The nightingale and the rose

The common nightingale is an unremarkable bird to look at, russet-brown and shy, keeping to thickets and the dense edges of gardens. It breeds in Iran in spring and summer, and it sings at night as well as by day, a long, rich song of whistles, trills and sudden silences. Persian has several names for it. Bolbol is the everyday word; poets also call it andalib, and hezar-dastan, the bird of a thousand tales.

Gol o bolbol

In Persian poetry the nightingale loves the rose, gol, and the pairing is so familiar that gol o bolbol, rose and nightingale, is shorthand for the whole lyric tradition. The bird is the lover, eloquent and sleepless; the rose is the beloved, beautiful, briefly in bloom and armed with thorns. Saadi named his book of prose and verse the Golestan, the rose garden, and Hafez returns to the nightingale again and again, sometimes as the poet himself, sometimes as a rival who sings louder but understands less. The image can be devotional too, the soul singing towards a beauty it cannot reach.

From verse to varnish

Painters took up the pair as eagerly as poets. In the Qajar period, gol o bolbol became a favourite theme of lacquer work: pen boxes, book covers and mirror cases painted with a small bird perched among heavy pink roses, under a varnish that has turned honey-coloured with age. The rose itself is not only a symbol. The Damask rose is grown for rosewater, golab, around Kashan, where the spring harvest still fills the valleys with distilling. English borrowed the Persian word as bulbul, now the name of a different family of songbirds; some of them, confusingly, also sing in Iranian gardens.