A Thousand Efforts
- Poet:
- Saadi
- Era:
- 13th century
- Electric Blues
Music & vocals AI-generated · poem in the public domain
The poem
هزار جهد بکردم که سر عشق بپوشم
نبود بر سر آتش میسرم که نجوشم
A Thousand Efforts to Hide Love · Ghazals of Saadi (ghazal 405)
About the poem
Saadi's confession that love cannot be hidden: a thousand efforts to conceal it fail, for a heart set over the fire cannot help but boil. He had resolved to give his heart to no one — one glimpse of the Beloved's face, and neither patience nor reason remained.
Meaning & background
«هزار جهد بکردم که سر عشق بپوشم / نبود بر سر آتش میسرم که نجوشم» — “I made a thousand efforts to hide the secret of love, but set over the fire it was not in my power not to boil.” Ghazal 405 of Saadi's Ghazaliyat opens with this confession and never lets it cool: the poet had been careful from the start — «به هوش بودم از اول که دل به کس نسپارم», “I was on my guard from the first, to give my heart to no one” — yet one glimpse of the Beloved's face and neither patience nor reason survived.
The ghazal is one of the most beloved in Persian music: Mohammad-Reza Shajarian sang it in his album Serr-e Eshgh (The Secret of Love), and many others have followed. This session gives the boiling-over confession an Electric Blues setting — a form built, like the poem, on secrets that refuse to stay hidden.
The ghazal is a textbook case of what Persian critics call sahl-o momtaneʿ — “simple yet unattainable”: every word is plain, and no one has ever matched the music. That effortless singability is why ghazal 405 keeps returning as song, from the classical radif repertoire to this Electric Blues session.
Listen