Wine and Persian Poetry

Appears in
From Persia to Napa: Wine at the Persian Table
From Persia to Napa

By Najmieh Batmanglij

Published 2015

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Dick Davis

To drink good wine down and be happy – that’s my way;

Ignoring faith and blasphemy – that’s how I pray.

I asked the world to name her price, I’d marry her;

She said, “Your happy heart is what you’ll have to pay.”

Khayyam/Davis

A sixteenth-century painting of worldly and otherworldly drunkenness.

When we talk about Persian poetry we are referring almost exclusively to poetry written after the Arab invasion of the seventh century C.E., which brought the then new religion of Islam to the country. The reason for this is that very little poetry has come down to us from before the invasion, although we know that Iran had enjoyed a very vigorous pre-Islamic poetic culture, that included epic, romance and lyric verse.