Dūš dīdam ke malā'ek dar-e meyxāne zadand is a ghazal by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez of Shiraz.
It was made famous in English by a well-known translation by Gertrude Bell (1897): "Last night I dreamed that angels stood without / The tavern door and knocked".
In the second half of the poem he expresses his gratitude to God and makes a reference to the doctrine that total surrender to Love is the surest way to achieve knowledge of the Divine.
Mahouzi (2018) writes concerning the first two verses:[5] Mahouzi quotes another verse of Hafez in which an angel is represented as standing at the door of the tavern, which makes it clear that the time being spoken about was that period when Adam was being created out of clay:[6][7] The Iranian scholar Bahaoddin Khorramshahi[8] explains that the first three couplets are a summary of chapter 4 of the book Mirsād al-'Ibād by the 13th-century Sufi philosopher Najm al-Din Razi.
In this chapter Razi depicts the workshop of Creation as a tavern where the angels have brought the clay of Adam to the divine Vintner who will knead it into the shape of man.
"[11] Clarke (1891) writes that the angels hoped that God might "pour into their vessels of readiness the wine of love from the wine-house of the divine world"; but in this they were disappointed and the door was shut in their face.
"[15] Most commentators, however, explain the lines as referring not to Adam's dust after he died, but to the clay from which his body was formed at the time of his creation by God.
[16] Some commentators interpret the phrase in this verse, bāde zadan, as having a similar meaning, namely that the angels drank wine with Hafez.
Hafiz is said to have explained this verse as follows to the conqueror Tamerlane (although the story itself is probably not authentic):[18] Two manuscripts, instead of rāh-nešīn "beggar", "one who sits by the road", have xāk-nešīn "dweller on the earth".
The verse is as follows: This refers to a tradition that the reason for Adam's fall from Heaven was the eating of a single grain of wheat.
Annemarie Schimmel traces the idea back to the 10th/11th century Sufi al-Hallaj of Baghdad, from whose writings it appears that "[The moth] does not want the light or the heat but casts himself into the flame, never to return and never to give any information about the Reality, for he has reached perfection.
E. G. Browne wrote of her translations: "(They) must be reckoned as the most skilful attempt to render accessible to English readers the works of this poet.
[33] The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door, echoing Bell's words, is the title chosen for their anthology of thirty Hafez poems by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn (2008).