Recent debates in literary studies have converged around theories, histories, and uses of the lyric, with especially exciting discussions about lyric performativity. These debates focus overwhelmingly on Western and/or modern poetic traditions, and this paper joins the effort to boaden these important conversations, and to make them more inclusive, by looking to non-Western lyric examples. The premodern Persian lyric, while firmly fixed in form, is incredibly plastic when it comes to modes, topoi, intertextual ingenuity, and the interpolation of other forms of discourse. The argument of this paper is that an important performative aspect of lyric poetry, and specifically of the way lyric poetry can enact varieties of systematic thought, comes to light if we turn to the understudied micro-genre of the Persian definition poem. I combine contextualized close reading of lyric poems by premodern Persian poets from India and Iran with larger ideas emerging in literary studies today about lyric and performativity (Culler, Marno, Ramazani). Specifically, I look at how ??fe? Sh?r?z? (D.1390) defines the parameters of his own debauchery (rend?); at the despondent attempts of ?Orf? Sh?r?z? (D.1591) to define a broken heart; at Fay? K?sh?n? (D.1679), who defines grace as a divine light filtering through the first poem of his lyric corpus; and finally at B?del Dehlav? (D.1720), an intricate poem by whom opens with the weighty question: “What is Man?” From the reenactment of conversations and debates with mentors about love, propriety, and devotion, to the mechanisms of direct address in prayer, to B?del’s tour-de-force performance of the entangled logics of scholastic theology, grammar, and philosophy, the Persian definition poem emerges as a micro-genre offering a rich repertoire of possible performances – specifically lyric performances – of various forms of systematic thought. This study of definition poems from the premodern Persian tradition offers enticing comparative possibilities (for instance, with the similarly under-studied micro-genre of the definition poem in early modern Europe, which emerges around the same time), and contributes to expanding the parameters of current investigations in literary studies into the work of lyric poetry.