Making Love by Making War War Imagery in the Classical Persian Ghazal Tradition In the tradition of the Persian ghazal we often come across the motif of a constant battle between a supplicant lover - often expressed through the first person singular pronoun man (I), thus implicating the poet himself - and a cruel and unyielding beloved needless of the lover. In the unequal battle between lover and beloved, the latter uses the bows of her eyebrows to cast arrows of her eyelashes (or her glances) in the direction of the lover, captures the lover's heart (or soul) with the long lasso of her tresses and enchains him (or his heart) in the deep pitch-black dungeon of her disheveled hair. With his heart captive to the caprice of the beloved, the lover becomes the helpless party in utter need of the beloved while the beloved is elevated to the God-like position of absolute power. While there is no dearth of comment on the prevalence of war imagery in the Persian lyric poetry, the trope has never been traced along a diachronic dimension and its connections with the concurrently evolving epic and romantic poetry have remained entirely unexplored. That's what the present paper proposes to do, or at least take some initial steps in that direction. It argues that, given the historical fact of the simultaneous emergence and evolution of the two genres of romantic epic and lyric during the same time span - i.e., 11th through 13th centuries, often in the hands of a single poet - it might be fruitful to explore the process by which war imagery is transposed from the vast spaces of the former into the much denser and more layered confines of the latter. Through a study of selected ghazals of Sa`di and Hafez, believed to have elevated the Persian ghazal to its zenith, the paper examines those specific usages that provide important clues to the ways in which the field of battling warriors may have been entwined with the bed where the visions of the impossibly beautiful beloved appear to the sleepless lover. Besides clarifying the use of an important set of images within the Persian poetic tradition, such a study may provide evidence of the ways aesthetic traditions develop internally by recasting earlier expressive devices in new molds, as well as in relation to their social environments.