Hafez and Norm-breaking in Form and Content of the Ghazal

Norm-breaking in the field of literature, like other areas of human knowledge, is the province of the talented. Norm-breakings Hafiz undertook in his ghazals came to be the source of a movement with a good many imitators. His norm-breakings took place in form, meaning and/or in the possible relationships between the two. Critiquing the social mores was one of his trademark iconoclastic practices in the realm of content. Another norm-breaking was inventing rhetorical subtleties whose novelty was particularly conspicuous in the realm of pun. It was an innovation in creating varied links of signs on the horizontal axis of poetry—an innovation resulted from Hafez’s contemplations on the emotional meanings of words conjured up in various cultural aspects. The harmony of meaning background and emotional background with the general music dominating them—a linkage created by meter, rhyme and juxtaposition of words—is another feature in Hafez’s poetry. The impressing value and emotional intimacy of these elements are palpable in his poetry. The most remarkable norm-breaking in Hafez’s ghazals may be the way in which the scattered meanings clandestinely interact through a ghazal; this has caused most scholars to regard it as polysemous and lacking in terms of logical relationship among couplets. These couplets, albeit distantly related with each other, are connected deep inside. Besides demonstrating Hafez’s rhetorical, artistic as well as semantic norms-breakings, the present paper shows that in spite of his poetry seeming scattered, which is a result of distant and far-reached associations in Hafez’s culturally and experientially loaded mind, there is an inner relationship among them that can be understood by transforming the norm-breaking propositions to norm-enforcing ones. A ghazal by Saadi is juxtaposed to one by Hafez to illustrate the issue at hand.