lover and beloved

the lowly lover humbles himself as a slave, an exile, or a beggar before a beautiful, unattainable, and cruel beloved; union and fulfilment can only be imagined and suffering is inevitably the lover’s lot. In the ghazal, this love generally has a homoerotic dimension, since the beloved is often a young boy, a literary convention in early Persian ghazals which derived their context from courtly banquets where pageboys and sāqīs were present, or Sufi circles where handsome, beardless boys (shāhids) were considered a witness to divine beauty.