Kháqání seems, however, to have got as far eastwards as Ray, where he appears for some reason to have been forbidden to proceed further, for he says in a poem entirely addressed to that city (loc. cit., pp. 940-941):—
Chún níst rukhṣa súy-i-Khurásán shudan mará
Ham báz-pas shawam; na-kasham man balá-yi-Ray.
Gar báz raftan-am súy-i-Tabríz ijázat ast,
Shukrána gúyam az karam-i-pádishá-yi-Ray.
“Since I have not permission to proceed to Khurásán
I will even turn back; I will not endure the affliction of Ray.
If leave be granted me to go back to Tabríz,
I will give thanks for the favour of the King of Ray.”
He seems to have imagined that in Khurásán he would meet with greater appreciation, for he says in a verse from the qaṣída cited above:—
Chún zi man ahl-i-Khurásán hama 'anqá bínand,
Man Sulaymán-i-jahán-bán bi-Khurásán yábam.
“Since the people of Khurásán see in me a complete phœnix
('anqá),
I may find in Khurásán the Solomon who rules the world.”
The last reference is evidently to Sanjar, who is, indeed,
explicitly mentioned a little further on; and this poem was
evidently written before the disastrous invasion of the Ghuzz
(A.D. 1154), one of the victims of which, as already mentioned,
was the learned and pious doctor Muḥammad b. Yaḥyá, with
whom Kháqání corresponded during his life,
*
and whom he
mourned in several fine verses after his violent and cruel
death.
*
That he was also in relation with the Court of
Khwárazm is proved by several panegyrics addressed to
Khwárazmsháh, and a laudatory poem (loc. cit., pp. 469-
Of Kháqání's second pilgrimage, as already remarked, we
possess a singularly full account in the rather prosaic Tuḥfatu'l-
Sar-ḥadd-i-bádiya 'st: rawán básh bar sar-ash;
Tiryák-i-rúḥ kun zi sumúm-i-mu'aṭṭar-ash!
“Here are the confines of the Desert: advance upon it;
And draw from its fragrant breeze healing for the spirit!”
It was on his return from the pilgrimage that Kháqání visited Iṣfahán, where a mischance befell him very similar to that which befell Anwarí at Balkh. He was at first well received, but a satirical verse on the people of Iṣfahán, composed by his pupil, Mujíru'd-Dín of Baylaqán, somewhat injured his popularity, and called forth from the Iṣfahání poet, Jamálu'd-Dín 'Abdu'r-Razzáq, a most abusive reply. * In order to exculpate himself from his pupil's indiscretion and restore the Iṣfahánís to good humour, Kháqání composed a long and celebrated qaṣída in praise of that city, in the course of which he says, after describing the tributes of praise which he had already paid it:—
“All this I did without hope of recompense, not for greed,
Nor hoping to receive crown or gold from the bounty of
Iṣfahán.
That stone-smitten (rajím)
*
devil who stole my eloquence
Rebelled against me if he dared to satirize Iṣfahán.
He will not rise with a white face in the Resurrection,
Because he strove to blacken the neck of Iṣfahán.
Why do the people of Iṣfahán speak ill of me?
What fault have I committed in respect to Iṣfahán?”
This poem, as internal evidence proves, was composed after A.H. 551 (A.D. 1156-57), probably, as Khanikof conjectures, in the following year.
On his return to Shirwán shortly after this, Kháqání, whether on account of his greatly increased self-esteem (a quality in which he was at no time deficient), or because he was accused by his detractors of seeking another patron, incurred the displeasure of Akhtisán Shirwánsháh, and was by him imprisoned in the fortress of Shábirán, where he wrote his celebrated ḥabsiyya, or “prison-poem,” given by Khanikof at pp. 113-128 of his Mèmoire. As to the length of his imprisonment and his subsequent adventures until his death at Tabríz in A.H. 582 (= A.D. 1185) * we have but scanty information, but we learn from his poems that he survived his patron Akhtisán, and that he lost his wife and one of his sons named Rashíd, a child not ten years of age. Concerning the elegy in which he bewailed the loss of his wife, Khanikof speaks (p. 49) as follows:—
“Of all Kháqání's poems this is, in my opinion, perhaps the only one wherein he appears as one likes to imagine him, that is to say, as a good and sensible man. Grief causes him to forget his erudition; his verse does not glitter with expressions hard to interpret or grammatical artifices, but goes straight to the heart of the reader, and interests him in a domestic misfortune from which seven centuries separate us.”
Kháqání was buried in the “Poets' Corner” at Surkháb,
near Tabríz, between Dhahíru'd-Dín Faryábí and Sháhfúr-i-
Like Anwarí, Kháqání is essentially a qaṣída-writer, and it is on this form of verse that his reputation rests, though he also has a complete Díwán of odes, a large number of quatrains, and the mathnawí already mentioned, viz., the Tuḥfatu'l-'Iráqayn, besides some poems in Arabic. His style is generally obscure, extremely artificial, and even pedantic. The comparison instituted by von Hammer between him and Pindar is fully discussed and criticised by Khanikof at pp. 61-64 of his Mèmoire. Kháqání's poems are voluminous, filling 1,582 large pages in the Lucknow lithographed edition. In one very curious qaṣída published by Khanikof (Mèmoire, pp. 71-80; Kulliyyát, pp. 271-278) he makes display of all his knowledge of the Christian religion and ritual, and even proposes (though he afterwards asks God's forgiveness for the proposal) to enter the service of the Byzantine Emperor, embrace the Christian faith, and even, should the Qayṣar (Cæsar) so please, “revive the creed of Zoroaster.”
Let us now turn to Nidhámí of Ganja, the third great poet of this period, the acknowledged master of romantic mathnawí, whose influence and popularity in Turkey as well as in Persia Nidhámí of Ganja. remain, even to the present day, unsurpassed in his own line. On him also we have a very careful and scholarly monograph by Dr. Wilhelm Bacher, published at Leipzig in 1871, and entitled Niẓâmî's Leben und Werke und der zweite Theil des Niẓâmîschen Alexanderbuches, mit persischen Texten als Anhang, on which I shall draw largely in this portion of my work. In this monograph Bacher has followed the only safe method of constructing trustworthy biographies of the Persian poets, that is to say, he has ignored the utterly uncritical statements of Dawlatsháh and other biographers, * and has drawn his information almost exclusively from the best of all sources, the poet's own incidental allusions to his life. Thus the dates of Nidhámí's death given by the biographers vary from A.H. 576 (= A.D. 1180-81) by Dawlatsháh (p. 131 of my edition) to A.H. 596-99 (= A.D. 1199-1203) by Ḥájji Khalífa, but Bacher conclusively proves that the latest of these dates is the correct one, and further establishes the following important chronological data in the poet's life. He was born at Ganja (now Elizavetpol) in A.H. 535 (A.D. 1140-41); wrote the first of his five great mathnawí-poems (known collectively as the Khamsa, or “Quintet,” or as the Panj Ganj, or “Five Treasures”), to wit, the Makhzanu'l-Asrár (“Treasury of Mysteries”), about A.H. 561 (A.D. 1165-66); wrote the second, the Romance of Khusraw and Shírín, in A.H. 571 (A.D. 1175-76); wrote the third, the Romance of Laylá and Majnún, in A.H. 584 (A.D. 1188-89); wrote the fourth, the Romance of Alexander the Great, in A.H. 587 (A.D. 1191); wrote the fifth and last, the Haft Paykar, or “Seven Effigies,” in A.H. 595 (A.D. 1198-99); and died at the age of sixty-three years and a half in A.H. 599 (A.D. 1202-3).