one remaining "open" theme, that in the third bayt. In so doing it has strung the couplets together and "clasped " the "necklace," as a maqta should. The resemblance to a tapestry, or to a type of sonata form in music can be seen. (Avery cites the Greek Odes of Pindar as having a similar structure). Most ghazals are susceptible to this type of analysis, but due to the variety of meanings of each individual bayt, since it is a self-contained whole in itself, it is very difficult to follow for one unfamiliar with the imagery or philosophical ideas of the poets.

ISHQ

One finds in the ghazal a voluptuous assortment of sensual/erotic imagery, dealing with the enchantments and intoxication of Wine and of the Beloved. This imagery worked on a variety of levels, as Meher Baba and the Sufi writers have explained. To the uninitiated the poems were straightforward incitements to libertinism; to the mystic, the poems represented the Path and the attributes of God as the Beloved.

Meher Baba explains that there are two types of love (ishq — a word which means far more than our word "love"): ishq-i-mejazi, or "human love", and "ishq-i-haqiqi" or Divine love. The highest human love, such as Majnun had for Leila, leads to the self-forgetfulness and identification with the Beloved characteristic of ishq-i-haqiqi , but Divine Love is conditioned by the Grace of the Master. It is only vouchsafed to the saints and real seekers — and to the masts, whose love for God has rendered them senseless to the world.

Many scholars in their translations have remarked that Platonic ideals of Beauty in the abstract have inspired the ghazals. But it is not the Beauty of the Beloved which inspires, for beauty to these poets is a temporal thing. Rather it is the experience of love itself, its states and stages, which are the subject of the ghazal, and the erotic imagery in many cases is merely its ornamentation. The sensuous images may be invoked because this is the only way in which the mystics can express the rapture of their direct experience of God; the same mystery that is found in the ghazal in the intoxication of the nightingale with the rose; of the moth with the flame; of the Cup, brimful of wine. This is the imagery of self-forgetful intoxication, with beauty as an afterthought, an earthly qualification of the object of love; and it is the experience of this intoxication and the need to express it that gave birth to the characteristics of the ghazal. Mystics have suggested that this imagery is speaking directly of God; claiming that it is a means of concealing mystic states from the uninitiated; still others find only mundane love in this poetry. But the mingling of ishq-i-mejazi and ishq-i-haqiqi is unavoidable in the ghazal, and in most of the poetry, the earthly love has its symbolical counterpart in the divine romance.

When God is seen as the Beloved, all the conventions of the ghazal fall into place, and assume grandeur of meaning that is universal in expressing the human condition, for all conditions are contained in the stages of love, and everyone is in love with something. Meher Baba, in the following discourse, outlines the "stages of love," to which representative ghazal couplets have been attached in illustration:

• When lust goes, love appears:

    Hafiz wrote his joy-book of Love-for-You on the day

    When his pen denounced all desire for goods and renounced happiness.