Bell’s note that blue is the Persian color of mourning — and that Hafiz pictures the grieving lovers as a bed of violets bowing in the wind — opens onto a wider Persian iconography. The Persian word for the violet, banafshah, is one of the standard ghazal flowers, and its drooping head is read across the poetry as the posture of submission, modesty, and bereavement. Compare the figure to Mary of Bethany at the feet of Christ in Luke 10:39, submission as a posture of love. The violet does not negate the cypress (the upright beloved); it answers it. Persian gardens, real and poetic, are arranged on that contrast: the cypress that does not bend and the violet that cannot help bending.