The lyric “I” of the Persian ghazal is a fictive construct. Generic and rhetorical convention provide abstract scripts for the poetic speaker to act out a set canon of performative roles, such supplicant, admirer, wounded lover, or sage. For the most part, reading the lyric voice as a representation of the author’s personal life experience confuses history and literature in ways that are detrimental to both. But as Domenico Ingenito has recently argued, this apparently closed semiotic system also opens a space for reference to external reality and the historical author’s own life experience. In the terminology of Leo Spitzer, an “empirical I” emerges from and blends with the “lyric I.” Toponyms, place names, often provide a cue to recognizing the interplay of the generic and the personal. Sā’eb Tabrizi (d. 1676) makes frequent references to cities and regions that played a significant role in his life—India (Hend), Nishapur, Kashmir, and above all his native city of Isfahan. This paper will examine two ghazals, one expressing his frustrated desire to leave Isfahan (Qahraman 5653) and another celebrating his joyous return (Qahraman 5573). Although it is impossible to give exact dates for these poems, they point to specific turning points in Sā’eb’s life story as we know it from outside sources. Examining the interplay of convention and personal experience in these poems demonstrates how the ghazal could serve as a medium for life writing and public self-fashioning and provides one example of the emergence of (auto-)biographical writing as a major trend in early modern Persian literature.