In Iran, when you cannot decide something, you open the Divan of Hafez at random and read whatever verse your finger falls upon. This practice -- called fal-e Hafez -- has been performed for six centuries by scholars, lovers, soldiers, and shopkeepers. No other poet in any language has been so thoroughly woven into the daily fabric of a civilization. Hafez is not merely read in the Persian-speaking world; he is consulted, memorized, sung, argued over, and loved with the kind of intimacy usually reserved for family.

He was born in Shiraz around 1315, during a period of political chaos and cultural brilliance. The Mongol invasions had shattered the old caliphate, and Persia was ruled by a succession of local dynasties that rose and fell with violent regularity. Hafez lived through several of these upheavals, managing -- through wit, discretion, and the protection of various patrons -- to survive them all.

His given name was Shams-ud-Din Muhammad. "Hafez" is an honorific meaning "one who has memorized the Quran," and he reportedly did so as a young man, in all fourteen canonical readings. This intimate knowledge of sacred scripture saturates his poetry, which is built on an elaborate system of double meanings: the wine that is both actual wine and divine intoxication, the beloved who is both a human face and the face of God, the tavern that is both a disreputable drinking house and the sanctuary of mystical truth.

This ambiguity is not evasion; it is the heart of his art. Hafez understood that the sacred and the profane are not opposites but mirrors, that the desire for a beautiful face and the desire for God are the same desire experienced at different registers. His ghazals -- short lyric poems of between five and fifteen couplets -- achieve a compression and resonance that have never been surpassed. Each couplet is a self-contained universe, simultaneously sensual and metaphysical, witty and devastating.

Goethe, encountering Hafez in translation, was so overwhelmed that he wrote his own collection of poems in response -- the West-Eastern Divan -- and declared Hafez his twin across the centuries. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "a poet for poets." But these Western admirers, however sincere, catch only a fraction of what Hafez means to those who read him in Persian, where the music of his verse -- the internal rhymes, the puns, the rhythmic perfection -- operates at a level that translation can gesture toward but never reach.

He died in Shiraz around 1390. His tomb, surrounded by gardens and orange trees, remains one of the most visited sites in Iran. Lovers go there. So do the heartbroken. They open the book, and the old poet speaks.