A Persian Song of Hafiz (Sweet Maid) by Hafiz (trans. William Jones)
Quick answer: A Persian Song of Hafiz, William Jones's 1771 Sweet Maid translation, analysed: the Shiraz ghazal behind it, its extravagant offer, and lessons for poets.
Before FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, before Goethe's Persian enthusiasms, there was a young Welsh linguist named William Jones turning a ghazal of Hafiz into English song. A Persian Song of Hafiz, published in 1771 and often known by its opening address to a sweet maid, carried the fourteenth-century poet of Shiraz into European literature and helped set off a century of fascination with Persian verse. Jones later founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta; this poem was an early act of the same curiosity.
The original is among the most celebrated ghazals in Persian, famous above all for its opening extravagance: if that beauty of Shiraz would take the speaker's heart in hand, he would give Bokhara and Samarkand, two of the richest cities on the Silk Road, for the dark mole on her cheek. Jones renders the spirit freely, in rhymed English stanzas, and the result is a document of two traditions meeting.
What the poem says
The poem is a lover's escalating offer. The speaker begins by promising fabulous cities for a single detail of the beloved's face, an exchange so disproportionate that its logic must be poetic rather than economic: one living particular outweighs all the wealth of empire. From there the song calls for wine and moves through the pleasures of Shiraz, its rose gardens and flowing waters, while admitting that none of it can distract a heart already captured.
In the later movement the poem turns wry about beauty's indifference. The beloved needs no praise and no cosmetic art; perfection is untroubled by the poet's rhetoric, as Joseph's beauty in the old story needed no advertisement. The closing stanzas, following ghazal convention, fold back to the poet himself: sing your song, boast of your verses, the ending suggests, for the poem is the one treasure the lover actually possesses and can actually give. The extravagant offer of cities was always the poet's coin, minted in words.
How it works
A Persian ghazal is a string of couplets, each closed and quotable, linked by rhyme and refrain rather than by narrative. Jones, writing for eighteenth-century English ears, converted this into regular rhymed stanzas with a songlike metre, trading the ghazal's flickering discontinuity for Georgian smoothness. Comparing the two teaches more about translation than most essays: what Jones keeps is the imagery and the gallantry; what he loses is the leap between couplets, the very feature modern translators try hardest to preserve.
The craft inside the poem is the rhetoric of hyperbole. The opening offer works because it is specific twice over, named cities against a named facial detail, and because the scale gap between them is absurd and the poem knows it. Hafiz's wit lies in committing to the absurdity. The mole is a classic image of Persian love poetry, the small dark flaw that concentrates all beauty, and the poem's economy of empire-for-blemish states a whole aesthetic: perfection is priced by its most particular point.
Why it lasts
The poem endures partly as a hinge of literary history. Jones's version, with his accompanying essays on Asian poetry, told European writers that Persia held a lyric tradition as sophisticated as anything in Greek, and the influence ran through the Romantics and beyond. Legend even attaches the original couplet to Tamerlane, who is said to have summoned Hafiz to explain how he dared give away the conqueror's cities; the poet's reported reply, that such generosity is how he became so poor, may be apocryphal, but it preserves exactly the poem's spirit.
And the lyric itself keeps its charm because extravagant, self-aware devotion never goes out of date. Every lover has offered cities they do not own.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the disproportionate trade. Offer something vast and public for something tiny and particular, and name both sides precisely; the gap between them is where the feeling lives. Vague hyperbole (I would give anything) is dead on arrival, but Samarkand for a mole is alive because both nouns are real.
Steal the closed couplet discipline of the ghazal, too: write a love poem in couplets where each could stand alone, connected by mood and a repeated end-word rather than by story. The form forces every two lines to earn their place, a habit worth carrying into anything you polish for publication.
What poets can take from this
- Make hyperbole specific on both sides: named cities for a named freckle.
- Let the beloved's smallest detail outweigh the largest public treasure.
- Try ghazal couplets that stand alone, linked by refrain rather than narrative.
- Admit the absurdity of your extravagance inside the poem; wit protects sincerity.
- End by folding back to the poet: the poem itself is the only gift you truly own.
Try it yourself
Write a love poem that opens by offering two real, named places for one tiny physical detail of a person you love, and ends by admitting what you actually have to give.
Questions
What is A Persian Song of Hafiz about?
It is William Jones's 1771 English version of a famous ghazal by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz. The lover offers the great cities of Bokhara and Samarkand for the mole on his beloved's cheek, then moves through wine, gardens and wit before ending on the poet's own song.
Who was Hafiz?
Hafiz was a fourteenth-century Persian lyric poet of Shiraz, master of the ghazal form. His Divan remains central to Persian culture, read for its fusion of earthly love, wine and mystical longing, and it has been translated into English many times since Jones.
Why is William Jones's translation important?
Published in 1771, it was among the first influential English renderings of Persian lyric poetry and helped introduce Hafiz to Europe. Jones smoothed the ghazal into rhymed English stanzas, and his work fed the growing Romantic interest in Eastern literature.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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