تخت سلیمان (Takht-e Soleymān / “The Throne”) & The Throne
Philosophical Analysis — Draft 002
Poem by Alireza Bemanian, June 27, 2017
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
I. The Epistemology of the Bestowed Throne
In classical literature, the Throne of Solomon (Takht-e Soleymān) represents the absolute pinnacle of cosmic authority, wisdom, and dominion over both the natural and supernatural worlds. Dr. Bemanian’s The Throne opens with this ultimate gift already bestowed upon the speaker. However, the philosophical weight of the poem lies in the immediate paradox: the possession of supreme power is met with profound internal ignorance.
The first beyt admits, “I did not know that I, crazed (majnun)…” The English companion text unpacks this ignorance as “arrogance, conceit, and narcissism.” The philosophical argument here is that external elevation (the throne) does not automatically confer internal clarity. True knowledge begins not with the reception of authority, but with the recognition of one’s own blinding narcissism, which must be dismantled by the “fervor, passion, and vehemence” of desire. The throne is merely the starting point; the real kingdom to be conquered is the self.
The claim can be put more exactly, because the poem’s own first and last verbs put it so. The first verb is dādi, “you gave.” The last is daryāb, “grasp it,” which in ordinary Persian also means “receive it.” Dr. Bemanian separates two events that are usually treated as one. A thing can be given without being received. The giving is the Giver’s act and is complete in an instant; the receiving is the act of the one given to, and it may take a life. Between those two verbs lies the whole poem, and the first thing said after the gift is nadānestam, “I did not know.”
The tradition behind the title already holds this thought. In the Qur’an, Solomon himself does not treat a throne set before him as a reward. “This is of my Lord’s bounty,” he says, “that He may try me, whether I am thankful or ungrateful” (27:40, in A. J. Arberry’s translation). Elsewhere the throne is the very place of his trial: “Certainly We tried Solomon, and We cast upon his throne a mere body; then he repented” (38:34). Dr. Bemanian’s speaker is in that position at the start of the poem: on the throne, and not yet equal to it, a body on a seat. What the poem adds to the tradition is the account of what follows. It is not enough to be grateful for what one has been given. One has to become the kind of being that can hold it.
II. The Mechanics of Purification
The second and third beyts outline a rigorous methodology of spiritual refinement. The Persian juxtaposes searching within (darun juyam) with polishing the outside (berun rā seyqalash sāzam).
The English text translates this act of polishing into a violent, necessary internal revolution: “the purge, eradication, and expulsion of insights and convictions echoing contradictions.” Philosophically, this is an epistemology of subtraction. Truth is not gained by adding new dogmas, but by aggressively removing cognitive dissonance. The “slumbered, mortified, and degraded segments” of the core must be restored. This purification leads to a state of being madhush (intoxicated or stunned). It is an intoxication not of wine, but of pure, uncontradicted clarity, where the “vibrant mind” is stunned by its own cleansed reflections.
Three features of this purge set it apart from the usual account. The first is its object. What is expelled is not appetite or sin. It is “insights and convictions,” a person’s own conclusions, the things he has earned the right to think. The poem asks him to give up part of what he knows, on one ground only: that it contradicts the rest. The test is internal consistency, and nothing outside the mind is appealed to.
The second is its honesty about motive. The English lists, among the forces that keep the cleansing going, “the foresightedness of forthcoming rewards, inducements, and incitements.” The seeker purifies himself partly because he expects to gain by it. Dr. Bemanian does not disguise this, and he does not condemn it. Four beyts later the same “inducements” are to be “invigorated.” A discipline that waited for pure motives would never begin.
The third is its result. In the Persian, the interior is “adorned” and the speaker is at once madhush-e ghoghā, dazed by uproar. One expects a cleansed mind to be a quiet one. This poem’s cleansed mind is loud. The noise of the world was always there; what the contradictions had done was muffle it. Clarity, on this account, is an increase of what one has to bear.
III. The Archetypes of Mastery: Solomon and Noah
The Throne employs two of the most massive archetypes in Abrahamic and Islamic literature—Solomon and Noah—but strips them of their historical distance, internalizing them as faculties of the human soul.
Solomon represents the initial state: power given by grace. Noah, introduced in the sixth beyt, represents power earned through labor, “dexterity and acuity.” To become a maker (sāne’) like Noah is to transition from being a passive recipient of the throne to an active architect of one’s salvation. Noah’s ark is not a wooden ship here; it is the fortified, cleansed soul capable of surviving the deluge of existence. The philosopher-poet demands that the seeker evolve from Solomon (who commands the wind) to Noah (who must build against the flood).
The two figures are distinguished in the tradition by their elements, and the poem’s argument follows the distinction. Solomon’s is the wind: “So We subjected to him the wind, that ran at his commandment, softly, wherever he might light on” (Qur’an 38:36). His throne is carried. Noah’s is the water, and he is not carried over it by anything he did not make. The movement from the first figure to the second is a movement from being borne to bearing oneself, and the English companion states it as a prohibition: “Do not float, drift, and soar.” To soar is Solomon’s way of travelling.
The word the poem uses for Noah closes off a misreading. Sāne’, maker, might be taken as a claim of self-sufficiency, the soul as its own creator. The Qur’an’s Noah is nothing of the kind. He makes because he is told to, and he makes while being watched: “Make thou the Ark under Our eyes, and as We reveal” (11:37). The verb of that command, isna’, is the verb from which sāne’ is formed. And he makes before there is any water, while those who pass by “scoffed at him” (11:38). Three things follow for the poem’s philosophy of making. The maker is commissioned; his craft is a form of obedience. The maker is observed; he works under a gaze, as the speaker of beyts 3 and 4 worked under his own. And the maker begins before the need is visible. The poem tells the seeker to become such a maker in beyt 6, one beyt before it tells him to go to sea.
IV. The Dialectic of the Ocean and the Stars
The spatial philosophy of the poem is constructed on a vertical axis. At the bottom is the daryā (the sea, representing chaos, livelihood, and overwhelming emotion). At the top are the aflāk (the heavens) and the akhtar (the star).
The speaker is commanded to “Stand up towards the ocean waves… portray and render your bequeathed aptitude capable of touching the highest stars.” This is a philosophy of defiant stature. The human soul is positioned as the bridge between the deepest chaos and the highest order. The ocean is not to be feared; it is to be informed of the soul’s “eminence.” The horizon of stars (āfāq-e akhtar) has made a dwelling for the seeker, but the seeker must still plunge into the sea to claim it.
The two poles are not treated alike, and the difference is written into the poem’s grammar. The Persian marks its objects with the particle rā, eighteen times in sixteen lines. The sea takes it three times. The longing, the uproar, the demand and the struggle all take it. The sky never does. The two lines of the poem that have no rā at all are the two that name the heavens, and in the last beyt the star’s horizon is the subject of the verb: it “made” the dwelling. The sea is what the seeker acts upon. The sky is what has already acted for him.
This gives the vertical axis its meaning. The seeker is told to show the waves a stature “one heaven higher,” and the English calls that stature a “bequeathed aptitude.” His height is real and it is inherited. He does not rise to the stars by his own strength; he discovers that he is their “inhabitant, dweller, and citizen.” What he does by his own strength is go down, into the sea. In this poem effort is spent below, and what is above is given.
V. The Philosophy of “Taqallā” (Struggle vs. Drift)
Perhaps the most potent existential instruction occurs in the seventh beyt: masho khāmush in daryā taqallā rā (“Do not become silent [in] this sea, the struggle”). The English translation offers a brilliant philosophical directive: “Do not float, drift, and soar by the flow impetuses… Do not succumb to the sea and slide into a silent postulate.”
Here, Dr. Bemanian critiques spiritual passivity. In many mystical traditions, surrender to the divine ocean implies becoming utterly passive—a drop dissolving in the sea. The Throne violently rejects this. True spiritual ascendance requires taqallā (struggle, exertion). To float is to succumb. The seeker must “take the voyage,” “undertake the urge,” and “disseminate your sturdiness and solidity.” The ultimate serenity mentioned in the final paragraph is not the peace of a floating corpse, but the tranquility achieved after conquering the storm.
The poem’s precision about silence deserves emphasis. The word khāmush is used twice. In beyt 5 the seeker is told to make the storm silent. In beyt 7 he is told not to become silent himself. The two commands define the kind of calm the poem will accept. Calm imposed on the storm is the goal. Calm that comes from giving up one’s own voice is the failure. From outside the two might look the same, a still surface in either case, and the poem insists on telling them apart by how they were reached.
The English gives the bad silence a name from the sciences: “a silent postulate.” A postulate is a proposition assumed without proof and built upon. The danger the phrase describes is intellectual as much as spiritual. It is the state of a mind that has stopped testing what it rests on, and that mistakes its own quiet for a conclusion.
VI. Desire Under Instruction
The noun that sounds most often in the poem is tamannā, longing or desire, eight times in sixteen lines. The poem’s treatment of it is its most original philosophical act, and it is neither of the two treatments that moral traditions usually offer.
One of those is the ascetic’s: desire is the enemy, and wisdom is its extinction. The other is the romantic’s: desire is the guide, and wisdom is to follow it. The Throne begins by showing desire as madness. The speaker on his throne is majnun, and the thing he is mad with is named twice, with no verb, as if he could not finish the sentence. The poem then spends its length doing something to that desire, and the verbs tell the story in order. In beyt 4 the speaker informs it: tamannā rā khabar sāzam. In the same breath he commands it to grasp the sea’s voice. In beyt 5 he tells it to silence the storm. In beyt 6 he tells it to give voice, and it is renamed a taqāzā, a demand. In beyt 7 he casts it upon the sea, and in the refrain’s own place a new word appears, taqallā, striving.
Desire is not extinguished at any point. The English is emphatic: “Yes, the desire, the desire,” and again, “Yes, the desire,” and the seeker is told to “arouse your temptations, invigorate your inducements.” Nor is desire obeyed. It is told things and given orders. The position is that desire is a faculty, and that like any faculty it can be ignorant or instructed. Ignorant, it is the madness of a man who has been given everything and wants without knowing what. Instructed, it becomes a demand addressed to someone and then an exertion toward something. The three Persian words are nearly one sound, tamannā, taqāzā, taqallā, and the poem’s ethics is the passage through them: wanting, asking, working.
VII. The Master Made Gentle
A poem of commands would be expected to end in command. This one ends otherwise. Its last line is to daryābash, konad rāmat cho daryā rā: “you, grasp it; it will make you gentle, as it does the sea.” Rām is the word for an animal that has been tamed and for a temper that has become mild. The seeker who was told to stand a heaven higher than the waves and to silence their storm is, in the final verb, the one who is tamed. The grammar concurs: in the last beyt “you” is twice the object and never the agent of anything but understanding.
The English companion renders the same turn in a triad of verbs that pull against one another: “Relinquish, confiscate, and adorn the moment.” To relinquish is to let go; to confiscate is to seize. The moment that the desire of the first beyt was “not overwhelming enough to grasp, clench, and capture” is at last taken, and the taking includes a letting go. The sea, in the same sentence, “is turned into calmness and tranquility.” The verb is passive. Three beyts earlier the command was “Conquer and calm.” At the end no conqueror is named.
The philosophical content of this ending is the poem’s resolution of an old opposition, between what is given and what is earned. Read quickly, The Throne says that the unearned must be replaced by the earned, Solomon by Noah. Read to its last beyt, it says something more careful. The dwelling among the stars “was made” for the seeker; it is as much a gift as the throne was. Nothing has been replaced. What has changed is the seeker, who at the start could not take in what he was handed and at the end can. Effort, in this poem, does not compete with grace. It is the way grace is received. The struggle earns nothing that was not already given, and without the struggle nothing that was given can be held.
That is why the English ends as it does. The first person, absent for nine paragraphs of command, comes back in the last clause, and what it says is not a claim of achievement. It is “my dream of reaching you.” Earlier the speaker pursued “your dream,” the Giver’s. The two dreams are now one. And the serenity he has come to is put to work at once, “to reflect, admonish farcical deems, and replenish the itinerary of attempts and trials.” Being made gentle is not being finished.
VIII. Two Thinkers of the Made Self
Two bodies of thought, neither used elsewhere in this series, come close enough to The Throne to show where it stands alone.
The first is Muhammad Iqbal’s Asrār-e Khudi (“The Secrets of the Self”), the Persian philosophical poem published in Lahore in 1915. Iqbal is the great modern opponent, in Persian verse, of the mysticism of dissolution. In notes he supplied to his translator R. A. Nicholson he put his position in one sentence: “The moral and religious ideal of man is not self-negation but self-affirmation.” And the faculty by which the self lives, for Iqbal, is desire:
زندگی در جستجو پوشیده است
اصل او در آرزو پوشیده است
“Life is latent in seeking, / Its origin is hidden in desire,” in Nicholson’s translation. A few lines on, Iqbal uses the very word of Dr. Bemanian’s refrain, with the heart’s glow and the sea beside it:
از تمنّا رقصِ دل در سینه ها
سینه ها از تابِ او آئینه ها
“Desire sets the heart dancing in the breast, / And by its glow the breast is made bright as a mirror.” Desire, he says, “is a restless wave of the Self’s sea,” and “Negation of desire is death to the living, / Even as absence of burning extinguishes the flame.”
The kinship with The Throne is plain, down to the shared words tamannā, tāb, daryā. Both poets refuse the drop that dissolves; both make desire the engine. The differences show what Dr. Bemanian has done that Iqbal did not.
Iqbal’s desire needs no instruction. It is life itself, and his counsel is to keep it burning. Dr. Bemanian’s desire begins as madness and has to be informed; the whole second half of his poem is addressed to it. He agrees with Iqbal that desire must not be put out, and adds what Iqbal does not say, that it must be taught.
The order of the path is reversed. Iqbal sets out the education of the self in three stages, which Nicholson gives as “Obedience, Self-control, and Divine Vicegerency.” Authority comes last; it is the reward of a completed discipline, and the vicegerent, in Iqbal’s own words, is “the completest Ego.” The Throne begins with the vicegerent’s seat. Its speaker has Solomon’s throne in the first line, before any obedience and with no self-control at all. The poem then runs the stages in the other direction: from the throne, to the labor of governing the self, to a last line in which the self is made gentle. This is the more common human case and the harder one. People are seldom given authority after they are ready for it. They are handed thrones, of office, of talent, of inheritance, and must become fit for them afterwards. Dr. Bemanian has written the philosophy of that second situation.
And the end is different. Iqbal’s self grows “more and more individual, more and more unique”; its perfection is to stand. Dr. Bemanian’s self is at its highest “one heaven higher” than the waves, and the poem does not stop there. It goes on to rām, and to “reaching you.” He takes Iqbal’s affirmation of the self as a stage and declines to make it the destination.
The second body of thought is Aristotle’s account of how a person comes to have a virtue, in the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle distinguishes what we have by nature from what we have by practice. The senses belong to the first kind: “we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them.” The virtues belong to the second: “Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.” His example is the one the poem uses: “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts” (in W. D. Ross’s translation).
“Adapted by nature to receive them” is as close a prose statement of the poem’s first and last verbs as one could ask for, and “men become builders by building” is its sixth beyt. What Aristotle calls nature, the poem calls a gift. What he calls habit, it calls taqallā. On the central point the two agree: capacity is given and possession is made.
But Aristotle’s two kinds stay apart, and Dr. Bemanian’s throne belongs to both at once. It is given outright and beforehand, as the senses are. And it is not truly had until it has been exercised, as the virtues are not. The poem describes a third kind of good that Aristotle’s division does not provide for: a thing fully bestowed that must still be earned in order to be owned. Further, Aristotle’s learner is formed gradually, in a city, under laws designed for the purpose; “legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them.” There is no sea in the Ethics. Dr. Bemanian’s learner is told to make himself a builder and is sent into the storm in the next beyt. And Aristotle’s end is the agent’s own completed excellence. The poem’s end is a relation: a dwelling made by another, and “my dream of reaching you.”
Between them the two comparisons fix the poem’s position. With Iqbal, against the mystics of dissolution, it holds that the self must strive and that desire is its strength. With Aristotle, it holds that what we are given we must still become. Beyond both, it holds that the striving self is finally made gentle, and that what it becomes able to do is receive.
IX. Conclusion
The Throne is a manifesto of spiritual and existential sovereignty. It begins with the unearned gift of Solomon’s throne, which serves only to reveal the seeker’s internal conceit. Through a ruthless purging of contradictory convictions, the seeker’s mind is cleansed. The soul is then commanded to abandon its passive observation, enter the tumultuous sea of existence, and adopt the active, architectural dexterity of Noah. By refusing to drift, and by asserting its stature against the highest stars, the soul finally tames the ocean into tranquility. It is a philosophy that marries absolute mystical devotion with relentless, active human struggle.
The marriage has definite terms, and they are the poem’s contribution. A gift is not received by being given; the receiving is a work. That work begins with a subtraction, the removal of one’s own contradictory convictions, and its first result is noise. Desire is neither extinguished nor obeyed; it is informed, commanded, and turned by stages into demand and exertion. The model of the worker is a maker who builds to an order, under a gaze, before the flood. The calm he reaches must be the storm’s silence and never his own. And at the end he is himself made gentle, in a dwelling he did not build, with his striving shown to have been the means of accepting what was his from the first line. The sovereignty the poem teaches is the capacity to be given to.
X. Biography of the Poet
Dr. Alireza Bemanian is a poet, physicist, systems architect, and author whose bilingual works bridge classical Persian mysticism with modern existential and scientific rigor. The themes of The Throne reflect the mindset of an architect. When the poem commands the lover to become a sāne’ (a maker/artisan) like Noah, it elevates the act of engineering—the building of a vessel to withstand chaos—to a supreme spiritual virtue. Furthermore, the directive to purge “convictions echoing contradictions” mirrors the physicist’s demand for mathematical and systemic coherence. In The Throne, Dr. Bemanian crafts a worldview where the ultimate spiritual delight is not found in passive surrender, but in the rigorous, deliberate construction of a soul capable of taming the sea.
The same conviction runs through his historical writing. His volumes on the modern history of Iran study what becomes of a society when authority is held without having been earned and accepted without being examined: when conclusions are received from above and never worked for by those who live under them. The Throne states the principle in the first person and applies it to its own speaker before anyone else. A throne that costs its holder nothing teaches him nothing, and the poem’s remedy is not to take the throne away. It is to send the holder to sea until he knows what he was given. For Dr. Bemanian, in the poem as in the histories, what is handed down must be made one’s own by labor, and a silence that has not been reached by that labor is only “a silent postulate.”
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
تخت سلیمان (Takht-e Soleymān / “The Throne”) & The Throne
Formal Expanded Analysis — Draft 002
Poem by Alireza Bemanian, June 27, 2017
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
I. Introduction
Dr. Alireza Bemanian’s Takht-e Soleymān (titled “The Throne” in English) is an eight-beyt architectural marvel of Persian poetry that charts the soul’s progression from unearned grace to fought-for mastery. If The Night, written five days earlier, was about learning how to see and hear the Beloved in the darkness, The Throne is about learning how to act, build, and conquer the tumultuous ocean of existence.
The formal engine of the Persian poem is heavily reliant on the accusative marker rā (را). It appears relentlessly at the ends of hemistichs: Soleymān rā, tamannā rā, ghoghā rā, rosvā rā, daryā rā, taqāzā rā, taqallā rā. In Persian grammar, rā marks the definite direct object—the thing that is acted upon. By repeating this marker, the poem thrusts every concept into the objective case. Longing, the sea, the uproar, the struggle—they are not abstract forces acting upon the speaker; they are the materials the speaker must act upon.
The English companion text operates as a sweeping, muscular exegesis of the Persian framework. Where the Persian uses the classical name of Noah, the English expands it into “Noah’s dexterity and acuity.” Where the Persian speaks of polishing the outside, the English decodes this as the “expulsion of insights and convictions echoing contradictions.” The English text strips away the mythological distance of the Persian imagery, turning it into a precise psychological and spiritual blueprint.
A closer reading shows how deliberately the poem is closed on itself. Its first beyt has two verbs: dādi, “you gave,” and nadānestam, “I did not know.” Its last beyt answers both. The first word of the final beyt is bedān, “know,” and the verb of its final line is daryāb, which means “grasp it” and also, in plain Persian, “receive it.” The poem begins with something given and not understood, and it ends with the command to know and to receive. Everything between, the purging, the gazing, the sea, the storm, Noah, the striving, is the distance between being given a thing and receiving it.
The same verb carries the poem’s central image inside it. Daryāb is written دریاب. The sea, daryā, is written دریا. The word for receiving contains the word for the sea, letter for letter, and Dr. Bemanian sets the two together twice, in the last line of the first half of the poem and in the last line of the whole: daryābash … daryā rā. No sea is mentioned in the first seven hemistichs. It enters the poem through the verb.
The throne itself is named once, in the first line, and neither the Persian nor the English mentions it again. A poem called The Throne leaves its throne in the opening line and goes to sea. By the last beyt the seat has become a manzel, a dwelling. The English companion keeps a discipline of its own, set out in Section IV: in 570 words it never says “I,” its first word is “You,” and its last word is “you.”
II. A Reader’s Guide
The poem’s structure follows a journey of realization, purification, confrontation, and mastery.
| Beyt | Stage | What the lover does/experiences | Key Object (rā) | Its meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Unearned Gift: Receiving power but lacking awareness | Given the throne; realizes his own madness | tamannā | desire / longing |
| 2 | The Inner Purge: Cleansing the soul of contradiction | Seeks within; polishes the outside; becomes stunned | ghoghā | tumult / uproar |
| 3 | The Vigilance: Watching the revolving world | Keeps safe the slumbering inner self | rosvā | disgraced / exposed |
| 4 | The Awakening of the Sea: Breaking the observing mold | Informs desire to grasp the sea’s fever | daryā | the sea / ocean |
| 5 | The Assertion of Stature: Standing atop the cosmos | Shows stature to the waves; calms the storm | tamannā | desire / longing |
| 6 | The Craft of Salvation: Becoming the Architect | Voices the request; becomes a maker like Noah | daryā | the sea / ocean |
| 7 | The Struggle (Taqallā): Refusing to drift | Strikes the sea; refuses silence; strives | taqallā | struggle / exertion |
| 8 | The Taming: Reaching the horizon of stars | Discovers the dwelling; tames the ocean | daryā | the sea / ocean |
Eight features of the form matter for everything that follows. The first three were identified in the first draft of this analysis; the last five are added here.
The Objectification of Chaos. The poem’s rhyme scheme centers on words ending in the ā vowel, immediately followed by the object marker rā. The sea (daryā), the struggle (taqallā), the tumult (ghoghā) are all subjected to the speaker’s action. The grammar itself demands that the seeker conquer these elements. The count is exact: rā occurs eighteen times in sixteen lines, and fourteen of the sixteen lines contain it. The two lines without it are the first hemistichs of beyts 3 and 5, and they have one thing in common. They are the two lines that look at the sky: gardun, the turning wheel of heaven, in the one, and aflāk, the spheres, in the other. In a poem that puts the throne, the longing, the uproar, the sea, the demand and the struggle into the objective case, the heavens are never made an object. One more rā deserves notice. In the first line of the last beyt it is attached to to, “you.” The one who has been commanded to act upon everything is, at the end, the thing acted upon.
The Evolution of the Imperative. The poem begins in the past tense (“You presented,” “I did not know”) and the present indicative (“I seek,” “I cast my gaze”). But halfway through, it pivots violently into the imperative command: namā (show!), kon khāmush (silence!), āvā kon (voice!), be daryā zan (strike the sea!), masho khāmush (do not be silent!). The poem transforms from a confession into a battle cry. The pivot can be located to the line. Beyts 2 to 4 hold nine verbs in the first person, juyam, sāzam, shavam, bāzam, konam, pardāzam, bāzam, bāzam, sāzam. The last of them is khabar sāzam, “I inform,” in the first hemistich of beyt 4, and what the speaker informs is his own longing. The very next line delivers the message, and it is two commands: daryābash, farāgirash, “grasp it, take it all in.” From there to the end the poem holds ten commands, one of them a prohibition, and not a single verb in the first person. The pronouns divide the same way. Man, “I,” occurs twice, both times in the first beyt. To, “you,” occurs four times, all of them in beyts 5 to 8.
The Triadic English Expansions. As is characteristic of Dr. Bemanian’s style, the English text relies on powerful triads to unpack single Persian concepts: “arrogance, conceit, and narcissism,” “purge, eradication, and expulsion,” “blizzards, outpours, and rages,” “inhabitant, dweller, and citizen.” This creates a rhetorical surging effect, perfectly mimicking the ocean waves the poem describes. There are some thirty such groups of three in the sixteen paragraphs, and at the poem’s turning points the group grows to four: the throne is “to be bestowed, cherished, treasured, and savored,” and the gaze is “Attentive, observant, perceptive, and insightful.”
A ring. The first and last beyts answer each other term by term. Dādi (you gave) is answered by daryāb (receive it). Nadānestam (I did not know) is answered by bedān (know). Takht (a throne) is answered by manzel (a dwelling). And the first line’s object, Soleymān rā, is answered by the last line’s object, daryā rā: the poem begins on a king’s name and ends on the sea.
Two halves, and the same close for each. The first four beyts are the speaker’s account of himself. The last four are commands. Each half ends on the same pair of words. The eighth hemistich is ke daryābash farāgirash tab-e āvā-ye daryā rā; the sixteenth is to daryābash, konad rāmat cho daryā rā. The first half closes by telling the longing to grasp the sea’s fever. The second closes by telling the self to grasp its dwelling, and promising that it will be made calm as the sea is.
A second rhyme that disappears. In beyts 2, 3 and 4 the first hemistichs, which a ghazal leaves unrhymed, rhyme with one another: seyqalash sāzam, nazar bāzam, khabar sāzam. All three are first-person verbs, “I make,” “I cast,” “I make.” For three beyts the open line of each couplet ends on what the speaker does. From beyt 5 onward this rhyme is gone, at the moment the first person is. The verb sākhtan, to make, does not go with it. It returns as the Arabic sāne’, “maker,” in beyt 6, and as sākht, “made,” in beyt 8, where its subject is no longer the speaker.
Words that come twice, turned around. Ghoghā, uproar, appears in beyt 2 as what stuns the speaker and in beyt 7 as what he is told to throw himself into. Khāmush, silent, appears in beyt 5 as what he must make the storm and in beyt 7 as what he must not become. Āvā, voice, appears in beyt 4 as the sea’s and in beyt 6 as his own. In each case the second use reverses the first: what overwhelmed him becomes his element, the silence he imposes is forbidden to himself, and the voice he was told to take in is the voice he is told to give out.
A refrain that is the meter’s own foot, and lines of two lengths. The poem moves in the old four-syllable foot of Persian verse, one short syllable and three long. The refrain ta-man-nā rā is exactly one such foot. So are ta-qal-lā rā, ta-qā-zā rā, So-ley-mān rā, na-zar bā-zam and kha-bar sā-zam. The longing is the unit the poem is measured in. And the lines are not of one length, as the classical ghazal requires. By my scansion seven hemistichs run to three feet and nine run to four. The poem opens in the shorter line, lengthens whenever the refrain is doubled, holds the longer line through beyts 4, 5 and 7, where the sea is entered and fought, and returns to the shorter line for both hemistichs of beyt 8, where it is calmed. The lines swell and subside with the water.
III. Beyt-by-Beyt Reading
Beyt 1: The Throne and the Arrogance
چو دادی بر منش تخت سلیمان را
ندانستم که من مجنون تمنا را تمنا را
Cho dādi bar manash takht-e soleymān rā
Nadānestam ke man majnun tamannā rā tamannā rā
When you gave it to me, the throne of Solomon,
I did not know that I, crazed, the longing, the longing.
The poem opens with an ultimate bestowal: the throne of Solomon, a symbol of unparalleled dominion over men, jinn, and nature. Yet, this high status is immediately undercut by nadānestam (I did not know). The speaker realizes that despite holding the throne, he was majnun (crazed/mad), possessed entirely by tamannā (desire).
Three things in these two lines govern the rest of the poem. The first is what a throne of Solomon is in the tradition the poem draws on. In the Qur’an, Solomon’s throne is a place of trial before it is a place of rule. “Certainly We tried Solomon, and We cast upon his throne a mere body; then he repented” (38:34, in A. J. Arberry’s translation). And when the throne of the Queen of Sheba is set before him in the time it takes a glance to return, Solomon’s own comment is this: “This is of my Lord’s bounty that He may try me, whether I am thankful or ungrateful” (27:40). A throne that arrives as a gift is, in that story, a question put to the one who receives it. Dr. Bemanian’s first beyt gives the speaker’s answer to that question, and the answer is that he failed it: I did not know.
The second is the word majnun. It means mad, and it is also a name, the name of the most famous lover in Persian and Arabic letters. The line seats Majnun on the throne of Solomon: the figure of love’s distraction in the place of sovereign wisdom. The poem will bring in a third name, Noah, in its sixth beyt, and the three stand for three ways of holding the world: given command of it, lost in desire for it, and building within it.
The third is the grammar of the refrain. Tamannā rā tamannā rā is an object stated twice, and the line gives it no verb. The first draft of this analysis supplied one in brackets, and a reader’s ear does the same, but the poem withholds it. “I did not know that I, mad, the longing, the longing” is a sentence that breaks off with its object in its hands. The longing has been named and marked as the thing to be acted upon, and nothing is yet done with it. It will be three more beyts before the same two words are given a verb.
One small word should be noted. Bar manash joins “to me” and a pronoun for the thing given, “it.” The English companion settles the sense: “You presented me with the throne.”
Beyt 2: The Inner Purge
درون جویم، برون را صیقلش سازم
درون آذین، شوم مدهوش غوغا را
Darun juyam, berun rā seyqalash sāzam
Darun āzin, shavam madhush ghoghā rā
I seek within, I polish the outside;
The inside adorned, I become intoxicated by the uproar.
The response to the ignorance of the first beyt is immediate action. The speaker seeks within (darun) and polishes (seyqal) the outside. Once the interior is adorned (āzin), the speaker becomes madhush (stunned/intoxicated). Notably, he is not intoxicated by wine or silence, but by the ghoghā (the tumult/uproar) of the world, now perceived with clarity.
The division of labor in the first line is unusual. The classical image of polishing belongs to the heart: the seeker burnishes the mirror within until it can take a reflection. Here the inside is sought and it is the outside that is polished. Seyqal is the burnishing of metal, of a blade or a mirror, and the speaker applies it to berun, the outward, the surface he presents. The inward work is a search and the outward work is a finish. The second line then reports the state of each. The inside is āzin, a word for festive decoration, the dressing of a street or a hall for a celebration. And the result of an interior made festive is not peace. It is ghoghā, uproar, and the speaker is dazed by it. This poem’s purification does not quiet anything. It lets the noise in.
Beyt 3: Guarding the Core
به این گردون و هر سویش نظر بازم
کنم محفوظ پردازم درون خفته رسوا را
Be in gardun o har suyash nazar bāzam
Konam mahfuz pardāzam darun-e khofte-ye rosvā rā
To this firmament and its every direction I cast my gaze;
I keep safe, I attend to the sleeping, disgraced inner [self].
The gaze expands to the gardun (firmament/revolving cosmos). Despite looking outward at the universe, the speaker’s primary action is protective: keeping safe (mahfuz) the khofte-ye rosvā (the sleeping, disgraced inner self) that is slowly being restored.
Nazar bāzam carries more than “I cast my gaze.” Nazar bākhtan is to play one’s glance as a stake is played, and a nazar-bāz is the classical lover whose art is looking. The words can be heard as “I stake my gaze” and as “I am one who plays the game of glances.” What the gaze is played upon here is not a face. It is the turning sky and “its every side.” The art of the love lyric is pointed at the whole revolving world.
The second line says what the looking is for, and it is the poem’s most unsparing description of the self. The inside that was sought and adorned in beyt 2 is now khofte, asleep, and rosvā, disgraced, exposed to shame. The speaker does two things for it. He keeps it safe, and he attends to it; pardāzam is the verb of the craftsman who finishes and burnishes a piece, so the polishing of beyt 2 has moved inward. What is guarded in this line is not a treasure. It is a sleeper in disgrace, and the guarding is done so that the work on it can go on.
Beyt 4: The Call of the Sea
نظر بازم نظر بازم تمنا را خبر سازم
که دریابش فراگیرش تب آوای دریا را
Nazar bāzam nazar bāzam tamannā rā khabar sāzam
Ke daryābash farāgirash tab-e āvā-ye daryā rā
I cast my gaze, I cast my gaze, I inform the longing;
That discover it, embrace it, the fever of the sea’s voice.
The repetition of nazar bāzam (I cast my gaze) creates an urgent rhythm. The speaker informs his own desire (tamannā) of a new mission: to discover and embrace the tab (fever) of the sea’s voice. Observation is no longer enough; immersion is required.
This is the hinge of the poem, and it is built to be heard as one. The first hemistich is four equal feet, each a complete phrase: nazar bāzam | nazar bāzam | tamannā rā | khabar sāzam. It is the only line in which the refrain’s two words receive a verb in the first person. In beyt 1 the longing was an object with nothing done to it. Here something is done: it is informed. Khabar sākhtan is to give someone news. The mad longing of the first beyt, which did not know, is now told.
The second hemistich is what it is told, and with it the poem changes person for good. Daryābash, farāgirash: grasp it, take it in entire. These are the first commands in the poem, and they are addressed to the longing. Their object arrives at the end of the line, and it is the first water in the poem: tab-e āvā-ye daryā, the fever of the sea’s voice. The sea comes in as a sound and a temperature before it is anything to be seen or crossed. And it comes in already folded into the verb that commands it, daryāb beside daryā, so that to grasp, in this line, is to take in the sea.
Beyt 5: The Stature of the Cosmos
به امواجش نما قامت یکی افلاک والاتر
تو کن خاموش طوفانش تمنا را تمنا را
Be amvājash namā qāmat yeki aflāk vālātar
To kon khāmush tufānash tamannā rā tamannā rā
Show your stature to its waves, one heaven higher;
You silence its storm, the longing, the longing.
The poem shifts into the imperative. The speaker commands the soul to show its qāmat (stature) to the ocean waves, declaring it to be yeki aflāk vālātar (one heaven higher). It is a moment of supreme spiritual defiance. By standing taller than the cosmos, the soul has the power to silence (khāmush) the storm.
The commands continue from the line before, and so does their addressee. The speaker told his longing to grasp the sea’s voice; now the one addressed is told to stand up to the sea’s waves. It is the first line of the second half and one of the two lines in the poem with no rā in it. Nothing here is an object. A stature is shown, and its measure is the heavens.
The second hemistich contains the poem’s first to, “you,” placed at the head of the line for emphasis: you silence its storm. Then the refrain returns, and again it has no verb of its own. It can be heard as the thing the calmed storm leaves standing, and it can be heard as a call to the one addressed: “the longing, the longing.” The storm is to be silenced. The longing is repeated.
Beyt 6: The Architect of Salvation
به تاب دل تو آوا کن تمنایش تقاضا را
که گردی صانعی چون نوح دریا را
Be tāb-e del to āvā kon tamannāyash taqāzā rā
Ke gardi sāne’i chon nuh daryā rā
By the burning of the heart, voice its longing, the request;
That you may become a maker like Noah [for] the sea.
The internal heat (tāb-e del) is used to voice the ultimate plea. The goal of this plea is not to be rescued, but to become a sāne’ (a maker/artisan) like Noah. Noah did not stop the flood; he built the architecture to survive it. The seeker must engineer their own spiritual survival.
The word sāne’ is chosen with precision. It is the Arabic for a maker, a craftsman, and it is the word the Qur’an itself attaches to Noah. The command he is given there is a command to make: “Make thou the Ark under Our eyes, and as We reveal” (11:37). The Arabic verb is isna’, from the same root as sāne’. The next verse shows him at it before any rain has fallen: “So he was making the Ark; and whenever a council of his people passed by him they scoffed at him” (11:38). Noah is the prophet whose obedience took the form of a craft, carried out on dry ground and under mockery. That is the figure the seeker is told to become.
Two more details. Tāb is heat and glow, and it is also endurance and the twist of a rope; “by the tāb of the heart” is by its fever and by what it can bear, and it answers the tab, the fever, of the sea’s voice two beyts earlier. And the longing has changed its name. It is asked to voice a taqāzā, a demand or a claim. Tamannā is a wish; taqāzā is a wish that has been addressed to someone. The line that names Noah is also one of the shorter lines of the poem, three feet where its neighbors have four, set among the long lines of the storm like a hull among waves.
Beyt 7: The Rejection of Silence
به دریا زن به غوغا زن تمنا را تمنا را
مشو خاموش این دریا تقلا را تقلا را
Be daryā zan be ghoghā zan tamannā rā tamannā rā
Masho khāmush in daryā taqallā rā taqallā rā
Strike the sea, strike the uproar, the longing, the longing;
Do not become silent [in] this sea, the struggle, the struggle.
The commands reach their climax. Be daryā zan translates literally to “strike the sea” or “plunge into the sea.” The speaker forbids passivity: masho khāmush (do not be silent). The defining word of the poem appears here: taqallā (struggle/exertion). The sea is meant to be fought, not floated upon.
A Persian idiom stands behind the first line. Del be daryā zadan, “to cast one’s heart upon the sea,” means to take the plunge, to commit oneself past the point of return. Dr. Bemanian keeps the idiom’s verb and its sea and puts the refrain where the heart would be: be daryā zan … tamannā rā, cast it upon the sea, the longing. After six beyts the refrain has its verb. The object that hung unfinished in the first beyt, that was informed in the fourth and repeated in the fifth, is now thrown. And it is thrown twice, into the sea and into the ghoghā, the uproar that stunned the speaker in beyt 2.
The second line does something the ear notices before the mind. The refrain’s place is filled by a new word. Where the poem has said tamannā rā tamannā rā three times, it now says taqallā rā taqallā rā. The two words have one shape, the same opening syllable, the same doubled middle consonant, the same long close, and they fill the same foot. In the slot where the longing stood, the striving now stands. Between them, in beyt 6, came taqāzā, the demand, a third word of nearly the same sound. Wish, demand, exertion: the poem’s argument is carried by three words that the ear can barely tell apart, as if each were the last one, pressed harder.
Beyt 8: The Tamed Ocean
بدان، منزل تو را افاق اختر ساخت
تو دریابش، کند رامت چو دریا را
Bedān, manzel to rā āfāq-e akhtar sākht
To daryābash, konad rāmat cho daryā rā
Know this, the star’s horizon made a dwelling for you;
You discover it, it tames you like the sea.
The final beyt brings the resolution. The āfāq-e akhtar (horizon of stars) is the soul’s true dwelling (manzel). When the seeker discovers this, the ultimate paradox is achieved: in the act of realizing one’s cosmic stature, the soul is tamed (rāmat), and simultaneously, the tumultuous sea is tamed.
Every element of the first beyt is answered here. Bedān, “know,” answers nadānestam, “I did not know.” Daryābash, “receive it,” answers dādi, “you gave.” And the throne is answered by a manzel. The word has three senses, and the line uses all of them. It is a dwelling, a home. It is a stage on a journey, the term the Sufi manuals use for the stations of the path. And it is a mansion of the sky, one of the stations through which the moon and stars are said to pass. With akhtar, star, beside it, the third sense is awake: the horizons of the star have made your station.
Two turns of grammar complete the poem. The verb is sākht, “made,” the same verb that ended two lines of the first half as sāzam, “I make.” There the maker was the speaker. Here the maker is the star’s horizon, and the one for whom it made is marked with rā: to rā. The dwelling was made already. It is not the result of the striving. The striving is what brings the seeker to the point where he can be told of it. And the last verb, konad rāmat, has “you” as its object: it “makes you tame, as it does the sea.” The one commanded to silence the storm is himself made gentle, by the same act and in the same phrase as the water. Both lines of this beyt are short lines. The sea of the poem’s meter is calm as well.
IV. “The Throne” — The English Companion Poem, Complete
The English gives one paragraph to each Persian hemistich, sixteen in all, and it keeps rules of its own. In 570 words the pronoun “I” does not occur. The first word of the poem is “You” and the last is “you,” and both name the Giver. Between them the speaker appears as an owner and an object in the first six paragraphs (“me” twice, “my” five times) and then disappears. From the seventh paragraph to the fifteenth there is no “my” and no “me.” The self in those nine paragraphs is the one spoken to: “your heart,” “your stature,” “your spirit,” thirteen uses of “your” in all, twelve of them there. In the last clause of the last paragraph the first person returns, once: “my dream of reaching you.” The word “desire” appears nine times, where the Persian has tamannā eight times: in every line where the Persian has it, and once more in beyt 2. The affirmation “Yes” is spoken three times, all in beyts 5 and 6. “Do not” is spoken twice, both in beyt 7. There is one exclamation mark in the poem, and it belongs to the sea.
Beyt 1
چو دادی بر منش تخت سلیمان را
You presented me with the throne of Solomon, to be bestowed, cherished, treasured, and savored.
ندانستم که من مجنون تمنا را تمنا را
My arrogance, conceit, and narcissism. Yet, the fervor, passion, and vehemence of my desire commences to nurture and cultivate. The desire’s yearn and summon continues to exalt and exhilarate, although not overwhelming enough to grasp, clench, and capture the moment, the instance, the occasion.
Interpretation: The English companion bluntly translates the ignorance of the Persian into “arrogance, conceit, and narcissism.” The majnun (madness) is reinterpreted not as a flaw, but as a necessary “fervor, passion, and vehemence” that begins to nurture the soul. The realization is that the throne was given before the soul was ready to “grasp, clench, and capture the moment.”
The first paragraph says what a gift asks of the one who gets it, in four participles: “to be bestowed, cherished, treasured, and savored.” All four are things done with a gift once one has it. None of them is understanding it. The second paragraph then opens with a sentence that has no verb: “My arrogance, conceit, and narcissism.” The Persian says “I did not know.” The English says neither “I” nor “know.” It sets down three names for one fault and puts a full stop after them, a confession with nothing in the sentence to soften or explain it. This is also the nearest the English comes to the Persian refrain’s grammar, an object named and left standing.
What follows the “Yet” is the English poem’s first argument. The desire that was madness in the Persian is here a gardener: it “commences to nurture and cultivate.” But it is “not overwhelming enough to grasp, clench, and capture the moment, the instance, the occasion.” Two words enter here that the English will carry to its end, “grasp” and “the moment.” They are the English for the Persian’s key verb before the Persian has used it. Daryāftan is to grasp, and its commonest use in everyday speech is with forsat, the opportunity: to seize the moment.
Beyt 2
درون جویم، برون را صیقلش سازم
And now, the thirst is crushing, the desire is devastating, and the thrust to search the soul, harvest the yield, acquiescence, capitulations, combined with the purge, eradication, and expulsion of insights and convictions echoing contradictions, is thriving.
درون آذین، شوم مدهوش غوغا را
The gradual cleansing of the soul, refinement of deliberations and conducts, the foresightedness of forthcoming rewards, inducements, and incitements are persuasive and persistent. The emerging sensations and commotions, numbing, dazing, are stunning my vibrant mind.
Interpretation: The Persian act of “polishing the outside” is brutally and beautifully decoded in English as the “purge, eradication, and expulsion of insights and convictions echoing contradictions.” It is a psychological cleansing. The resulting intoxication (madhush) is explained as “emerging sensations and commotions, numbing, dazing,” which stun the “vibrant mind.”
The first paragraph is one sentence of three clauses, and each clause is a force with a participle: the thirst “is crushing,” the desire “is devastating,” the thrust “is thriving.” Two of the three are destructive and the third is growth, in that order. What the search of the soul brings in is called a harvest, and its yield is named: “acquiescence, capitulations.” The first fruit of looking inward is giving in. And what is thrown out is carefully specified. It is not sins or appetites. It is “insights and convictions,” the things a person has concluded and holds to be true, and only those among them “echoing contradictions.” The standard is consistency.
The second paragraph adds an admission the Persian does not make. Among the things that keep the cleansing going is “the foresightedness of forthcoming rewards, inducements, and incitements.” The purification has an eye on what it will gain. Dr. Bemanian does not present a seeker already free of motive. The word “inducements” will return in beyt 6, where the seeker is told to “invigorate” them.
Beyt 3
به این گردون و هر سویش نظر بازم
Being immersed by the revolving and twirling trends of livelihood, the aspirations, the essence, comfort, and gratitude further incites me to explore, seek, and pursue your dream. Adhering to substance, content, and fulfillment by knowing wholeheartedly any corner, any object, and any crux demands to be glazed at, examined, and contemplated.
کنم محفوظ پردازم درون خفته رسوا را
To remain a guardian of my character, rectitude, and disposition. While continue to evolve and restore the slumbered, mortified, and degraded segments within my core, all endured by succumbed spirit and essence.
Interpretation: The firmament (gardun) is translated as the “revolving and twirling trends of livelihood.” The English reveals that observing the world is not a passive act; it demands that every crux be “glazed at, examined, and contemplated.” The protection of the disgraced inner self is expanded into remaining a “guardian of my character, rectitude, and disposition,” actively restoring the “slumbered, mortified, and degraded segments.”
Two phrases in the first paragraph carry more than they seem to. One is “gratitude.” In the Qur’anic story of the throne, gratitude is the whole of the test: “whether I am thankful or ungrateful.” The English names it here, in the beyt after the confession and the purge, as one of the things that now “incites” the speaker onward. The other is “your dream.” This is the only “your” in the English that belongs to the Giver, and what the speaker is moved to pursue is not his own dream. It is the dream of the one who gave the throne. The last words of the poem will return to this phrase and change one word of it.
The second paragraph has no finite verb governing it. “To remain a guardian” is a purpose with no sentence around it, and “While continue to evolve and restore” has no subject. The first person, which the English never states as “I,” is here missing even from the grammar. The work on the self is described with the self left out.
Beyt 4
نظر بازم نظر بازم تمنا را خبر سازم
Attentive, observant, perceptive, and insightful, with the substance of life and livelihood junctures, aspects, and views all aimed towards and consumed by the desire. The appeal, the entreat, the imploration, and the supplication streaming forward.
که دریابش فراگیرش تب آوای دریا را
Then the intuition, be vigilant to grasp the instance, to explore the culmination. Seize the fervor pondering and reflecting the thoughts to contemplate the tunes and melodies instantiated by the oceans, the seas, their vastness, and their enormous reservoirs. The whispers of the sea! Encapsulate them within your heart, shatter your mere observing mold, maturity, movement, undertake the excursion.
Interpretation: The transition from observation to action is marked in English by the command to “shatter your mere observing mold.” The fever of the sea’s voice becomes “the tunes and melodies instantiated by the oceans.” The seeker is commanded to “undertake the excursion,” bridging the gap between passive vigilance and total immersion.
The first paragraph answers the Persian’s doubled nazar bāzam with four adjectives of attention and no verb, and its doubled group of four is matched at the paragraph’s end by four nouns of asking: “The appeal, the entreat, the imploration, and the supplication streaming forward.” What the Persian calls informing the longing, the English hears as petitions beginning to flow, a stream before the sea.
The second paragraph is the longest in the poem, fifty-nine words, and it is where the English turns. It names the one commanded, which the Persian leaves to its grammar: “Then the intuition, be vigilant.” It is the intuition that is told to “grasp the instance,” the same “grasp” and the same “instance” that the desire of beyt 1 was not yet strong enough for. It contains the poem’s one exclamation, “The whispers of the sea!”, and the Persian’s āvā, a voice that can be a cry or a song, has become a whisper. It contains the word “instantiated,” which belongs to the working vocabulary of a systems architect, where a general design is instantiated in a particular case; the oceans instantiate their melodies as a system instantiates its design. And it contains the first “your” addressed to the self: “Encapsulate them within your heart, shatter your mere observing mold.” From this point the speaker does not say “my” again until the poem’s last clause.
Beyt 5
به امواجش نما قامت یکی افلاک والاتر
Stand up towards the ocean waves, surges, and the surfs. Enlighten them of your stature and eminence, portray and render your bequeathed aptitude capable of touching the highest stars within the sky. Yes, to stand atop of cosmos.
تو کن خاموش طوفانش تمنا را تمنا را
Conquer and calm their storms, blizzards, outpours, and rages. Yes, the desire, the desire, the devotions, the astute aspirations. Reflect, replicate, and reveal them to your heart, goad it to penetrate and infuse with the tenets of your spirit.
Interpretation: The Persian command to show one’s stature is rendered with absolute cosmic authority: “Enlighten them of your stature… capable of touching the highest stars… Yes, to stand atop of cosmos.” The English explicitly frames the silencing of the storm as an act of conquering. The external storms are inextricably linked to internal “devotions” and “astute aspirations.”
At the height of its defiance the English remembers the first line. The aptitude that is to be shown to the waves is a “bequeathed aptitude.” The stature is the seeker’s, and it was given. The poem’s first sentence said “bestowed”; this one says “bequeathed.” Even in the imperative the English does not let the throne be forgotten.
The second paragraph gives the storm two verbs where the Persian has one: “Conquer and calm.” The pairing matters, because the last beyt will keep only the second. Then the refrain appears in English exactly as it stands in the Persian, doubled and without a verb: “Yes, the desire, the desire.” It is one of three sentences in beyts 5 and 6 that begin with “Yes,” and each affirms a thing the earlier beyts had treated with suspicion: standing “atop of cosmos,” which could be the narcissism of beyt 1 over again; “the desire, the desire,” which was the madness; and in beyt 6, once more, “Yes, the desire.” The English says yes to the very things it began by confessing.
Beyt 6
به تاب دل تو آوا کن تمنایش تقاضا را
Press your heart, arouse your temptations, invigorate your inducements. Prepare to reach the pinnacle of murmuring, susurrating, and whispering the appeal, the plead. Yes, the desire.
که گردی صانعی چون نوح دریا را
Then the moment to transmute and alter, the instance to apprehend Noah’s dexterity and acuity to conquer the seas. The oceans, brinies, heaps, hills, and the mountains.
Interpretation: The heat of the heart (tāb-e del) becomes a physical command: “Press your heart.” The archetype of Noah is decoded profoundly. Noah is not merely a survivor; he represents “dexterity and acuity to conquer the seas.” The English text expands the sea into “oceans, brinies, heaps, hills, and the mountains,” emphasizing the totality of the chaos that must be engineered against.
The first paragraph contains the boldest instruction in the poem. Temptations are to be aroused and inducements invigorated. A manual of devotion would say the opposite. Dr. Bemanian treats the seeker’s wants as a store of energy to be drawn on, the same “inducements” that kept the cleansing going in beyt 2. And the height to which they are to carry him is described in the quietest words in the poem: “the pinnacle of murmuring, susurrating, and whispering.” The Persian says āvā kon, give voice. The English makes the summit of that voice a whisper, and so answers “the whispers of the sea” of beyt 4 in the sea’s own register. The sea whispered; at his highest pitch, the seeker whispers back.
The second paragraph returns to “the moment” and “the instance” for the third time, and now they have come: “Then the moment to transmute and alter, the instance to apprehend.” Its list of what Noah’s craft must master rises as it goes, from water to land: “The oceans, brinies, heaps, hills, and the mountains.” The Qur’an’s flood is described in just this way. The Ark “ran with them amid waves like mountains,” and Noah’s son, refusing to board, says, “I will take refuge in a mountain, that shall defend me from the water” (11:42-43). In the English companion the mountains are on the list of things conquered. There is nowhere to stand that the maker’s craft does not have to reach.
Beyt 7
به دریا زن به غوغا زن تمنا را تمنا را
Take the voyage, start the journey, get aboard the ship, undertake the urge, envisage the vitality, and promote your passion. Disseminate your sturdiness and solidity, the desire, the desire.
مشو خاموش این دریا تقلا را تقلا را
Do not float, drift, and soar by the flow impetuses, drives, and spurs. Do not succumb to the sea and slide into a silent postulate. Recover and adherently be adamant to strive, to strive.
Interpretation: The Persian taqallā (struggle) receives its most vital English expansion here. The speaker is commanded: “Do not float, drift, and soar… Do not succumb to the sea and slide into a silent postulate.” This is a definitive rejection of spiritual passivity. The path to the divine is not a quiet surrender to the current, but an adamant striving, a dissemination of “sturdiness and solidity.”
The first paragraph is the most crowded sentence in the poem, six commands in a row, and one of them supplies what the Persian leaves out. The Persian has a sea and a maker and never mentions a vessel. The English says “get aboard the ship.” Both refrains are kept in their doubled form, “the desire, the desire” and “to strive, to strive.”
The three forbidden verbs are chosen to cover every way of being carried. To float is to be held up by the water. To drift is to be moved by its current. To soar is to be borne by the air. The third is the one a reader does not expect in a warning, since soaring is ordinarily praise, and it is the one that looks back to the first line. Solomon’s throne, in the tradition, travelled on the wind: “So We subjected to him the wind, that ran at his commandment, softly, wherever he might light on” (Qur’an 38:36). To soar is to be carried as Solomon was. The English forbids the throne’s own way of moving. And the silence the seeker must not fall into is given a name from the sciences: “a silent postulate.” A postulate is a proposition assumed without proof. To go quiet in the sea, the English says, is to slide into an assumption one has not earned.
Beyt 8
بدان، منزل تو را افاق اختر ساخت
Be aware, astute, and incisive. You are the inhabitant, dweller, and citizen of the tallest horizons, to be nourished, cultured, and captivated by your perceptions, insights, and awareness.
تو دریابش، کند رامت چو دریا را
Relinquish, confiscate, and adorn the moment, when the ocean is turned into calmness and tranquility. The serenity to reflect, admonish farcical deems, and replenish the itinerary of attempts and trials. It is the passageway of delight, my dream of reaching you.
Interpretation: The English concludes by affirming the soul’s true citizenship: “inhabitant, dweller, and citizen of the tallest horizons.” The taming of the sea results in “calmness and tranquility.” Crucially, this serenity is not an end in itself; it is the space needed to “replenish the itinerary of attempts and trials.” The cycle of struggle yields to the “passageway of delight” and the ultimate dream of reaching the Beloved.
The first paragraph returns to the grammar of the poem’s first sentence. There the throne was “to be bestowed, cherished, treasured, and savored.” Here the one addressed is “to be nourished, cultured, and captivated.” The same construction, “to be” and a run of passive participles, has moved from the gift to the one who was given it. At the start the throne was the thing to be cherished. At the end the citizen is the one to be fed. And what feeds him is his own: “your perceptions, insights, and awareness,” the faculties that the purge of beyt 2 made trustworthy.
The second paragraph opens with the strangest triad in the poem: “Relinquish, confiscate, and adorn the moment.” To relinquish is to let go. To confiscate is to seize by right. To adorn is the āzin of beyt 2, the festive dressing of the interior. The three verbs do not agree with one another, and they are not meant to. They are the English for a Persian line that says two things at once, daryābash, seize it, and konad rāmat, it will make you tame. The moment that the desire of beyt 1 could not capture is at last to be taken, and it is taken by one who has let go.
The sea’s calm is given in the passive: “the ocean is turned into calmness and tranquility.” Three beyts earlier the command was “Conquer and calm.” No conqueror is named here. And then the first person comes back. “It is the passageway of delight, my dream of reaching you.” In beyt 3 the speaker was incited “to explore, seek, and pursue your dream.” Now the dream is “my dream,” and its content is “you.” The dream of the Giver and the dream of the receiver have become one, and the poem that began with the word “You” doing the giving ends with the word “you” as what is reached.
V. Conceptual Innovations
The Internalization of Myth. Solomon and Noah are standard figures in Persian literature. Typically, Solomon represents divine power and Noah represents divine rescue. Dr. Bemanian innovates by turning them into stages of the human psychological journey. Solomon is the unearned privilege that exposes our narcissism. Noah is the architectural “dexterity and acuity” we must develop to save ourselves. The pairing is exact in a way the tradition makes available and no earlier poem, to my knowledge, has used. Solomon’s element is the wind, which carried his throne. Noah’s is the water, which he met with something he had built. The poem moves its seeker from the first element to the second, from being carried to making, and the English seals the move by forbidding him to “soar.”
The Rejection of “Floating”. Much of mystical literature praises the annihilation of the self (fana), often using the metaphor of a drop dissolving into the ocean. The Throne vehemently opposes this. “Do not float, drift, and soar… Do not succumb to the sea,” the English commands. True enlightenment requires taqallā (struggle) and standing “one heaven higher” than the waves. What the poem refuses, it should be said, is drift, and it does not refuse union. Its last line has the seeker made gentle and its last English words are “reaching you.” The claim is that the Beloved is reached by one who has striven and been calmed, and is not reached by one who was merely carried.
A gift that has to be received. The poem separates two acts that ordinary speech runs together. To be given a thing is one event; to receive it is another, and the second can come long after the first, or never. Dr. Bemanian builds the whole poem between them, dādi in the first line and daryāb in the last, and he makes the labor of the middle six beyts the means by which what was given at the outset is finally taken in. Nothing new is awarded at the end. The dwelling of the last beyt “was made” already. The seeker’s striving does not earn the gift. It makes him able to have it.
Desire as the one commanded. Classical ethics tends to offer two treatments of desire: subdue it, or be ruled by it. This poem does neither. From the middle of beyt 4 the speaker addresses his longing directly, and what he does to it is a sequence: he informs it, commands it to grasp, tells it to give voice, casts it upon the sea, and silences its storm while forbidding its silence. The longing that was madness in the first beyt is never put out. It is given news and given work. And its name changes as the work is done, from tamannā, a wish, to taqāzā, a demand, to taqallā, exertion, three words of one sound.
The conqueror in the objective case. A poem whose grammar turns everything into an object ends by turning the same grammar on its subject. The last beyt marks “you” with rā and makes “you” the object of the final verb: you are the one for whom a dwelling was made, and you are the one made gentle. The sky, meanwhile, is the one thing the poem’s rā never touches. Dr. Bemanian’s mastery has a ceiling written into its syntax.
VI. Persian/English Comparison and Stand-Evaluation
The Persian text is the battle plan: compact, rhythmic, and propelled forward by the hammering repetition of the rā object marker. It uses classical imagery (Solomon, Majnun, Noah, the firmament) to create a sense of timeless authority.
The English text is the battlefield itself. It is expansive, psychological, and brutally specific. Where the Persian uses the elegant metaphor of “polishing,” the English demands the “purge, eradication, and expulsion of insights and convictions echoing contradictions.”
The English companion serves as a necessary modern exegesis. Without it, a reader might mistakenly read The Throne as a traditional, passive ghazal. The English text ensures the poem is understood as a manifesto of active, strenuous, intellectual, and spiritual exertion.
Set side by side, line for line, the two texts differ in ways that are plainly authored, and each difference shows what the poet wanted the second language to do.
What the first fault is. The Persian says nadānestam, “I did not know,” and calls the speaker mad. Ignorance and madness are conditions; a person is not exactly to blame for them. The English says “arrogance, conceit, and narcissism,” which are faults of character. The English is the harsher judge. It turns a failure of knowledge into a failure of the self, and this is a pattern in Dr. Bemanian’s companions: the second language audits the first.
Where the Giver is. In the Persian, the Giver is present in one verb ending, the -i of dādi, “you gave,” and nowhere else. Every to in the poem’s second half is the self being commanded. In the English the Giver is the first word and the last, and returns once between, in “your dream.” The Persian poem is given a throne and left to itself. The English keeps the one who gave it in view.
Who is commanded. The Persian says in so many words that the speaker informs his longing, and the commands follow. The English says “Then the intuition, be vigilant.” The faculty addressed has changed, from the one that wants to the one that perceives. On the Persian’s account, desire is taught to act. On the English’s, insight is told to wake.
How loud it is. The Persian is a noisy poem: ghoghā twice, āvā twice, tufān, and the prohibition of silence. The English renders the two voices as whispers, “the whispers of the sea” and “murmuring, susurrating, and whispering,” and the uproar of beyt 2 as “sensations and commotions.” At the points of sound the English is the quieter text. It spends its force elsewhere, on the confession and on the list of commands.
What the English adds. A ship, which the Persian never mentions; the mountains of the flood; “gratitude”; “your dream”; and the thread of “the moment,” which is missed in beyt 1, to be grasped in beyt 4, arrives in beyt 6, and is relinquished, confiscated and adorned in beyt 8.
How it ends. The Persian’s last verb has the seeker for its object, and its last words are daryā rā, “the sea.” It ends with the self subdued and the water still in view. The English ends with the first person restored after nine paragraphs of absence, and turned toward the Giver: “my dream of reaching you.” The Persian closes on what was done to him. The English closes on what he now wants.
The evaluation these differences support is this. The Persian is the more severe poem and the more impersonal one. After its first beyt there is no Giver in it and after its fourth there is no “I”; it is a set of orders issued by a man to his own longing, and its reward is to be made calm. The English is the more exposed poem and the more relational one. It confesses more, it says “Yes” to what it confessed, and it never loses the “You” of its first word. Neither is a version of the other. The Persian records how a gift is taken in by work. The English records to whom the work was addressed.
VII. Literary and Aesthetic Merits
The Escalation of Action. Aesthetically, the poem brilliantly accelerates. It begins in the past tense with an admission of ignorance. It moves into the present with observation (“I cast my gaze”). Then, it shatters the observing mold entirely, launching into a volley of imperatives: stand up, silence, voice, strike, strive. The poem enacts the very taqallā it preaches.
The Architecture of Triads. The English text relies heavily on triplets: “arrogance, conceit, and narcissism,” “inhabitant, dweller, and citizen,” “Relinquish, confiscate, and adorn.” This rhetorical device creates an overlapping, surging rhythm that mimics the very ocean waves the speaker is attempting to conquer.
A hinge that can be heard. The first hemistich of beyt 4 is the most regular line in the poem, four feet and four phrases that coincide exactly, with a rhyme at the end of the first, second and fourth. It is the last line the speaker utters in his own person, and it is made to sound like a mechanism closing. The line that follows it is the first command.
Lines that swell and subside. The classical ghazal keeps one length of line from beginning to end. Dr. Bemanian lets his line run to three feet or to four, and the choice follows the water. The long lines gather where the sea is entered and fought. The short ones stand at the poem’s two shores: the giving of the throne at the start, the calm at the end. The Noah line is a short line among long ones.
Reversals in a single word. Three words, ghoghā, khāmush and āvā, occur exactly twice, once in each half of the poem, and each time the second use undoes the first. The economy is considerable. The poem does not need new vocabulary to show that the seeker has changed. It reuses the old and lets the reader hear the difference.
A title the poem walks away from. The throne occupies one line. The dwelling occupies the last beyt. Between a seat one is placed on and a home one comes to know, the poem draws the whole difference between being honored and being at home, and it does so without ever returning to the word of its title.
VIII. Literary Comparison: The King Who Goes to Sea
Two poems, neither used elsewhere in this series, stand on either side of Takht-e Soleymān and show what is its own. Each is about a king and a throne, and each sends its king somewhere.
The first is the story of Jamshid in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, completed about the year 1010. Jamshid is the great king of the Persian tradition, the one with whom Solomon was long ago allowed to share his monuments: the ruins of Persepolis are Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid, and more than one ancient platform in Iran bears the name Takht-e Soleymān. Ferdowsi tells how Jamshid made his throne and how he rode it:
به فرّ کیانی یکی تخت ساخت
چه مایه بدو گوهر اندر نشاخت
که چون خواستی دیو برداشتی
ز هامون به گردون برافراشتی
“By the royal glory he made a throne, and what a wealth of jewels he set in it; and when he wished, the demon would lift it and raise it from the plain to the turning sky.” And then how he fell:
منی کرد آن شاه یزدان شناس
ز یزدان بپیچید و شد ناسپاس
“That king who had known God grew full of himself; he turned away from God and became ungrateful.” The Persian for “grew full of himself” is mani kard, literally “he did I-ness.” Jamshid then calls his nobles and tells them what he now believes: ke joz khishtan rā nadānam jahān, “I know no one in the world but myself,” and honar dar jahān az man āmad padid, “skill came into the world from me.” At those words, Ferdowsi says, the divine glory left him, and the world filled with talk.
The vocabulary of the two poems is shared to a degree that makes the comparison exact. Ferdowsi has a throne, takht; a verb of making, sākht; the turning sky, gardun; a king’s “I do not know,” nadānam; and the verdict nāsepās, ungrateful. Dr. Bemanian has takht, sākht, gardun, nadānestam, and in the English companion “gratitude.” And he reverses every one. Jamshid makes his throne; the speaker of Takht-e Soleymān is given his. Jamshid is lifted to the turning sky by a power not his own; the speaker looks at the turning sky, “and its every side,” and goes down to the sea. Jamshid’s “I do not know” is a boast: he knows nothing but himself. The speaker’s “I did not know” is a confession, and it is the first thing he says. Jamshid claims that making came into the world from him, and loses everything; the speaker is told to become a maker, and at the end is told that his dwelling was made by another. Above all, Jamshid’s mani, his I-ness, is seen by the narrator and never by Jamshid. In Dr. Bemanian’s English it is the speaker who names it, three times over, “arrogance, conceit, and narcissism,” in the second sentence of the poem. Ferdowsi wrote the tragedy of the king who did not see his own pride. Dr. Bemanian begins where that tragedy ends, with the pride seen, and asks what a man must do next.
The second poem is Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” written in 1833. It opens on a throne that has become unbearable:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
and its old king’s complaint is the complaint of a blade that has lost its polish:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
His answer is the sea, in an order to his crew that could translate the first words of Dr. Bemanian’s seventh beyt:
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset,
and the poem ends on the verb that is the English companion’s verb as well:
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
No poem in English stands closer. An idle king; the fear of going unburnished, where The Throne has its seyqal; “smite the sounding furrows,” where it has be daryā zan; and “to strive,” where it has “to strive, to strive.” Tennyson, like Dr. Bemanian, sends his king down from the seat to the water and makes striving the last word.
Three differences mark Dr. Bemanian’s ground. Ulysses goes to sea to get away. He leaves “the sceptre and the isle” to his son and speaks of his own people as “a savage race, / That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.” The speaker of The Throne goes to sea in order to come into what he was given. His voyage is the way to the meaning of the throne, not the way out of it. Second, Ulysses has nothing to confess. “I am become a name,” he says, and “I am a part of all that I have met”; the poem’s grandeur is the grandeur of a self that takes itself as the measure. The Throne names that stance in its second sentence and calls it narcissism. Its seeker’s stature is “bequeathed,” and it is shown to the waves only after the purge. Third, Ulysses’s sea is never calmed and his striving has no one at the end of it. “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: / It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.” His last word is a refusal, “not to yield.” Dr. Bemanian’s last Persian verb is the opposite: the seeker is made gentle, with the sea. And his last English word is “you.” For Tennyson the striving is its own justification, and it ends unbowed and alone. For Dr. Bemanian the striving is how a gift is received, and it ends in calm, and in someone reached.
The first draft of this analysis set the poem beside Hafez, and the comparison stands. In the Divan-e Hafez, the throne and ring of Solomon are frequent motifs, usually representing the fleeting nature of worldly power or the ultimate authority of Love over the wind and demons. Hafez often advises the reader not to mourn the loss of Solomon’s dominion, as all is transient. One couplet uses the very phrase of Dr. Bemanian’s title:
بادت به دست باشد اگر دل نهی به هیچ
در معرضی که تخت سلیمان رود به باد
“You will have wind in your hand if you set your heart on anything, in an arena where the throne of Solomon goes to the wind.” The line turns on one word. Bād is the wind that carried the throne and the wind to which all things are lost.
Dr. Bemanian takes a radically different approach. The throne of Solomon is not a symbol of transience to be mourned or dismissed; it is a starting point that exposes the seeker’s “narcissism.” Hafez’s throne goes to the wind, and the lesson is to hold nothing. Dr. Bemanian’s throne-holder goes to the sea, and the lesson is to learn to hold what he was handed. He does not let the gift blow away. He changes its element.
Furthermore, where classical Sufism often emphasizes surrender, Dr. Bemanian’s command to “apprehend Noah’s dexterity and acuity” echoes the existentialism of Western thinkers like Nietzsche (the call to stand “atop of cosmos”) or the active, builder-mentality of a systems architect. The soul is not meant to be a leaf on the wind of God; it is meant to be the shipwright. The likeness to Nietzsche holds for the height and stops there. The stature shown to the waves in The Throne is a “bequeathed aptitude,” the dwelling among the stars was made for the seeker and not by him, and the poem’s last act is to make him gentle. It is a shipwright’s poem, and the shipwright works to an order.
Read beside these, the poem’s own place is clear. It shares Ferdowsi’s throne and his turning sky, and begins with the confession his king never made. It shares Tennyson’s idle king and his blow upon the water, and ends in a calm his king never finds.
IX. Conclusion
Takht-e Soleymān and its English companion The Throne comprise a masterpiece of spiritual defiance. It is a poem that refuses the comfort of passive mysticism. By forcing the seeker to confront their own arrogance upon receiving the ultimate gift, purging contradictory convictions, and shattering the “mere observing mold,” the poem lays out a rigorous path to enlightenment. The command to struggle (taqallā) against the sea, while simultaneously recognizing one’s citizenship among the stars, creates a breathtaking dialectic. Dr. Bemanian proves that the highest form of devotion is not silent surrender, but the loud, striving, architectural mastery of one’s own soul.
The closer reading adds the means by which this is done, and one qualification. The means are small and exact. A two-letter particle, rā, is set eighteen times, withheld from the two lines that look at the sky, and attached at the end to “you.” A refrain of two words is left without a verb for six beyts and then given one, “cast it.” Three words of one sound, tamannā, taqāzā, taqallā, carry the longing from wish to demand to exertion. The verb for receiving holds the sea inside it and closes both halves of the poem. The lines lengthen for the storm and shorten for the calm. The qualification is that the mastery the poem teaches is not self-possession. The first beyt’s two verbs, “you gave” and “I did not know,” are answered in the last beyt by “know” and “receive.” The seeker ends as the one for whom a dwelling was made and as the one made gentle. The striving was real, and what it accomplished was to make him able to accept.
Dr. Bemanian wrote Takht-e Soleymān on June 27, 2017, at the end of a remarkable ten days. Niyāz (“Reflection”) is dated June 18, Naghme-ye Bolbol (“Canary Carol”) June 20, Zendeh Shab (“The Night”) June 22, and Ahd (“The Pledge”) June 25. The poems of those days hand words to one another. The Night spoke of the Beloved’s manzel and nazargāh, the dwelling and the place of the gaze; here the gaze is cast, nazar bāzam, three times, and the manzel is found to be the seeker’s own. The Pledge, two days earlier, ended on its only verb in the second person, āghāz koni, “you begin.” Takht-e Soleymān is the poem in which the second person is commanded for eight lines together. Whatever the poet intended, the beginning that one poem handed over is the work the next one sets out.
X. Biography of the Poet
Dr. Alireza Bemanian is a poet, physicist, systems architect, and author whose bilingual works bridge classical Persian mysticism with modern existential and scientific rigor. The themes of The Throne are a direct reflection of an architect’s mindset. When the poem commands the lover to apprehend “Noah’s dexterity and acuity,” it elevates engineering and structural planning to the level of spiritual necessity. His demand for the “expulsion of insights and convictions echoing contradictions” perfectly mirrors the physicist’s requirement for a coherent, unified system. Through The Throne, Dr. Bemanian crafts a worldview where faith and science converge not in passive observation, but in the strenuous, deliberate construction of a soul capable of conquering the flood. His craft in both languages shows the same habits. In Takht-e Soleymān the engineering is in the smallest parts: an object marker counted and placed, a refrain cut to the exact length of the meter’s foot, a line that is allowed to grow by one foot when the sea rises and to lose it when the sea is calm. In The Throne it is in what is withheld and what is kept: 570 words without an “I,” a first person that leaves the poem for nine paragraphs and returns in its last clause, and a single word, “You,” set at the beginning and the end. His English diction carries his professions with it, in melodies that are “instantiated” and in a silence that is called a “postulate.” The two texts are best read as he made them, side by side, as the design and the working model of one vessel.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
Artistic Appreciation
The Sea Inside the Verb in The Throne — Dr. Alireza Bemanian
The art of Takht-e Soleymān is an art of small parts carrying large loads. Dr. Bemanian builds an eight-beyt poem about sovereignty, purification, storm and calm, and he rests it on a particle, a refrain of two words, and one verb with a sea hidden in it.
The verb first. Persian says “grasp it” or “receive it” with daryāb, written دریاب. The sea is daryā, written دریا. The one word contains the other, and the poet places them side by side exactly twice, in the last line of the poem’s first half and in the last line of the whole. No sea has been mentioned before the first of these lines; it comes into the poem through the verb. By the end the reader has been taught, by nothing more than spelling, that to take in what one was given and to take in the sea are one act.
The particle is rā, which marks the object of a verb. It appears eighteen times in sixteen lines. Everything the poem names is put under it: the throne, the longing, the uproar, the sea, the struggle. Only two lines do without it, and they are the two that look at the sky. Then, in the final beyt, it is attached to the word “you.” The grammar that has been turning the world into material for the seeker turns at last upon the seeker, and what the poem has to say about mastery is said in that one placement.
The refrain is tamannā rā tamannā rā, “the longing, the longing.” It is cut to the measure of the poem’s meter: each ta-man-nā rā is one complete foot, so that the longing is the unit in which the lines are counted. For most of the poem it has no verb. It is an object waiting. In the seventh beyt it is given one, “cast it upon the sea,” and in the very next line its place is taken by a word of the same shape, taqallā rā taqallā rā, “the striving, the striving.” The ear hears one word become another.
The lines themselves move. A classical ghazal holds one length of line throughout. This poem lets its line run to three feet or to four, and the long lines gather where the sea is entered and fought, while both lines of the last beyt, where the water is calmed, are short. Three words appear exactly twice and are turned around the second time: the uproar that stuns the speaker becomes the uproar he is told to plunge into; the silence he is told to impose on the storm is the silence he is forbidden; the voice that was the sea’s becomes his own.
The English companion works by a different economy. In 570 words it never says “I.” Its first word is “You” and its last is “you.” The speaker is present as “my” and “me” for six paragraphs, vanishes for nine while he is being commanded, and returns in the closing clause, “my dream of reaching you.” Its sentences come in threes, some thirty times, “float, drift, and soar,” “inhabitant, dweller, and citizen,” a rhythm of wave on wave, and at the end one triad is made of verbs that pull apart: “Relinquish, confiscate, and adorn.” Three times, at the height of the storm, it says “Yes.”
And there is the title. A poem called The Throne names its throne in the first line and never again. What it arrives at, sixteen lines later, is a manzel, a dwelling. The whole poem lies between a seat a person is placed upon and a home a person comes to know, and the craft of it is that the reader crosses that distance by water, carried by a verb.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
Conversational Commentary
The Throne (Takht-e Soleymān) — Dr. Alireza Bemanian
If the formal analysis follows a two-letter particle through sixteen lines, and the philosophical analysis follows the difference between being given a thing and receiving it, a conversational reading of The Throne can start from an experience almost everyone has had: being handed something before you were ready for it.
It happens all the time and in every size. A promotion. An inheritance. A child. A talent you did nothing to deserve. The thing is yours, on paper, from the first day, and you know perfectly well you are not yet the person who can carry it. Dr. Bemanian’s poem opens on the largest version of this that the Persian tradition can supply, the throne of Solomon, and its speaker’s first reaction is the honest one. He did not know. The English puts it less kindly: “arrogance, conceit, and narcissism.” What makes the poem useful, and not only beautiful, is that it then tells you what to do next.
Here the poet’s own training shows. Dr. Bemanian is a physicist and a systems architect, and the first step he prescribes is the first step in repairing any system: find the assumptions that contradict one another and take them out. The English calls for “the purge, eradication, and expulsion of insights and convictions echoing contradictions.” Notice what is being removed. It is “insights and convictions,” his own conclusions, and only the ones that do not fit together. Anyone who has debugged a design knows that the fault is usually something you were sure of.
The same habit of mind chooses the poem’s hero. The seeker is told to become a maker like Noah, and the English admires “Noah’s dexterity and acuity.” In the old story Noah builds a ship on dry land, to a specification he is given, before a drop of rain has fallen, while the neighbors laugh. Every engineer recognizes that situation. The poem treats it as the model of a spiritual life: you do the building before the flood, and you do it properly.
The handling of desire has the same plain sense. The Persian word is tamannā, and it sounds eight times. The poem never says to kill it. “Arouse your temptations, invigorate your inducements,” the English says, which is the last advice one expects in a devotional poem and exactly what one would say about a source of power. What the poem insists on is that desire be given information and given work. In the Persian the wish becomes a demand and the demand becomes an effort, in three words that sound almost the same: tamannā, taqāzā, taqallā. Wanting, asking, working. A good deal of ordinary unhappiness comes from stopping at the first.
Two warnings in the poem are worth carrying around. One is “Do not float, drift, and soar.” It is easy to mistake being carried for making progress, and the poem counts even soaring as a way of being carried. The other is the phrase “a silent postulate.” A postulate is something assumed without proof. Going quiet, the poem says, can be a way of sliding into an assumption you never tested, and it can feel very much like peace.
And then the ending, which keeps the poem from being a lecture on effort. The sea is calmed, the seeker is made gentle with it, and the calm is put straight to use: “to reflect, admonish farcical deems, and replenish the itinerary of attempts and trials.” The rest is real, and it is also where the next list gets written. Dr. Bemanian wrote this poem two days after The Pledge, whose last words in Persian are “you begin.” The Throne reads like the instructions that follow.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
Reader Impression
The Throne (Takht-e Soleymān) — Dr. Alireza Bemanian
I expected a poem called The Throne to be about power, and for exactly one line it is. “You presented me with the throne of Solomon.” Then comes the second sentence, and it is three words and a full stop: “My arrogance, conceit, and narcissism.” I have read many poems that begin with a gift. I cannot think of another that hands its speaker everything in the first line and has him answer like that in the second.
The Persian has a sound I could not get out of my ear. Line after line ends on the same small word, rā, the particle that marks whatever is about to be acted upon. The throne takes it, the uproar takes it, the sea takes it. And twice in the first beyt the longing takes it, tamannā rā tamannā rā, “the longing, the longing,” with no verb to follow. He has named the thing that possesses him and cannot finish the sentence. It is the most accurate picture of wanting I know: an object, said twice, and nothing yet to do with it.
Then there is the moment the poem turns, and I felt it before I understood it. Halfway through, the speaker says he will give his own longing the news. In the next line the voice has changed. It is giving orders: grasp it, take it in. In the English the word “my” simply stops. For nine paragraphs he says only “your heart,” “your stature,” “your spirit,” speaking to himself as one speaks to someone one has become responsible for. The only exclamation mark in the whole poem falls just there, and it is given to the water: “The whispers of the sea!”
I kept expecting the commands to tell him to be still. They never do. “Arouse your temptations, invigorate your inducements.” “Do not float, drift, and soar.” Even soaring is on the list of things forbidden, which stopped me, until I remembered that Solomon’s throne was carried on the wind. He is being told not to travel the way his own gift travels. And the figure he is told to become is Noah, and what the poem admires in Noah is “dexterity and acuity.” He is praised as the one who built.
The ending undid my idea of what kind of poem this was. After all the conquering, the last instruction is “Relinquish, confiscate, and adorn the moment,” three verbs that cannot all be obeyed at once, and the ocean “is turned into calmness and tranquility” without anyone being said to have done it. The Persian is plainer still. It says: grasp this, and it will make you gentle, as it does the sea. The man who stood up to the waves is calmed along with them.
I went back to the beginning after that. The first word of the English is “You” and the last word is “you.” Nothing was taken from him between them, and nothing new was added. The throne he could not hold in the first line was never withdrawn. He had to go to sea to become someone who could accept it, and when he has, the poem lets him speak for himself again, once, in its final words: “my dream of reaching you.”
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.