Some literary critics have often engaged in debates on the degree of overall cohesion and coherence across the couplets of the Hafez ghazals: some maintain that the Hafez’s ghazals lack coherence; some others believe that there is cohesion and coherence in the nature of the couplets. This paper presents an analysis of the overall coherence in a ghazal of Hafez- that has a weak cohesion apparently- by using a linguistics framework laid out by Halliday and Hasan (1976 & 1984). Based on this theory, although cohesion is an important property of a text, just finding the cohesive elements does not show that the text is coherent. Rather, after finding these elements, it is necessary to show coherence in a text based on Cohesive Harmony. After doing this analysis, we have found that this ghazal has a very high cohesion and coherence. So, by utilizing this theory - that is a scientific method-  we can probe the degree of  cohesion and coherence in any ghazal of Hafez or other literary texts quantitatively. 

In Persian language and generally in all other languages connectives are considered among the most important devices in the coherence of texts. However, there are some other elements such as adverbs and prepositions that operate in the text and function like conjunctions. These are only a few of the elements that connect sentences in a text to each other. We can classify these elements from different perspectives. One of these perspectives isHalliday’s functional theory. In his theoryHalliday calls the semantic, verbal, syntactic and logical connections of the sentences in text coherence. From this point of view, in addition to connectives, the other factors that affect the coherence of the text are reference, displacement, elision, and lexical cohesion. Because of the extent of the subject, the researchers in this article study only one of these factors, namely connection. Among different factors of connection, only non-temporal connectives that include simple, compound, explicative and allegorical connectives; contrastive connection factors including simple and compound connectives; and causal connection factors such as the common and reverse will be studied.