A Brief History of Metaphor in Persian Poetry (Part III)

Regarded as particularly refreshing and pleasant, the cool breeze of dawn, referred to in the second stanza of the poem, is a constituent of the idealized landscapes of much Persian poetry. This breeze apparently brings the scent of musk, the most valued and expensive of medieval perfumes, and again we see that we are being presented with an idealized situation in which everything, including the scented air, is as beguilingly charming and special as possible. The musk comes from Tibet, a remote and exotic place for the speaker, and the poem momentarily opens on a distant, almost fabulous, reality, as with the mention of Mani. Here the musk is a metaphor for the scent of the garden’s flowers as it is diffused by the breeze, the logic being that musk is the most precious perfume, so the flowers in this idealized garden share its scent, and this rare, idealized loveliness provokes wonder in the speaker. Wonder at what seems perfect (a garden, a person, a state of mind—usually love or grief), or extreme to the point of unreality, is a very commonly evoked effect in Persian poetry.

Next we come to Layli and Majnun, star-crossed lovers from an originally 7th-century Arabic tale that quickly spread all over the Islamic world. Since he is a tragic figure, unable to be united with his beloved, Majnun is often represented as weeping and this is why he is mentioned in the third stanza of the poem as being “within the clouds”—he is weeping the dew onto the flowers below him (dew continues the implication that the poem is describing a scene in the early morning, which is considered to be the loveliest and most refreshing time of day).
Persian lyric poetry is in general welcomingly receptive to both the pre-Islamic past and non-Islamic faiths.
Layli’s cheeks are imagined as red, either as an indication of her beauty or of her flushed, bewildered distress, or both, so Majnun’s tears, which are the same color as her cheeks, are red. The conceit is that the tears are bloody, indicating that Majnun has wept so long and so hard that his eyes are injured and he weeps blood; with the same implication of relentless injurious weeping, tears are almost always referred to as red in pre-modern Persian verse (an exception is when they are compared to pearls). So the roses are red because Majnun has wept his red tears onto them. The metaphor is continued in the next stanza, in which tulips are compared to red glasses (short wild tulips, whose shape is easy to imagine as like that of a red glass, are meant), and in which the dew/bloody tears present in these red glasses is implicitly being compared to red sherbet. The association of red flowers (almost always roses or tulips), bloody tears, and sherbet is common in Persian verse, with any one of the three being able to stand in metaphorically for either of the other two.