, and نجوا (najvā, “the whisper” / “the murmur”) perceived in the Beloved’s countenance. In beyt 6, the world’s false sound intrudes as دعوی (da’vi, the litigious “claims and demands” of the bound ascetic), which the seeker refuses to share breath (hamdam) with. Finally, in beyt 8, the quiet murmur of beyt 4 expands into آوای او (āvā-ye u, “His voice” / “his reverberant songs”). The seeker moves from a burned silence, through an intimate whisper and past the noise of dogmatic claims, into a universe resounding with a song to be answered.
III. Beyt-by-Beyt Reading
Beyt 1: The Inward Eye vs. The Spectacle of the Raw
نگر بی تاب اندر دیده گر تو طالعش خواهی
که خامان را نمایش هاست در سودای خود خواهی
Negar bi-tāb andar dide gar to tāle’ash khāhi
Ke khāmān rā namāyesh-hāst dar sowdā-ye khod-khāhi
Look restlessly within the eye, if you desire His rising;
For the raw ones have their shows, in the fever of self-wanting.
The poem opens with an immediate command: negar (look!). Yet the direction of this gaze is paradoxical—not outward at the horizon, but andar dide (inside the eye itself), and bi-tāb (restlessly, without patience or complacency). The second hemistich explains why the outward world cannot be trusted: it is dominated by the khāmān (the raw, unripened, spiritually immature), whose lives are mere namāyesh-hā (theatrical displays, ostentatious shows) driven by sowdā-ye khod-khāhi (the dark passion of egoism).
Two words in these lines carry more than one sense, and the poem uses both. Tāle’ is the astronomer’s and the astrologer’s word: the rising of a star, the ascendant sign at a person’s birth, and so a person’s fortune. “If you want His tāle’” means “if you want Him to rise for you,” and it also means “if you want the fortune that comes from Him.” The poem begins in the vocabulary of the horoscope and immediately points it inward: the place to look for this rising is not the sky but the eye. And sowdā is both a passion, in the old medicine the black bile of melancholy and obsession, and a trade, a bargain struck in the market. The raw ones’ self-wanting is a fever and it is a business, and the poem leaves both senses standing.
Bi-tāb (“restlessly”) also carries a physical and optical layer alongside its emotional sense of impatience. In Persian, tāb is both endurance (patience), heat or glow (radiance), and twist or curl. When paired with dide (the eye) and tāle’ (the rising of a celestial body), bi-tāb suggests an eye that cannot bear the glare of false outward spectacles and turns its feverish, unquiet intensity inward to catch the true rising. And dide itself is the past participle of didan (to see): literally “that which has seen,” and by extension the pupil of the eye—in classical Persian مردمک دیده (mardomak-e dide, the “little person of the eye,” so named because one sees a tiny reflection of oneself when looking into another’s pupil). To look andar dide is to look past the surface reflection of the ego at the threshold of sight into the faculty of seeing itself.
Beyt 2: The Eclipse of the Cosmic Sun
به خورشید فلک جاه و تامل نیست در انگار
چو که مقصود دریابی و در کوی دلش خواهی
Be khorshid-e falak jāh o ta’ammol nist dar engār
Cho ke maqsud daryābi o dar kuy-e delash khāhi
The sun of the firmament holds no glory and no contemplation in the mind’s reckoning,
Once you grasp the purpose and want [to be] in the alley of His heart.
Here the poet establishes a scale of value. The khorshid-e falak (the sun of the sky, traditionally the supreme symbol of majesty and light) loses all jāh (glory, rank) and no longer arrests ta’ammol (deep contemplation) in one’s engār (imagination, reckoning) the moment the seeker grasps the true maqsud (purpose) and seeks residence in the kuy-e delash (the quarter or alley of the Beloved’s heart). Even cosmic awe pales beside intimate spiritual alignment.
The beyt is one of the two places in the poem without a command. It is a statement of consequence, and its verb is the one on which The Throne ended six days earlier: daryāftan, to grasp, to receive. The Throne‘s last hemistich was to daryābash, “grasp it.” Here, in the second beyt, maqsud daryābi, “you grasp the purpose,” is no longer a command. It is the condition under which the sun goes dim. The verb that closed one poem opens the reckoning of the next. And the heart of the Beloved is given a street, kuy, a quarter of a city. The poem’s figure for intimacy is a neighborhood one comes to live in.
The word انگار (engār) at the close of the first hemistich is chosen with philosophical exactness. From the root engāshtan (to suppose, to reckon, to form a mental image), engār denotes the mind’s framework of estimation—what a physicist or systems theorist would call a frame of reference. The poet does not say that the sun of the sky ceases to shine; he says that dar engār, within the mind’s frame of reckoning, it no longer commands jāh (rank) or ta’ammol (contemplation). Once consciousness calibrates its reference frame to the maqsud (the ultimate purpose), the scale of magnitude shifts, and the largest object in the physical sky becomes secondary to a single alley in the Beloved’s heart.
Beyt 3: Refusing the Roofs, Burning the Silence
به هر بامی مزن ماوا که مخدوش است کم کوشی
بزن آتش به خاموشی چو در وادی سمن خواهی
Be har bāmi mazan mā’vā ke makhdush ast kam-kushi
Bazan ātesh be khāmushi cho dar vādi saman khāhi
Do not make your refuge on every roof, for little striving is a flawed thing;
Set fire to silence, since in the valley you want the jasmine.
This couplet delivers two ethical imperatives built on one verb—mazan (do not strike) and bazan (strike). Persian uses zadan, to strike, for pitching a shelter as one pitches a tent, and for setting fire, ātesh zadan. The first line forbids the one striking and the second commands the other. To settle on “every roof” is to accept premature comfort; the poet diagnoses this as kam-kushi (striving too little), which is makhdush, scratched, marred, flawed. In the second hemistich, as in The Throne, khāmushi (silence, stillness, passivity) is treated as something to be incinerated. If the seeker desires the saman (jasmine) blooming in the vādi (the valley, the wilderness of the quest), he must burn away his own stalemate.
The rhyme makes the diagnosis. Kam-kushi, the last word of the first line, and khāmushi, the object of the fire in the second, share their ending, and the poem sets them in adjacent lines so that the ear joins them. Little striving and silence are one condition heard twice. Mā’vā is a refuge, and in the Qur’an it is the name of a garden: jannat al-ma’wā, the Garden of the Refuge (53:15). The word the poem forbids to “every roof” is the word for paradise’s shelter. The refuge itself is not refused, only its counterfeit on any rooftop.
The spatial movement between the two hemistichs is downward and outward, and it reverses conventional expectation. One would expect a spiritual poem to urge the climber up onto a roof and out of the valley. Here the bām (roof) is the place of premature self-satisfaction—a man-made platform slightly above the street where one stops climbing and calls it arrival—while the وادی (vādi, valley or desert tract) is the open, unroofed terrain of real seeking. In classical Persian mysticism, most famously in Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr (The Conference of the Birds), the vādi is the unit of the spiritual journey itself (the Seven Valleys of Quest, Love, Understanding, and so forth). And blooming inside that rugged vādi is the سمن (saman, white jasmine), the emblem of delicate, fragrant grace that cannot be grown on a domestic rooftop. To find the jasmine, one must come down from false roofs and cross the open valley.
Beyt 4: The Youth of Fortune and the Fearless Melody
شباب بخت در خود جو و پر سازش وز آن نغمه
جفا را نیست پروائی چو نجوای رخش خواهی
Shabāb-e bakht dar khod ju o por sāzash vaz ān naghme
Jafā rā nist parvā’i cho najvā-ye rokhash khāhi
Seek the youth of fortune within yourself, and fill it from that melody;
Hardship has no daring when you want the whisper of His face.
Returning to the inward imperative of beyt 1, the poet commands: shabāb-e bakht dar khod ju (“seek the youth of fortune within yourself”). Fortune is not an external lottery; its vitality (shabāb) resides inside the soul and must be filled (por sāzash) with naghme (melody, tune). Once the interior is brimming with that music, jafā (cruelty, hardship, the world’s afflictions) loses its power to intimidate. Note the synesthesia at the end of the line: najvā-ye rokhash (“the whisper of His face”)—beholding the Beloved’s countenance is experienced simultaneously as vision and as intimate whispered speech.
Two small words decide the line. The first is ān, “that”: vaz ān naghme, “from that melody.” No melody has been mentioned before. The demonstrative points to a music the poem assumes the seeker already knows, and it is not named until the last line, where the purpose is said to be nothing but āvā-ye u, His voice. The fortune within is not self-generated. It is a vessel, and it is to be filled from a sound that comes from elsewhere. The second is parvā, which means both fear and daring. Jafā rā nist parvā’i can be read “one has no fear of hardship” and it can be read “hardship has no daring.” The English companion chose the second, “The dilemmas and drawbacks do not dare to stand,” and so made hardship, not the seeker, the one who loses its nerve.
There is also a quiet musical pun in پر سازش (por sāzash, “fill it”) standing immediately before vaz ān naghme (“from that melody”). As a compound verb, por sākhtan means to make full, to brim; as a noun, ساز (sāz) is a musical instrument, and also harmony or tuning. Because the very next phrase is vaz ān naghme (“from that melody”), the ear hears sāz and naghme—instrument and melody—side by side. The youth of fortune within the soul is at once a vessel to be filled to the brim and an instrument (sāz) brought into full resonance by the Beloved’s tune.
Beyt 5: The Image, the Turning Shadows, and the Mihrab
نگارش بر وجودت سایه ها پربار و پر گردش
نما محراب را در قامت قدسش نظر خواهی
Negārash bar vojudat sāye-hā por-bār o por-gardesh
Namā mehrāb rā dar qāmat-e qodsash nazar khāhi
His image upon your existence: shadows heavy with fruit and full of turning;
Show the mihrab, if you want a sight of His holy stature.
The title word vojud (existence) appears here at the poem’s midpoint, the ninth of its sixteen lines. Negārash carries a double meaning: “His painting, His image” and “His beloved self,” since negār is both the painted likeness and the beloved whose likeness is painted. Inscribed upon the seeker’s existence are sāye-hā por-bār o por-gardesh—shadows that are not dark or sterile, but laden with fruit (por-bār) and full of turning (por-gardesh). In response, the seeker must present his mehrāb (the prayer niche), measuring his devotion against the sacred stature (qāmat-e qodsash) of the Beloved.
The first line has no verb, and it is the only line of the poem in which nothing is commanded and nothing is wanted. It states what is: the image is on you. Its shadows are described in two words that belong to two different things. Por-bār is said of a tree, heavy with its yield. Por-gardesh is said of the sky, which turns, gardesh, and of whatever turns with it. A shadow that turns is a shadow cast by a moving sun, the shadow on a sundial, which marks the hours by going round. The Beloved’s image falls on the seeker’s existence as light falls on the ground of a garden: it bears fruit there, and it tells the time.
The second line puts two words of prayer side by side. Mehrāb is the niche in a mosque’s wall that shows the direction of prayer. Qāmat is stature, the height of a standing figure, and in the call that begins each prayer it is the word for standing up to pray: qad qāmat al-salāt, “the prayer has stood up,” that is, the prayer is now established. The seeker is told to show his mihrab against a stature whose very name is the summons to rise. He is not told to pray in it. He is told to show it, to measure it, as one would set a scale beside a tower.
In Persian script, نگارش can be vocalized in two ways that enrich the line still further: as negār-ash (“His beloved image / His portrayal”) and as the verbal noun negāresh (“writing, inscription, artistic composition,” from negāshtan, to write or paint). Both readings converge upon bar vojudat (“upon your existence”): the seeker’s very being is the page or canvas upon which the Beloved’s design is inscribed. And in the second hemistich, the juxtaposition of محراب (mehrāb, the arched prayer niche) and قامت (qāmat, the upright figure) renews one of the oldest visual pairings in Persian ghazal poetry—where the curve of the mihrab’s arch is traditionally compared to the brow and the cypress-tree to the Beloved’s tall qāmat—while stripping it of ornament and making it an ethical test: does the arch of your sanctuary match the height of His holiness?
Beyt 6: The Marketplace and the Bound Ascetic
تمنا کن تامل کن نگر هر کوی و بازارش
مشو همدم به دعوی زاهد مشروط کج خواهی
Tamannā kon ta’ammol kon negar har kuy o bāzārash
Masho hamdam be da’vi zāhed-e mashrut-e kaj-khāhi
Desire, contemplate, look upon every alley and bazaar of His;
Do not become the companion, at his claim, of the ascetic bound to crooked wanting.
The first hemistich opens with three imperatives: تمنا کن، تامل کن، نگر (tamannā kon, ta’ammol kon, negar, “Desire! Contemplate! Look!”). Here ta’ammol (contemplation), which was denied to the physical sun in beyt 2, is restored when paired with tamannā (desire) and directed at “every alley and bazaar of His.” The true seeker does not flee the world’s marketplaces; he sees the Beloved’s offerings in every corner. The second hemistich warns, in a long Persian tradition, against the zāhed, here the zāhed-e mashrut, the bound ascetic: one who has accepted, promised, or been compelled to support kaj-khāhi (crooked, selfish wanting), and the English names such figures “protractors of deterrence.”
The alley has widened. In beyt 2 it was one street, kuy-e delash, the alley of His heart. Here it is har kuy o bāzārash, every one of His alleys and His bazaar. The intimacy of the second beyt is not left behind for the world; the world is found to be the same city. And the market, where in beyt 1 the raw ones’ sowdā was a trade, is now a place the seeker is commanded to look upon. The poem does not condemn the bazaar. It condemns those who bring a bargain into it.
The ascetic is described by four words, and each narrows him. Da’vi is a claim, and in the law court a suit: he speaks as a plaintiff. Zāhed is the renouncer, the professional of abstinence. Mashrut, as the poet uses it, is bound: he has accepted, promised, or been made to support selfishness, and the bond reaches into his oath to keep his word, and with his word, implicitly, his thoughts. And kaj-khāhi names what he is bound to, a crooked, self-serving want. He is not a man who has broken his vow. He is a man who keeps it, and has vowed himself to the wrong thing. The command attached to him is not “oppose him” or “refute him.” It is masho hamdam, do not become his hamdam, the one who shares his breath, his companion at close quarters. The danger is not his argument. It is his company.
Look closely at the sequence of the three verbs that open the couplet: tamannā kon (desire), ta’ammol kon (contemplate), negar (look). They are not three synonyms heaped together; they name three distinct faculties in the exact order in which human inquiry works. First comes تمنا (tamannā, volition, the awakening of desire); second comes تامل (ta’ammol, interior reflection, what the English calls fulfilling “a gap of solitude”); third comes نگر (negar, empirical and spiritual observation of the world’s alleys and bazaars). Without tamannā, observation has no drive; without ta’ammol, desire rushes out unexamined into the spectacles of beyt 1; without negar, contemplation remains locked inside the self. The bound ascetic of the second line is the exact inversion of this triad: his desire is crooked (kaj-khāhi), his reflection is bound in advance by a condition (mashrut), and instead of looking upon the world he issues a legalistic claim (da’vi) against it.
Beyt 7: The Separated Qibla and the Sleeping Eyes
جدا کن قبله را دردانه اختر بهر ادراکش
که بسیارند خفته دیدگان معطوف زر خواهی
Jodā kon qeble rā dordāne akhtar bahr-e edrākash
Ke besyārand khofte-didegān ma’tuf-e zar-khāhi
Set your qibla apart: a star, a pearl beyond price, for the sake of perceiving Him;
For many are those with sleeping eyes, turned toward the wanting of gold.
After rejecting the false preacher in beyt 6, the seeker must individuate his spiritual compass: jodā kon qeble rā (“set your qibla apart”). The true qibla is the dordāne akhtar (a star like a single pearl), sought solely for edrākash (the perceiving of Him). The second hemistich contrasts the seeker’s awakened eye (from beyt 1) with the many khofte-didegān (“those with sleeping eyes”) whose whole orientation (ma’tuf) is bent toward zar-khāhi (the lust for gold). Their eyes are open to commerce and asleep to everything else.
The command is bolder than it first sounds. The qibla is, by definition, shared: it is the one direction toward which an entire community turns in prayer, the line that makes many worshippers face the same way. Jodā kon, “separate it,” “set it apart,” asks the seeker to have a direction of his own. What he is to face is a star, and dordāne is the single pearl found alone in its shell, the word used of an only, precious child. And the two lines of the beyt are both about direction. The seeker is told to set his bearing; the sleepers already have one. Ma’tuf means turned, inclined, bent toward. The many are not without a qibla. They have one, and it is gold.
The word ادراک (edrāk, comprehension, perception, intellectual grasping) in bahr-e edrākash (“for the sake of perceiving Him”) deserves special notice. In classical Islamic philosophy and mysticism, a qibla is set for ‘ibādat (worship) or tā’at (obedience). Dr. Bemanian says that the separated qibla is set bahr-e edrākash—for understanding Him. And the jewel-imagery of the couplet quietly reinforces this choice: in the first line the guiding star in the heavens is a دردانه (dordāne, a unique pearl formed in the depth of the sea), while in the second line the sleepers are bent toward زر (zar, gold dug from the earth). The pearl-star lifts the awakened eye upward toward comprehension; the yellow metal bends the sleeping eye downward toward possession.
Beyt 8: The Winged Gaze and the Answering Voice
نظر پرواز دارش تا که بام مهر او بر سر
بدان مقصود جز آوای او نی خاطرش خواهی
Nazar parvāz dārash tā ke bām-e mehr-e u bar sar
Bedān maqsud joz āvā-ye u ney khāterash khāhi
Keep the gaze in flight, until the roof of His love is overhead;
Know: the purpose is nothing but His voice. It is His heart you want.
The final couplet brings the ghazal to its height. The gaze that began by looking restlessly inside the eye in beyt 1 now takes wing: nazar parvāz dārash (“keep the gaze in flight”), rising until the bām-e mehr-e u (the roof of His love—mehr meaning both “love” and “the sun,” thus answering the khorshid-e falak of beyt 2 and the low bām of beyt 3) arches overhead. The closing line delivers the revelation (bedān maqsud, “know the purpose”): the goal is nothing other than āvā-ye u (His voice) and khāterash (His heart, His remembrance, His regard toward the lover).
Three things happen in this beyt for the first time. The Beloved is named as a word, u, twice, after seven beyts of being only a suffix. The poem’s sound, which entered in beyt 4 as “that melody” and in the whisper of His face, is given its source: āvā, a voice, a song. And the last phrase, khāterash khāhi, holds an idiom inside it. Khāter-khāh is the Persian for one who cares for another, a well-wisher, a lover. “You want His khāter” is grammatically the seeker wanting the Beloved’s regard; it also sounds the word for the Beloved’s own care. The English hears it that way and ends on it: “his adoring feelings towards you.”
The small word ney deserves an ear. Here it is the negative, “nothing but His voice, not…,” and it is written as the Persian writes the reed, ney, the flute that in the most famous opening of Persian poetry tells the story of its separation. Whether or not the poet meant the reed, the line sets āvā, a voice, and ney, a reed, side by side, at the place where the poem names its purpose. The final sound of a poem about wanting is a voice that answers, and an instrument through which voices pass.
Notice too how the compound بام مهر او (bām-e mehr-e u) in the first line of this final beyt reconciles the two halves of the poem’s cosmology. In beyt 2, the physical sun (khorshid-e falak) lost its glory before the inward purpose; in beyt 3, the earthly roof (har bāmi) was forbidden as a shelter of stunted effort. Because Persian مهر (mehr) means both “love/compassion” and “the sun,” bām-e mehr-e u is simultaneously “the roof of His love” and “the roof of His sun.” Neither the sun nor the roof was discarded; both were waiting to be transfigured into what belongs to Him (u).
IV. “My Desire, My Soul” — The English Companion Poem, Complete
The English gives one paragraph to each Persian hemistich, sixteen in all, 333 words, and it keeps rules of its own. There is no “I,” “me,” or “my.” The seeker is “your” fifteen times, in eleven of the sixteen paragraphs; the Beloved is “his” ten times. The word “you” occurs once, as the last word of the poem. The Persian’s to, “you,” also occurs once, in its first line. Between the two texts the second person travels the length of the poem: it begins as the one who wants and ends as the one who is wanted. “Desire” appears nine times (“desire” seven, “desires” twice), where the Persian names tamannā once and wants, khāhi, nine times. “When” appears six times, five of them in beyts 2 and 4, where the English turns the Persian’s conditions into a question and its answers. “Do not” appears twice, as the Persian’s two prohibitions do.
Beyt 1
نگر بی تاب اندر دیده گر تو طالعش خواهی
Start searching your own soul, if filled with the desire to capture his presence.
که خامان را نمایش هاست در سودای خود خواهی
Out there is full of displays set by short sighted beings, seeking their own selfish desires.
Interpretation: The English companion establishes an interior/exterior dichotomy: “your own soul” versus “Out there.” The Persian dide (eye) is rendered as the soul, signaling that spiritual vision is an act of self-excavation. The classical khāmān (the raw) is rendered as “short sighted beings,” linking spiritual immaturity to a failure of vision.
The English makes one exchange at the start. The Persian wants the Beloved’s tāle’, His rising, His star; the English wants “to capture his presence.” The astrologer’s word is dropped, and with it the sky; what the English wants is not a fortune but a presence. And it adds a verb the Persian does not have, “capture,” which the poem will answer at its other end. The first paragraph wants to capture; the last paragraph wants to reciprocate.
Beyt 2
به خورشید فلک جاه و تامل نیست در انگار
There is no glory, there is no capture of thoughts, even while observing the sun of universe, when?
چو که مقصود دریابی و در کوی دلش خواهی
When; the destiny, desire, intent, and goal of living is perpetually and purposefully perceived. When; your destiny is whole heartedly merged with his thoughts and; when it apexes to the everlasting desire.
Interpretation: The English turns the Persian syntactic subordination (cho ke) into a catechetical question, “when?”, followed by a three-part answer (“When; … When; … when…”). The single Persian word maqsud (purpose) is unpacked into a fourfold chain: “the destiny, desire, intent, and goal of living.” Even observing “the sun of universe” holds no glory compared to the moment when human destiny merges wholeheartedly with the Beloved’s thoughts and reaches its apex in “the everlasting desire.”
“Capture” returns in the first paragraph: “no capture of thoughts.” The sun cannot hold the mind. The second paragraph moves the Persian’s alley of the heart, kuy-e delash, into the mind: “merged with his thoughts.” The Persian’s intimacy is a place, a street one lives on. The English’s is a merging of thought, and it gives that merging a peak: “when it apexes to the everlasting desire.” “Apexes” is a verb made from a noun of geometry, and it is the first of the English’s measuring words.
The punctuation of this second paragraph is also deliberate: When;—a capital word followed immediately by a semicolon, repeated twice (When; ... When; ... and; when). In standard English prose a semicolon separates independent clauses; in Dr. Bemanian’s English companion it acts as a musical fermata and a logical colon, forcing the reader to pause on the temporal threshold (“When;”) before entering the condition that follows. The semicolon after “and;” in the final clause slows the cadence just before the verb “apexes,” making the syntax climb by steps to its summit.
Beyt 3
به هر بامی مزن ماوا که مخدوش است کم کوشی
Do not seek shelter under any comforting roof, where not realizing the far stretched extent of your potentials and the outpours of your endurable efforts.
بزن آتش به خاموشی چو در وادی سمن خواهی
Set your silence and stalemate aflame, that is so if your desire is to seek the jasmine flower of the prairie.
Interpretation: The English illuminates the ethical psychology behind kam-kushi (under-exertion): taking shelter under a “comforting roof” is a betrayal of “the far stretched extent of your potentials and the outpours of your endurable efforts.” In the second line, khāmushi is rendered as “silence and stalemate,” identifying quietism with existential stagnation, which must be set aflame to reach “the jasmine flower of the prairie.”
The English moves the seeker from on the roof to under it. The Persian forbids pitching a refuge on every roof, be har bāmi, the roof as a high place one might settle on. The English forbids “shelter under any comforting roof,” the roof as a cover. The Persian’s fault is settling too low on a height; the English’s is hiding beneath a lid. Both meet in “comforting.” And the Persian’s makhdush, scratched, flawed, is not translated as a flaw at all. The English says what is lost: “the far stretched extent of your potentials.” The Persian names the blemish; the English names the unused capacity.
Beyt 4
شباب بخت در خود جو و پر سازش وز آن نغمه
Attain the pick of your fortune by searching within your soul, that is to fulfill the desire to be overflowed by the enchanted tune.
جفا را نیست پروائی چو نجوای رخش خواهی
The dilemmas and drawbacks do not dare to stand, when; the murmur of perceiving his portray is the overshadowing desire.
Interpretation: Shabāb-e bakht (the youth of fortune) becomes “the pick of your fortune,” attained through inward search, leading the seeker to be “overflowed by the enchanted tune.” In the second line, jafā (affliction) is translated into practical obstacles, “dilemmas and drawbacks,” which “do not dare to stand” before “the murmur of perceiving his portray.”
The Persian’s “that melody” is now “the enchanted tune,” definite again. The Persian’s “fill it” becomes passive, “to be overflowed”: the seeker does not fill himself; he is filled past the brim. And jafā is not rendered as cruelty. As in The Night, written eleven days earlier, the English refuses to name the Beloved’s world as cruel. Its hardship is “dilemmas and drawbacks,” problems of judgment and of cost, and they are given a nerve to lose: they “do not dare.” The whisper of His face becomes “the murmur of perceiving his portray,” and the face, rokh, is “portray,” a word the next beyt will use for the image laid upon the seeker. The English joins the face that is perceived in beyt 4 to the image that is received in beyt 5.
Beyt 5
نگارش بر وجودت سایه ها پربار و پر گردش
The only portray with its secure revolving shadows, the one that is surrounding and overwhelming your existence and presence.
نما محراب را در قامت قدسش نظر خواهی
Depict your place of his seeking and its relevance, when compared and gauged against such a solemn and sacred stand.
Interpretation: The English links the “portray” (negārash) of beyt 5 back to the “portray” (rokhash) of beyt 4. The shadows cast upon the seeker’s existence (vojud) are “secure revolving shadows” that surround and overwhelm his being. The mehrāb (prayer niche) is defined in evaluative terms: “your place of his seeking and its relevance, when compared and gauged against such a solemn and sacred stand.”
The English adds a word of exclusion, “The only portray”: among all images, one. It translates the Persian’s fruit as safety, “secure revolving shadows,” where por-bār said “heavy with yield.” And it gives the seeker a second word for himself: “your existence and presence.” In the first paragraph the seeker wanted to capture his presence, the Beloved’s. Here “presence” is the seeker’s own, and it is surrounded. The word has crossed from the one sought to the one seeking. The mihrab becomes “your place of his seeking,” a direction described as a place, and it is to be “compared and gauged,” two verbs of the measuring room. “Gauged” is an engineer’s word: one gauges a pressure, a thickness, a tolerance.
Beyt 6
تمنا کن تامل کن نگر هر کوی و بازارش
Revive your desires, fulfill a gap of solitude, then observe his places, cornerstones, and offerings.
مشو همدم به دعوی زاهد مشروط کج خواهی
Do not turn to the claims and demands coming from the pious preachers, who are protractors of deterrence.
Interpretation: The English offers two remarkable exegetical phrases. First, ta’ammol kon (contemplate) is rendered as “fulfill a gap of solitude,” framing contemplation as a restorative interior stillness before stepping out to observe “his places, cornerstones, and offerings.” Second, the zāhed-e mashrut-e kaj-khāhi (the ascetic bound to crooked wanting) is translated as “pious preachers, who are protractors of deterrence,” exposing dogmatic moralists as instruments that measure out and prolong spiritual obstruction.
“Revive your desires” is the English for tamannā kon, and it says more than “desire”: the desires were there and had gone still, as the silence of beyt 3 was still. And “protractors of deterrence” is the English’s most exact invention. A protractor is the instrument that measures angles; to protract is to draw out, to prolong. The Persian calls the ascetic kaj, crooked, bent off the true line. The English turns the crooked man into the instrument that measures angles for others, and the angle he sets is deterrence. The next beyt tells the seeker to set his own angle, his qibla, by a star. Between the two paragraphs the English sets the poem’s choice of instruments: a direction measured out by a preacher’s protractor, or one taken from the sky.
Notice also how the English unpacks har kuy o bāzārash (“every alley and bazaar of His”) into the architectural triad “his places, cornerstones, and offerings.” A kuy (alley/quarter) becomes “places”; a bāzār (marketplace) becomes “offerings”—not goods for mercantile trade (sowdā), but gifts set out for the observer; and between them the English inserts “cornerstones,” a word not in the Persian line. A cornerstone is the first stone set in the foundation of a building, the reference block from which every wall takes its plumb line and angle. Coming immediately after the “solemn and sacred stand” of beyt 5 and immediately before the “protractors of deterrence” of beyt 6b, “cornerstones” reveals how the poet sees the world: the marketplaces of life are built upon foundational stones laid by the Beloved, waiting to be observed by one whose solitude has been fulfilled.
Beyt 7
جدا کن قبله را دردانه اختر بهر ادراکش
Distinct your seeking direction to point to his unique guiding star, that is to accomplish the perception of his indulgence.
که بسیارند خفته دیدگان معطوف زر خواهی
Remember and beware of the arrogant and conceited entities filled with the promise of gaining gold, as their essence of thoughts.
Interpretation: The ritual term qeble is universalized in English as “your seeking direction,” pointed at “his unique guiding star.” The khofte-didegān (sleeping-eyed ones) are diagnosed as “arrogant and conceited entities” whose entire “essence of thoughts” has been replaced by “the promise of gaining gold.”
“Distinct” is used as a verb, which English does not ordinarily allow, and it is the most literal thing in the paragraph: jodā kon, make it distinct, set it apart. The English then changes the sleepers’ fault. The Persian’s many have sleeping eyes; their sin is unawareness. The English’s are “arrogant and conceited,” and their sin is pride. Six days earlier, in the English of The Throne, the same two words were the speaker’s confession about himself: “My arrogance, conceit, and narcissism.” Here they are assigned to the gold-seekers. The seeker of The Throne found the fault in himself and set out to sea; the seeker of this poem is told to recognize it in others and keep his distance. The English also gives the gold-seekers something the Persian does not: a “promise.” Their gold is not yet in hand. What fills their thought is the expectation of it.
Beyt 8
نظر پرواز دارش تا که بام مهر او بر سر
Elevate your deliberations, deeds, and dreams to reach the point to be overwhelmed with the shadow of his benevolence and compassion.
بدان مقصود جز آوای او نی خاطرش خواهی
Then, be aware your destined goal is not anything but to reciprocate to his reverberant songs, that is your ultimate dream, destiny, and desire; his adoring feelings towards you.
Interpretation: The image nazar parvāz dārash (“keep the gaze in flight”) is unpacked into a triad of human agency: “Elevate your deliberations, deeds, and dreams.” In the final line, the English reveals what the Persian khāterash khāhi holds: the seeker’s ultimate goal is not a one-way cry into the void, but reciprocity, “to reciprocate to his reverberant songs,” culminating in the realization that the ultimate “dream, destiny, and desire” is “his adoring feelings towards you.”
The roof of the Persian becomes a shadow in the English: “the shadow of his benevolence and compassion.” The English has said “shadows” once before, in beyt 5, where His image laid revolving shadows on the seeker’s existence. The two paragraphs are joined by the word, and the poem’s shelter is shown to be the same thing as the poem’s image: a shadow, which is what light becomes where it falls on someone. And the English settles who wants whom. The Persian’s last two words, khāterash khāhi, have the seeker wanting the Beloved’s regard. The English’s last clause gives the seeker’s whole “dream, destiny, and desire” an object, and the object is not the Beloved but the Beloved’s feeling: “his adoring feelings towards you.” The paragraph that began “Then, be aware” ends on the only “you” in the poem. A poem that spent fifteen “your”s telling the seeker what to want ends by telling him he is wanted.
V. Conceptual Innovations
1. The Critique of the “Bound Ascetic” (Zāhed-e Mashrut) as a “Protractor of Deterrence.”
Classical Persian ghazals frequently satirize the zāhed (ascetic) for hypocrisy. Dr. Bemanian sharpens this critique with two formulations. In Persian, he calls the figure زاهد مشروط (zāhed-e mashrut)—an ascetic who is bound: who has accepted, promised, or been compelled to support self-serving desire, so that even his oath to keep his word, and implicitly his thinking, is pledged to it. In English, he names him “protractors of deterrence”, a geometric figure suggesting those who both prolong (protract) spiritual alienation and measure out the angles of prohibition that deter the soul from direct encounter with the Beloved. The classical satire of the ascetic is a satire of hypocrisy: he does in private what he forbids in public. Dr. Bemanian’s charge is different. It is not that the ascetic secretly breaks his vows, but that he keeps them, and that what he has bound himself to is crooked wanting. His fidelity is the fault. And the English shows what such a bond does to others: it measures out their angle of approach, and sets it at deterrence.
2. The Rejection of Premature Shelter (Kam-kushi and the Comforting Roof).
Just as The Throne rejected passive floating on the sea in favor of taqallā (struggle), My Desire, My Soul diagnoses the spiritual danger of کمکوشی (kam-kushi, under-exertion, settling for too little effort). Taking shelter under “any comforting roof” before realizing “the far stretched extent of your potentials” is treated as a flaw (makhdush). Silence (khāmushi) is equated with “stalemate” and must be set ablaze.
3. Reciprocal Love as the Purpose of Existence.
While the title of the Persian poem is Tamannā-ye Vojud (“The Desire of Existence”), the closing English line reveals a shift from one-directional longing to mutual resonance: “to reciprocate to his reverberant songs… his adoring feelings towards you.” The lover is not seeking a distant, indifferent Beloved; the poem is already full of the Beloved’s “reverberant songs” and “secure revolving shadows,” waiting for the seeker to raise his gaze and answer.
4. Wanting kept a verb. Most moral traditions treat desire as a quantity, to be reduced, or as a force, to be mastered. Dr. Bemanian treats it as a grammatical state. The seeker’s wanting is always khāhi, a verb in the second person, present, conditional, and moving. The vices are the same word stopped and made into a noun of character: khod-khāhi, kaj-khāhi, zar-khāhi. The difference between the seeker and the raw, the ascetic, and the sleepers is not that they want and he does not. It is that their wanting has become what they are, and his has not. A desire that is still a verb can still be turned toward something. A desire that has become a name has already been answered, by the self, by a pledge, or by gold.
5. A direction set by a star, not by a protractor. The poem’s most original move is to make devotion a matter of bearing. The seeker is told to show his mihrab, the niche that marks direction, and to measure it against the Beloved’s stature; then to set his qibla apart, by a star. Against him stand two kinds of misdirection: the ascetic, who in the English measures out other people’s angles, and the sleepers, who are ma’tuf, already turned toward gold. In this poem the question of faith is a question of navigation: who sets your angle, and by what fixed point. The answer is neither “by the community” nor “by yourself alone.” It is by a star you have chosen and set apart for one purpose, bahr-e edrākash, to perceive Him.
6. The Re-Ordering of Tamannā, Ta’ammol, and Nazar (Desire, Solitude, and the World).
In classical asceticism, contemplation (ta’ammol) requires the extinguishing of desire (tamannā) and withdrawal from the marketplace (bāzār). In modern secular activism, engagement with the marketplace bypasses contemplative solitude altogether. In beyt 6, Dr. Bemanian binds the three into a single, irreversible sequence: tamannā kon, ta’ammol kon, negar har kuy o bāzārash (“Revive your desires, fulfill a gap of solitude, then observe his places, cornerstones, and offerings”). Desire comes first, because without longing the eye is asleep; solitude comes second, not as a permanent monastery (“a gap of solitude” is bounded on both sides by life), so that desire can be purified of the spectacles of beyt 1; and observation of the marketplace comes third, because the purified eye discovers that the alleys and bazaars are His.
VI. Persian/English Comparison and Stand-Evaluation
The Persian poem is a study in prosodic economy and lexical symmetry. Anchored by the recurring khāhi and internal rhymes (kam-kushi / khāmushi, tamannā kon / ta’ammol kon), it weaves traditional motifs—طالع (rising star), کوی دل (alley of the heart), وادی سمن (valley of jasmine), محراب (prayer niche), قبله (direction of prayer), دردانه اختر (the pearl-star)—into an ethical mirror.
The English companion transforms these emblems into an explicit architecture of human potential:
– Dide (eye) becomes “your own soul.”
– Kam-kushi (little effort) becomes “not realizing the far stretched extent of your potentials and the outpours of your endurable efforts.”
– Ta’ammol kon (contemplate) becomes “fulfill a gap of solitude.”
– Nazar parvāz dārash (keep the gaze in flight) becomes “Elevate your deliberations, deeds, and dreams.”
Read side by side, the Persian provides the lyrical vessel and its music, while the English supplies the conceptual decompression, so that every classical symbol is understood as an active directive for intellectual, moral, and spiritual growth.
Set line by line, the two texts differ in ways that are plainly authored, and each difference shows what the second language was asked to do.
Where fortune is. The Persian begins with tāle’, a rising star, a horoscope, and then moves fortune inside: shabāb-e bakht dar khod ju. The English never mentions the star of beyt 1. It wants “his presence.” The Persian has to take fortune down from the sky; the English never puts it there.
Where intimacy lives. The Persian’s Beloved has a heart with a street in it, kuy-e delash, and beyt 6 widens the street into a city. The English’s Beloved has “thoughts,” and the seeker’s destiny is “merged” with them. The Persian’s closeness is residence. The English’s is a meeting of minds.
What the sleepers are guilty of. The Persian’s gold-seekers have sleeping eyes. The English’s are “arrogant and conceited.” The Persian diagnoses unawareness; the English diagnoses pride, and uses for it the words The Throne‘s English used six days earlier for the speaker’s own confession.
What the crooked man is. The Persian’s ascetic is kaj, bent. The English turns him into an instrument for measuring bends, a protractor, and gives the instrument a purpose, deterrence. The Persian describes his shape. The English describes his use.
What covers the seeker at the end. The Persian raises a roof, bām-e mehr-e u, and so answers the roofs of beyt 3. The English lays a shadow, “the shadow of his benevolence,” and so answers the shadows of beyt 5. Each text closes a ring of its own, and the rings are different.
Who is wanted. The Persian’s single to is the seeker, in the first line, wanting. The English’s single “you” is the seeker, in the last word, wanted. The Persian ends with the seeker wanting the Beloved’s regard. The English ends with the Beloved’s regard already turned toward the seeker.
What the title claims. The Persian title, Tamannā-ye Vojud (“The Desire of Existence”), names an objective ontological principle without a pronoun. The English title, My Desire, My Soul, introduces the only first-person pronoun (“My”) in either text, equating the faculty of wanting directly with the soul and placing those words in the mouth of the reader who has completed the journey.
The evaluation these differences support is this. The Persian is the stricter poem and the more architectural one. It keeps its sky, its stars, its roofs and its mihrab, and it sorts desire by grammar with a precision that cannot be carried into English, where “you want” and “-wanting” do not share a sound. The English is the more inward poem and the more assured one. It moves intimacy from the street to the mind, it reads pride where the Persian reads sleep, and it ends not on a wish but on an assurance. Neither is a version of the other. The Persian teaches the seeker how to want. The English tells him that he is answered.
VII. Literary and Aesthetic Merits
The Geometry of Light and Shadow.
The poem orchestrates an interplay between celestial light and shadow. In beyt 2, the sun of the firmament (khorshid-e falak) is surpassed by the inward light of purpose. In beyt 5, the Beloved’s image casts shadows “heavy with fruit and full of turning” (sāye-hā por-bār o por-gardesh) across the seeker’s existence. In beyt 7, the seeker navigates by a single “pearl of a star” (dordāne akhtar). And in beyt 8, the seeker rises until the “roof of His love” (bām-e mehr-e u), mehr being also the sun, is overhead, which the English renders as “the shadow of his benevolence and compassion.” In this poem true light does not blind, and true shadow does not darken; both shelter and orient the soul.
Triads in the English Text.
The English achieves its rhythmic elevation through placed clusters: “destiny, desire, intent, and goal,” “dilemmas and drawbacks,” “solemn and sacred stand,” “deliberations, deeds, and dreams,” and “dream, destiny, and desire.” These act as pillars across the sixteen paragraphs, and the last two are made of the same letter: the poem’s final triads alliterate on d, the first letter of “desire.”
A poem without a speaker. Neither text says “I.” The poem is all address, thirteen commands in the Persian and a “your” in most of the English paragraphs, and the one who gives the commands is never named. The effect is of instruction without an instructor: the voice belongs to no one in the poem, and the reader, who is the only “you,” is left alone with it.
A Beloved named last. For seven beyts the Beloved is an ending, -ash, attached to His rising, His heart, His face, His image, His holiness, His bazaar, the perceiving of Him. The poem does not let Him stand as a word until the last beyt, and there it names Him twice, under a roof and as a voice. The withholding gives the final line its force. The pronoun arrives at the same moment as the purpose.
Two prohibitions, both about belonging. The poem forbids exactly two things: a refuge on every roof and a companionship with the bound ascetic. Everything else it commands. A reader expects a poem about desire to forbid desires. This one forbids only the wrong home and the wrong company.
The verb that strikes twice. Beyt 3 is built on one verb used in two senses, mazan mā’vā and bazan ātesh, do not pitch a refuge, set a fire. The negative and the positive of the same word open its two lines, and the couplet’s ethics is carried by the prefix alone: ma- forbids, ba- commands.
The Vocabulary of the Measuring Room. One of the quietest aesthetic achievements of the bilingual work is the way the English companion translates the sacred architecture of the Persian (mehrāb, qāmat, qeble, akhtar) into the lexicon of geometry, surveying, and engineering: “apexes” (beyt 2), “far stretched extent” (beyt 3), “compared and gauged” (beyt 5), “cornerstones” and “protractors” (beyt 6), and “distinct your seeking direction to point to” (beyt 7). In lesser hands, technical diction in a mystical poem would feel cold. Here it gives the English prose-poetry its moral spine: spiritual devotion is treated with the exactness of an instrument calibration, where a false preacher is a crooked protractor and the soul’s alignment is gauged against a sacred standard.
VIII. Literary Comparison: Fortune Taken Down From the Sky
Two works, neither used elsewhere in this series, stand on either side of Tamannā-ye Vojud. Each tells its reader to stop looking to the sky, or to the world, for what can only be found within. Each therefore sounds at first like Dr. Bemanian’s poem, and each shows, by where it stops, what is his own.
The first is a qasida by Naser Khosrow, the eleventh-century poet, philosopher and traveler of Khorasan, whose Divan is among the great collections of ethical verse in Persian. It is the sixth qasida of the Divan, and its opening line is one of the most quoted in the language:
نکوهش مکن چرخ نیلوفری را
برون کن ز سر باد و خیرهسری را
“Do not blame the lotus-blue wheel; drive the wind and the headstrong folly out of your head.” The wheel is the sky, which turns and was believed to turn fortunes with it. Naser Khosrow’s argument is that it does no such thing, and his fifth couplet states the argument in the very terms of Dr. Bemanian’s first and fourth beyts:
چو تو خود کنی اختر خویش را بد
مدار از فلک چشم نیک اختری را
“When you yourself make your own star bad, do not keep your eye on the heavens for a good star.” Akhtar, star, is the word of Dr. Bemanian’s seventh beyt, and nik-akhtari, good fortune, literally “good-starredness,” is what his first beyt calls tāle’. Both poets take fortune down from the sky and put it in the person. Naser Khosrow says your star is what you make it; Dr. Bemanian says shabāb-e bakht dar khod ju, seek the youth of fortune within yourself.
The likeness goes further. Naser Khosrow’s third couplet sets jafā, the world’s cruelty, against the seeker’s patience: jahān mar jafā rā, to mar sāberi rā, “the world for cruelty, you for endurance.” Dr. Bemanian’s fourth beyt sets the same jafā against the whisper of the Beloved’s face. Naser Khosrow then turns to trees. The white poplar, he says, has nothing to show because “it chose fruitlessness,” begozid u kam-bari rā (couplet 12), and “they burn the wood of barren trees; that is the due of barrenness” (couplet 14). Dr. Bemanian’s fault is kam-kushi, little striving, a word of the same shape as Naser Khosrow’s kam-bari, little fruit; his shadows are por-bār, heavy with fruit; and he too calls for a fire. And the qasida’s fifteenth couplet makes the promise that Dr. Bemanian’s second beyt makes in its own way: “If your tree takes on the fruit of knowledge, you will bring the lotus-blue wheel down beneath you.” For both poets the sky loses its rank to something grown inside the person. Naser Khosrow even shares the poem’s first word. His sixteenth couplet begins with the same command, negar!, look.
The differences are where Dr. Bemanian’s poem stands alone. Naser Khosrow’s remedy is knowledge, dānesh, and his seeker is self-sufficient: your star is your own making, your tree bears your own fruit, and the reward is to stand above the wheel. Nothing comes to meet him. In Tamannā-ye Vojud the inner fortune is a vessel to be filled “from that melody,” a music that comes from elsewhere, and the poem’s last word is not mastery but a voice. Naser Khosrow abolishes the star. Dr. Bemanian keeps one: he tells the seeker to set his qibla apart, by a dordāne akhtar, a single pearl of a star. The qasida takes the sky away as a source of fortune; the ghazal gives the sky back as a source of direction. The star no longer decides what happens to you. It tells you which way to face.
The second work is the Conclusion of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), a book about leaving the comfortable house of one’s society to find out what one actually wants. Thoreau’s Conclusion opens its central argument with lines he borrows from the seventeenth-century English poet William Habington, and they could stand as a translation of Dr. Bemanian’s first line:
“Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.”
Negar bi-tāb andar dide: look, restlessly, into the eye. Thoreau’s prose then makes the same separation between the inward search and the market that the Persian makes with sowdā, the passion that is also a trade. “Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you,” he writes, “opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” The English companion’s gold-seekers are those whose “essence of thoughts” has become “the promise of gaining gold.” Thoreau draws the same line, between a channel of trade and a channel of thought, and asks his reader which he is digging.
Thoreau’s refusal of comfort is Dr. Bemanian’s refusal of the roof. “I did not wish to take a cabin passage,” he writes of the voyage of life, “but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.” The cabin is the comforting roof; the deck is the open sky, where the seeker of beyt 8 keeps his gaze in flight. And Thoreau’s most famous sentence is the English companion’s beyt 8 in another key: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” “The direction of his dreams” is very nearly “Elevate your deliberations, deeds, and dreams,” and Thoreau’s word for it is a direction, as Dr. Bemanian’s is a qibla. Thoreau even has the poem’s two roofs. “If you have built castles in the air,” he says, “your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
Here the comparison shows its edge. Thoreau’s interior is a territory to be explored, a “realm,” he says, “beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state.” It is vast and it is his. The laws that will “establish themselves around and within him” are the laws of his own advance, and no one is waiting at the end of it. The castle in the air is the dreamer’s own, and so is the foundation he puts under it. Dr. Bemanian’s roof in the air is not his. It is bām-e mehr-e u, the roof of His love, and the seeker does not build it; he rises until it is overhead. Thoreau’s search inward ends in self-possession, “the license of a higher order of beings.” Dr. Bemanian’s ends in being addressed: “his adoring feelings towards you.”
The first draft of this analysis set the poem beside Rumi and Hafez, and the comparison stands as background to the two above. The contrast between the khām (the raw person) and the pokhte (the ripened lover), and the polemic against the zāhed (the dry ascetic), reach back through the whole tradition; the line traditionally attributed to Rumi, khām budam, pokhte shodam, sukhtam, “I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned,” summarizes the first, and Dr. Bemanian invokes that lineage in beyt 1 (khāmān) and beyt 3 (bazan ātesh be khāmushi). When Hafez contrasts the mihrab and the qibla of the mosque with the eyebrow and the alley of the Beloved, he subverts religious formalism through wine and antinomian irony (rendi). Dr. Bemanian preserves the critique of the zāhed and the re-centering of the mihrab and the qibla, but replaces irony with purposeful alignment: the mihrab is gauged against the Beloved’s sacred stature, and the qibla is set like an astronomer’s bearing on a single star.
A further classical touchstone illuminates the poem’s seventh beyt: Saadi of Shiraz on the pearl (dordāne) and the star (akhtar), and Sanā’i of Ghazna on the sleeping eye (khofte-dide) and the market of self-seeking. In the Bustān and the Golestān, Saadi repeatedly contrasts terrestrial dust and mercantile gold with the solitary pearl (dorr-e yektā / dordāne) that forms in silence by receiving a single drop from above. Sanā’i, who inaugurated the ethical-mystical ghazal and qasida that Naser Khosrow and Rumi inherited, warns incessantly against those whose bodily eyes are wide open to the bazaar’s gold (zar) while the eye of their heart remains fast asleep (khofte). Dr. Bemanian compresses both classical traditions into the two lines of beyt 7 (dordāne akhtar vs. khofte-didegān-e ma’tuf-e zar-khāhi), yet turns them to a modern epistemic purpose: where Sanā’i wakes the sleeper with reminders of mortality and judgment, Dr. Bemanian wakes the seeker with the call to independent comprehension (bahr-e edrākash).
Read beside these, the poem’s own place is clear. It shares Naser Khosrow’s refusal to blame the sky, and keeps a star to steer by. It shares Thoreau’s inward eye and his open deck, and ends not in a realm of its own but under a roof it did not build, hearing a voice it did not make.
IX. Conclusion
Tamannā-ye Vojud (My Desire, My Soul) is a companion to The Throne. Where The Throne charted the conquest of the outer tempest through taqallā (struggle), My Desire, My Soul charts the purification and orientation of khāhesh (wanting itself). Moving from the restless inward search of the eye, past the theatrical vanity of the egoists, the deterrence of preachers pledged to crooked wanting, and the gilded slumber of materialists, the poem guides the seeker to ignite his silence, unleash his full potential, and give wings to his deliberations, deeds, and dreams, discovering at last that the ultimate goal of existence is to answer the Beloved’s reverberant song.
The closer reading adds the means by which this is done. A single refrain, khāhi, is used nine times, six times as a verb that belongs to the seeker and three times as a noun that belongs to someone else, so that the poem sorts true desire from false without once forbidding desire. Thirteen commands surround two statements of what is already given, the sun’s eclipse and the image laid upon existence. The Beloved is a suffix for seven beyts and a word in the eighth. The second person moves, across the two languages, from the one who wants in the first Persian line to the one who is wanted in the last English word. And the poem’s faith is described as a bearing: a mihrab measured against a stature, a qibla set apart by a star, against those who measure angles for others and those already turned toward gold.
And Draft 003 adds the final structural links that complete this design: the grammatical split in the rhyme slot (qāfiyeh) before khāhi, where the world’s idols (khod, kaj, zar) face the Beloved’s attributes (-ash); the four-stage acoustic progression from burned silence (khāmushi) to inner melody and whisper (naghme, najvā), past litigious claims (da’vi), into the reverberant voice (āvā-ye u); the ordered triad of human inquiry in beyt 6 (tamannā, ta’ammol, negar); and the quiet testimony of the English title (My Desire, My Soul), where the only first-person pronoun in the entire work waits for the reader who has been addressed as “you” at the end to claim the poem’s desire as his own.
Dr. Bemanian wrote Tamannā-ye Vojud on July 3, 2017, six days after Takht-e Soleymān and at the end of a sequence that began with Niyāz on June 18. The Throne‘s refrain, tamannā rā, the longing as an object, is in this poem’s title, and inside it the longing becomes a verb, tamannā kon. The Throne closed on daryāb, grasp; this poem’s second beyt opens its reckoning with daryābi, you grasp. The Throne‘s English confessed “arrogance, conceit”; this poem’s English sees the same faults in the gold-seekers and keeps away. Whatever the poet intended, the poems of those weeks read as a sequence, and this one stands where the striving of The Throne is given its direction.
X. Biography of the Poet
Dr. Alireza Bemanian is a poet, physicist, systems architect, and author whose bilingual works bridge classical Persian verse with modern scientific habits of mind. His craft in Tamannā-ye Vojud is the craft of a designer who works in two materials at once. In the Persian the precision is morphological: one Persian word, khāhi, is set nine times and allowed to be either a verb or the tail of a compound noun, and the whole moral argument of the poem is carried by which it is. The pronoun of the Beloved is withheld as a free word until the last beyt; the commands are counted out around two statements; the meter’s foot is shared with the poem written six days before, with a single syllable changed. In the English the precision is lexical and comes from his professions: the seeker’s devotion is to be “compared and gauged,” the moment of union “apexes,” and the bound ascetic is a “protractor,” an instrument for measuring angles, set against a qibla taken from a star. The two texts are best read as he made them, side by side, one sorting desire by grammar and the other assuring the reader that the desire is returned.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
Artistic Appreciation
The Verb That Stays Open in My Desire, My Soul — Dr. Alireza Bemanian
The art of Tamannā-ye Vojud is the art of saying something with grammar that could not be said as well in statement. Its subject is desire, true and false, and it never once tells its reader which desires are which. It lets the form decide.
The refrain is khāhi, “you want.” Persian allows the same sound to serve as a living verb and as the second half of a compound noun of character, the way English “-seeking” can follow “self” or “gold.” Dr. Bemanian uses both, nine times, and keeps them strictly apart. Six times the word is a verb, spoken to the seeker, always inside a condition or a purpose: if you want, when you want, since you want. Three times it has hardened into a noun and is fastened to someone else: khod-khāhi to the raw, kaj-khāhi to the ascetic, zar-khāhi to the sleepers. The moral argument of the whole poem is in that distribution. A wanting that is still a verb is still open. A wanting that has become a noun has closed around its object.
The opening couplet holds the argument in miniature. Its first line ends on the verb, tāle’ash khāhi, “you want His rising.” Its second ends on the noun, khod-khāhi, self-wanting. The same word, one line apart, is a wish when it is yours and a diagnosis when it is theirs. Even the rhyme slot (qāfiyeh) immediately before khāhi obeys this separation: in the three lines of false wanting, what stands before khāhi is the idol the world has bound itself to (khod, kaj, zar); in the lines of true wanting, what stands before it is an attribute of the Beloved bearing the suffix -ash (tāle’ash, delash, rokhash, qodsash nazar, khāterash) or the jasmine of His valley (saman).
Around this the poem builds with the economy of a careful designer. It has thirteen commands and two prohibitions, and the prohibitions concern only where one lives and with whom. It has two statements of what is already true, and they stand at its two quiet points: the sun’s loss of glory in beyt 2, and in beyt 5, the poem’s only verbless line, the Beloved’s image laid on the seeker’s existence, “shadows heavy with fruit and full of turning,” a phrase that joins the orchard to the sundial. The Beloved is present throughout only as a suffix, -ash, his, until the last beyt, where He is named as a word for the first time, twice: once under a roof of love and once as a voice.
The English works by a different economy and keeps its own rule. In 333 words it never says “I.” It says “your” fifteen times and “his” ten. It says “you” once, as its final word. Only in its title, My Desire, My Soul, does the first person appear, waiting for the reader who has been addressed as “you” at the end to claim the poem’s desire as “My.” And it adds its own figures to the Persian’s. Where the Persian calls the ascetic kaj, crooked, the English calls him a “protractor,” an instrument for measuring angles, and sets him beside the next beyt’s star: a direction measured out by another, against a direction taken from the sky. Where the Persian raises a roof of love over the seeker in its last beyt, the English lays “the shadow of his benevolence,” and so joins the ending to the shadows of beyt 5.
The poem’s sound repays a slow reading. It traces a four-stage acoustic arc from the silence (khāmushi) set aflame in beyt 3, through “that melody” (ān naghme) and the whisper of His face (najvā-ye rokhash) in beyt 4, past the litigious claims (da’vi) of the ascetic in beyt 6, into the reverberant voice (āvā-ye u) of beyt 8. The first foot of its sixth beyt, ta-man-nā kon, is the refrain of The Throne, written six days earlier, with one syllable changed: there the longing was an object, here it is a command. The melody of beyt 4 is called “that melody” before any melody has been named, and right beside it por sāzash (“fill it”) quietly sounds sāz, a musical instrument; the poem trusts the reader to know which music it means, and names its source only at the end, āvā-ye u, His voice. And in the last line the small word for “not,” ney, is spelled as the Persian spells the reed flute, set beside the word for a voice.
Read together, the two texts make one design in two materials. The Persian sorts desire by grammar and keeps its sky, its roofs and its star. The English moves intimacy into the mind, names pride where the Persian names sleep, and ends not on a wish but on an assurance. A poem that spends sixteen lines telling its reader what to want closes by telling him that he is wanted.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
Conversational Commentary
My Desire, My Soul (Tamannā-ye Vojud) — Dr. Alireza Bemanian
If the formal analysis follows one word, khāhi, through nine lines, and the philosophical analysis asks what it means for a desire to harden into a trait, a conversational reading can ask something simpler: what would it be like to live by this poem on an ordinary weekday?
It would mean, first, taking your wants seriously instead of being embarrassed by them. The poem treats desire as the stuff existence is made of. The trouble it diagnoses is not wanting too much. It is wanting that has stopped being a choice and become a personality: the person whose whole self is a display, the person whose whole religion is a promise made to his own self-interest and kept, the person whose whole thought is the promise of gold. Most of us know each of these people, and on bad days we have been each of them. The poem’s test is practical. Is my wanting still going somewhere, or has it settled into who I am?
It would mean, second, refusing the comfortable roof. “Do not seek shelter under any comforting roof, where not realizing the far stretched extent of your potentials.” That is a hard sentence to read in the middle of a career, a marriage, a set of habits that work well enough. The poem’s word for the fault is kam-kushi, too little effort, and it calls it makhdush, scratched, the way a surface is scratched. Nothing dramatic has gone wrong. Something has simply stopped being used.
Here the poet’s own life shows through. Dr. Bemanian is a physicist and a systems architect, and his English reaches for the instruments of those trades. The seeker’s place of prayer is to be “compared and gauged.” The moment of union “apexes.” The dogmatic preacher is a “protractor,” a tool for measuring angles. To someone who has spent a working life setting tolerances and bearings, faith is naturally a question of orientation: what fixed point are you steering by, and who set it? The poem’s answer is unusual. Not the crowd, and not yourself alone, but a single star you have chosen, “his unique guiding star,” for one purpose, to understand (bahr-e edrākash)—because a direction taken without understanding is only another kind of sleep.
It would mean, third, going out into the world rather than away from it, and doing so in the right order. The poem looks inward first, “Start searching your own soul,” and it would be easy to stop there, in a private piety. But four beyts later it gives three rapid commands—tamannā kon, ta’ammol kon, negar har kuy o bāzārash—which the English renders as “Revive your desires, fulfill a gap of solitude, then observe his places, cornerstones, and offerings.” First wake up what you want; then give yourself a brief, restorative interval of solitude (“a gap of solitude,” something to be filled and then left); and then step out to look at the marketplace, where what seemed like ordinary streets turns out to be built on His cornerstones.
And it would mean, finally, a change in what you expect from the whole effort. You start out wanting, and the poem keeps you wanting all the way through. But its last line turns the direction around. The purpose, it says, is “to reciprocate to his reverberant songs,” and the last thing named is “his adoring feelings towards you.” You thought you were the one doing the seeking. The poem ends by suggesting you were being sought, and that the work of all those commands was learning how to answer.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
Reader Impression
My Desire, My Soul (Tamannā-ye Vojud) — Dr. Alireza Bemanian
I came to this poem braced for a sermon against wanting. Its Persian title is “The Desire of Existence,” and poems that take desire as their subject usually end by asking you to give it up. This one does the opposite. In its sixth beyt it gives the order outright: tamannā kon, desire. The English says “Revive your desires,” as if they had been there all along and had only gone quiet.
What I heard first was the refrain. Nine lines end on khāhi, “you want,” and after a while the word stops sounding like a statement and starts sounding like a question put to me. If you want His rising. When you want the alley of His heart. Since you want the jasmine. Then, three times, the same sound comes back changed into something heavier: khod-khāhi, self-wanting, kaj-khāhi, crooked wanting, zar-khāhi, the wanting of gold. I did not notice the difference until I had read it twice. When the poem talks to me, the word is a verb. When it talks about other people, the word has become a name for what they are.
That is the moment the poem caught me. It never tells me not to want. It shows me what wanting looks like once it has set hard: the raw ones with their shows, the ascetic bound to his crooked wanting, the sleepers with their eyes on gold. Each of them wants, and each of them has stopped moving. The poem’s only real warning is not to become like that.
I was surprised by how little it forbids. Among thirteen commands there are two prohibitions, and both are about where to stay and whom to stay with: do not make your refuge on every roof, do not become the companion of the ascetic bound to crooked wanting. The English turns that ascetic into one of its oddest and best phrases, “protractors of deterrence.” I had to stop and picture it: a man with a protractor, measuring out the angle at which other people may approach God, and setting it at fear. Then the next beyt hands me the alternative. “Distinct your seeking direction to point to his unique guiding star.” I am to take my bearing myself, from a star, and not have it measured for me.
Through most of the poem I am only ever “your” in the English: your soul, your fortune, your silence, your desires. The Beloved is only “his,” and in the Persian only a small ending, -ash, on other words. Neither of us is quite a person yet. Even the sounds of the poem seem to grow as I walk through it: first there is a silence (khāmushi) I am told to burn, then an enchanted melody and a quiet murmur (najvā), then the noisy claims of the preachers I am told to leave behind. Then the last beyt arrives, and the Persian names Him at last, twice, u, under a roof of love and as a full voice (āvā-ye u).
And the English ends on the one word it has held back all along. “Then, be aware your destined goal is not anything but to reciprocate to his reverberant songs, that is your ultimate dream, destiny, and desire; his adoring feelings towards you.” Three hundred and thirty-three words without a “you,” and then “you” as the last of them—leaving the title itself, My Desire, My Soul, as the only “My” on the page, waiting for me to say it after the last line. I had spent the whole poem being told what to want. I finished it being told that I was wanted, and that all my wanting had been an answer to that.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.