The representation of Persia as a country of rose-gardens, flowing rivers and singing nightingales is the most recurrent theme in the online database of the 19th-century literature. The image of Persia’s landscape is highly “Orientalized” in nineteenthcentury English poetry: it is picturesque, it is sumptuous, it is splendid; above all, it is imaginary. But this Persian and, in general, Oriental “imaginary” has both a positive and a negative facet. Chris Bongie, in his discussion of Wordsworth’s portrait of the Solitary in “Book Three” of The Excursion (1814) defines two modes of nineteenthcentury “exoticism” (his replacement for Edward Said’s term of reference): “Imperialist and exoticizing exoticism”; while “imperialist exoticism,” he remarks, “affirms the hegemony of modern civilization over the less developed, savage territories, exoticizing exoticism privileges those very territories and their people, figuring them as a possible refuge from overbearing modernity.” A confluence of both types of “exoticism,” a blend of dissimilar attitudes and opposing thoughts, is behind the imaginary construction of Persian geography in nineteenth-century literature. We see this for instance in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), where Persia is depicted as a heavenly garden; but this delightful landscape, to use Brantlinger’s words, is also “a sensual paradise of luxury, tyranny and erotic decadence.” Persian poetry itself supplied some of the materials for such formulaic portrayal of the country’s “exotic” beauty. Take for example the recurring image of Shiraz, identified in Iran’s literary culture as a center of romance, revelry and literature; the city is celebrated in Persian poetry as a nourishing ground for verse, love, mirth, wine-drinking and natural beauty. Hafiz refers to Shiraz as a place where the water is pure and the breeze is pleasantly mild. He describes it as the precious gem of “seven territories,” underlining its special qualities. The image of Shiraz in English poetry echoes that of its counterpart in Persian poetry; it appears as a splendid garden, a landscape for romance and a city of wonders. If we take Sir William Jones’s “A Persian Song of Hafiz” as one of the earliest English translations of Hafiz, we may see why Shiraz was envisioned in such a sentimentalized fashion in English verse. Jones’s Shiraz is a fictitious landscape, incomparably beautiful: no “stream is so clear as Roknabad,” and no “bower so sweet as Mosellay.”  The underlined word “decadence” in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to ……….. .