شمشاد

The cypress-boxwood pair tells you something important about how Persian poetry works. The tradition is cumulative and recombinant. New poets do not invent new images. They take a fixed inventory of images (cypress, boxwood, narcissus, violet, moth, candle, wine, cup) and recombine them in new metrical and rhetorical configurations. The freshness comes from the combination, not from the individual elements. A reader who has memorized fifty key images can read across nine centuries of Persian lyric and follow the moves the poets are making. شمشاد is one of the smaller pieces in this set, but it is one that every educated reader recognizes immediately.