Jāmī (d. 1492), the towering fifteen-century Persian Sufi poet, in his commentary on Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s wine ode, entitled Lavāmiʿ, presents the reader with two distinct ways of analyzing the poem’s anacreontic imagery. Most of his work reads as a traditional Sufi interlinear commentary “on the words, phrases, unveiling[s], symbols, and allusions [of the poem]” with the clear goal of revealing for the reader the elaborate supra-literal network of allusions to myriad Quranic passages, hadith, and Sufi metaphysical concepts that are contained in each of these poetic “symbols.” This “symbolist” method of hermeneutic analysis, as one of its modern scholarly proponents has termed it, became one of—if not the—primary lens through which both premodern and modern readers have read Sufi poetry. While the “symbolist” hermeneutic tradition represents an undeniably important interpretative community within Sufism and the history of Persian poetry, there are a number of problems with exclusive reliance on this approach in our analysis of poetic imagery, as several scholars have pointed out (e.g., Meisami, Keshavarz, Sells).
The most significant of these problems, as this paper will argue, is that modern studies employing this approach ignore an equally historically grounded approach to poetry that Jāmī—in this same commentary—calls “expressing meanings in the clothing of forms.” Analyzing the “complete similitude” of earthly wine and love, Jāmī presents a radically different and deeply embodied perspective on the poetic function of metaphoric imagery. Sufi poets, he argues, “employ” “words and phrases” such as “earthly (ṣūrī) wine” “as metaphors” because they reproduce for the reader an imaginary experience that simulates (metaphorically) the experience, event, or concept that they wish to communicate to their reader. Wine is not just the Quranic “drink of Zanjabīl” or the “everlasting divine effusion,” as al-Qayṣarī argues in his commentary on the same poem. It is also a metaphoric embodiment of love that performs meaning through its diverse poetic manifestations. Moreover, these “meanings in the clothing of forms” are in the final instance not just poetic ornament in Jāmī’s view; they are pedagogical devices that marshal bodily experience of “sensorial perceptions/tangible objects” (mahsūsāt) in an attempt to convey the subtleties of higher spiritual realities.
The paper will conclude with the application of this more deeply embodied approach to poetic analysis in a reading of one of ʿAṭṭār’s qalandarīyāt, showcasing the different ways in which these two approaches understand the function of poetic imagery in a specific poem.
