The Poet's Sun: Mehr in Classical Persian Verse
No element of Persian vocabulary has been more richly exploited by the poets of the classical tradition than Mehr. Its dual meaning — the physical sun and human love or friendship — made it a perfect vehicle for the Persian poetic aesthetic, which delights in meanings that operate simultaneously on multiple levels. A verse about Mehr could be literally about the sun rising over the mountains, metaphorically about the arising of love in the heart, and allegorically about the manifestation of divine light in creation, all at once, with each level of meaning enriching and deepening the others.
Hafez and the Beloved Sun
Hafez of Shiraz (c. 1315–1390 CE), generally considered the greatest lyric poet in the Persian tradition, returns to Mehr repeatedly in his ghazals. For Hafez, the sun is a figure of the beloved, beautiful and life-giving but also terrifying in its power and indifferent to the suffering it causes in those who love it. The poet's eye, burned by gazing too long at the sun, becomes a metaphor for the lover's heart, destroyed by the beauty of the beloved but unable to look away. Hafez also uses Mehr to express divine love: the mystic's longing for union with God is like the moth's fatal attraction to the flame, or like the eye's compulsion to seek the sun despite the pain.
Rumi's Solar Mysticism
Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273 CE), the great Sufi poet of Konya, employs solar imagery with extraordinary frequency and power in the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. The Divan is named for Rumi's beloved teacher and spiritual master Shams-e Tabrizi, whose name means "Sun of Tabriz." For Rumi, the human soul's relationship to the divine is fundamentally solar: we are like planets orbiting the sun of divine love, sustained by its light and warmth, unable to exist without it, always turning toward it. The image of Mehr as spiritual sustenance and the source of all life runs through Rumi's verse with the insistence of a great theme in music.
Ferdowsi and the Solar Warrior-Kings
In the epic tradition, represented above all by Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, Mehr appears in a different register: as the divine quality of the sun that illuminates the righteous king and marks him as God's chosen ruler. Persian kings are described as possessing farr, the royal glory or divine effulgence, which is associated with solar light. Mehregan, the autumn festival, commemorates the restoration of righteous kingship, and Mehr names in the royal tradition (like Mehrdad, borne by Parthian kings) connect individual rulers to the divine solar order. The name Mehrzad, "born of the sun," carries within it the echo of this royal tradition.