Up, O Ye Lovers
The Drum of Parting Calls
Dīvān-e Shams, ode XXXVI · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1898Up, O ye lovers, and away! ’Tis time to leave the world for aye.Hark, loud and clear from heaven the drum of parting calls—let none delay!The cameleer hath risen amain, made ready all the camel-train,And quittance now desires to gain: why sleep ye, travellers, I pray?Behind us and before there swells the din of parting and of bells;To shoreless Space each moment sails a disembodied spirit away.From yonder starry lights and through those curtain-awnings darkly blueMysterious figures float in view, all strange and secret things display.From this orb, wheeling round its pole, a wondrous slumber o’er thee stole:O weary life that weighest nought, O sleep that on my soul dost weigh!O heart, toward thy heart’s love wend, and O friend, fly toward the Friend,Be wakeful, watchman, to the end: drowse seemingly no watchman may.
- First attested
- 1421The oldest dated witness Nicholson lists for this ode is B³, British Museum Or. 289, dated Dhū ’l Qa‘da 824 A.H. (autumn 1421). The foot of the Persian on p. 140 lists B², a British Museum copy he describes as apparently of the sixteenth century, B³, Cowell's manuscript C (the one he printed from; he gives it no date) and the Tabriz edition, where his Appendix III places it at p. 45. Ibrahim Gamard's Ghazals–Foruzanfar concordance lists it as Nicholson's no. 36 and Furūzānfar's ghazal 1789.
The cameleer's “quittance” renders ḥalālī: in Nicholson's note the driver “begs to be excused for having disturbed the travellers' repose”. One manuscript, B³, reads jilālī, saddle-cloths; Professor Bevan suggests it may be the correct reading, in which case the saddle-cloths served as blankets and at dawn the sārbān comes to reclaim his property.
Nicholson, Selected Poems (1898), note on XXXVI. 2, p. 289, and the variants at the foot of the Persian, p. 140
The drum of parting sounds from heaven, the camel-train is ready, and the travellers are asked why they sleep.
Ode XXXVI is a call to depart, and these are its first six couplets in the rhymed English Nicholson printed in Appendix II, “Translations in Verse”. His prose of the same lines, on p. 141, begins “O lovers, O lovers, it is time to abandon the world; The drum of departure reaches my spiritual ear from heaven”: the driver has “made ready the files of camels” and “begged us to acquit him of blame”; with each moment “a soul and a spirit is setting off into the Void”; a wondrous people comes forth from “(stars like) inverted candles” and the blue awnings of the sky; a heavy slumber has fallen from the circling spheres; and the watchman must not sleep. The ode runs on to seventeen couplets. Nicholson says the rhymes here follow the arrangement of the original, a closer imitation being impossible across two metrical systems. His Persian follows Cowell's manuscript (C); the ode is also in two British Museum copies and the Tabriz edition.
Light
It makes leaving the world sound like the start of a journey rather than an ending: the drum, the bells, the camel-train made ready and the driver begging pardon for disturbing the travellers' rest all belong to a departure that, the ode says, is under way every moment.
Shadow
Nicholson's preface says English verse cannot convey the full verbal sense of oriental poetry without lapsing into “grotesque doggerel”, which is why his main translation is prose; he points to Appendix II for the course of “a general adherence to his author's meaning”. This rhymed version adds words his own prose lacks — “amain”, “for aye”, “I pray”, “seemingly” — and is the freer of his two.
