[Here, Rehder asserts that Rumi must be understood as a poet rather than a philosopher, and claims that "the structures of his poems are the structures of his unconscious phantasies."]

Any study of the style of a Persian author is a particularly difficult problem at present because the literary criticism of Persian literature is a new and unexplored subject. The old, overall notions of Persian literature can now be seen to be wrong, but we still do not know enough to put anything new in their place. Above all, the need is for detailed studies. The greatest Persian poets, Mawlana included, are almost as unknown as the lesser.

I want to try to describe some of the distinctive qualities of Mawlana's work as they emerge from an analysis of individual poems. I will begin with a single poem:

1 Suratgar naqqa sham har lahzah buti sazam
  V-angah hamah buthara dar pish-i tu bigudazam

2 Sad naqsh bar angizam ba ruh dar amizam
  Chun naqsh i tura binam dar atishash andazam

3 Tu saqi yi khammari ya dushman i hushyari
  Ya ankih kuni viran har khanah kih mi sazam

4 Jan rikhtah shud bar tu amikhtah shud ba tu
  Chun buy i tu darad jan janra halah binvazam

5 Har khun kih z man ruyad ba khak-i tu miguyad
  Ba mihr-i tu hamrangam ba ashq-i tu hambazam

6 Dar khanah-yi ab u gil bi tust kharab in dil
  Ya khanah dar a ay jan ya khanah bipardazam²

1 I am a painter, a maker of pictures: every
  moment I form an image
  And when all the images are before you, I
  melt them.

2 I rouse a hundred pictures; I mix them
  with the spirit.
  When I see your picture, I throw them in
  the fire.

3 Are you the wine-merchant's cup-bearer or
  the enemy of caution
  Or the one who ruins every house I build?

4 The soul has been poured over you,
  mixed with you—
  Because the soul possesses your perfume,
  I shall caress the soul.

5 The blood which drops from me upon
  your earth is saying
  I am one colour with your love, I am the
  companion of your passion.

6 In the house of water and mud, without
  you, this heart is rubble.
  Enter the house, O beloved, or I shall
  leave it.

This poem shows us an important fact about the poetry of Mawlana: that he is not a painter of pictures, and it is an especially good poem for this purpose because in it the poet asserts the contrary. What is interesting is that painting pictures as a subject in no way causes the poet to create any. There is nothing in the poem that depends upon looking carefully at any object. There is no interest in shapes, shadows, or colours. This can be called a poem without images. The only observation in it is psychological. Nothing is depicted except the poet's mood.

Curiously, the language suggests more than one art. Suratgar, naqsh and naqqash are associated with painting, while buti sazam and buthara … bigudazam have connotations of sculpture or metal-working. The mixing of the second bayt does not indicate any particular art. It belongs to painting, perhaps to sculpture, and certainly to the craft of the builder referred to in the third and the sixth bayt (where the builder's mixture of water and mud is mentioned). It is a significant demonstration of Mawlana's interests that once he has begun with it, he does not continue with the subject and associations of the action of painting.

This absence or paucity of pictures is not a characteristic of the Islamic poetic tradition as a whole. The archaic Arabic poetry is full of carefully observed descriptions and visual metaphors. The famous mu'allaqah of Imru }1-Qays is a good example. Similarly, many Persian poems are full of images, such as Farrukhi's beautiful poem on the branding ground of Amir Abu 'l-Muzaffar or Manuchihri's musammat on wine-making, Madar-i may. There is nothing in Mawlana's work like Manuchihri's portrait of an apple:

And that apple like a smooth-turned ball of
 white sugar
That has been dipped three hundred times
  in yellow dye,
On its cheeks some small spots of coral,
And on its tail a green saddlecloth of
 emerald hue—
In its stomach are two or three tiny domed
  chambers;
In each sleeps a Negro child, as black as
  pitch.³

Such description is, in general, more likely to be found in a qasida than in a ghazal, but perhaps it is significant that the edition of the Kulliyyat-i Divon-i Shams-i Tabrizi with introductions by Furuzanfar and Dashti has a single section for the ghazaliyyat and qasa'id, as if Mawlana did not distinguish between the two forms.

The above poem, like so many by Mawlana, seems barely located in the world in which we live. Only a few things are named: atish, soqi, khanah, khun, khak, ab and gil, but in no case is their appearance described. It is a characteristic of this poem, and a part of its success, that no single point is elaborated at any length. This small number of nouns which refer to physical objects is accompanied by an almost total absence of adjectives, further evidence of how little Mawl n is concerned with looking at the world.

The interest in the poem is in mental events, and its center is the poet's imagination. The activity described is that of conjuring up vague images of the beloved. The lover is in many ways self-absorbed. He looks inwards, not outwards. The focus wavers. It is not so much on the beloved as on the insubstantial and intangible, the naqqash butha, ruh, and jan, of which the beloved is the most important exemplar. The beloved is faceless and ghostly, without features or even very many characteristics, and, appropriately, the poet threatens to become a ghost himself at the end of the poem.

The poet desires the presence of his love, but the reason for the beloved's absence is not clear. The effect of this is not much altered if we assume the beloved is God. Interestingly, this is neither obviously a religious poem or clearly a love poem. It cannot be positively identified as a poem written for Shams-i Tabrizi (although mihr also means sun) and it has no takhallus of any kind. At the same time it does not belong definitely to the group of poems addressed both to God and a human lover.

This ambiguity is kept alive by the play on two of the most important words in the poem: but and jan. But is an idol which is worshipped, an image of God forbidden to Moslems, and, by extension, the adored beloved. Similarly, jan is both the soul and a term of endearment.

The declaration Suratgar naqqasham presents the poet as disobeying the traditional Islamic prohibition against representational art (in Islam the creation of images came to be thought of as the exclusive power of God), and buti sazam suggests that he is an infidel. The Qur'an (59.23) refers to God as al-musawwir, the shaper, a word derived from the same Arabic root as suratgar and which later became an ordinary word for painter (or sculptor) in both Arabic and Persian. Although this Qur'anic passage, … He is God, the creator, the maker, the shaper. The most beautiful names are his, in its context has nothing to do with art, it appears to have provided the justification for the attack on the painter in the hadith literature. The following hadith (from the well-known collection of al-Bukhari) is not only representative in its condemnation of painting, but like the first two bayts of the poem, it refers to the painter trying to breathe life into his images: "On the Day of Judgment the punishment of hell will be meted out to the painter, and he will be called to breathe life into the forms that he has fashioned; but he cannot breathe life into anything."⁴ Thus, by his statements at the beginning of the poem, the poet puts himself in the place of God the creator and in direct opposition to Islamic tradition. Like Hafiz, but in a very different manner, Mawlana takes pleasure in the outrageous and forbidden. He removes himself not only from the perceptions of the world, but also from its conventions and laws. Moreover, he provides himself with an opportunity for making dramatic assertions. Mawlana enjoys gestures of rebellion, but, in the end, as the above analysis reveals, he does not create a representational art. It is as if unconsciously he obeys the traditional prohibition.

Mawlana's lack of interest in looking carefully at the world in his poems is related, I suggest, to his thinking about it as in a state of flux. This is not simply a philosophical belief. It is a fact of both his conscious and unconscious behaviour as a poet, a fact of his style. The inference to be drawn is that the world being in a state of flux makes it both impossible to observe and not worth apprehending. Everything in this poem, as in so many others in his Diwan, is changeable and temporary. The point is made in each bayt in the poem:

1. Every moment the poet makes a new picture, but they are unsatisfactory and their existence is brief. Melting is a blurring of boundaries, a change of state.
2. Again there is a multiplicity of undefined images and again they are destroyed. After their initial appearance the poet alters them by mixing them with the spirit.
3. The question is unanswered. The beloved, who could not be represented or contained in any of the images, is not fixed in a single phrase, but described by three. There is a hint that these images may be the result of the unstable state of drunkenness.
4. The verb amikhtan is used for the second time which draws attention to the fact that the idea of mixing is central to the poem. The poet ceases to be the mixer and his soul becomes the thing mixed. The perfume is incorporated by inhalation. Rikhtah with its meanings of poured, infused, cast, melted, scattered, combines most of the actions of the poem.
5. The poet's blood flows. The spilling of his blood is parallel to the pouring out or infusion of his soul in the previous bayt. The blood combines with the dust as the water with the mud in the following bayt. Hamrang and hamb z mean sharing and partnership—the merging of differences.
6. The component parts of the house are emphasized. The heart is broken in pieces. The statement that the beloved ruins every house that the poet builds informs his plea that the beloved enter the house. The final metaphor of change and combination is the poet's declaration that he may change his state and more if his beloved rejects him. Thus, the world of the poem is in motion, coming apart and coming together. All its forms are destroyed or empty or in the process of metamorphosis.

The question that presents itself is what does Mawlana offer in place of the world in which we live. The answer is, I think, the universe of his phantasy. I deliberately do not say world because in his poems he talks regularly of the two worlds, our world and the other world of the divine, and sometimes he seems to think that there are an infinite number of worlds. The incredible and the impossible are ordinary in phantasy as they are in Mawlana's poems:

Wherever you set foot, from the earth a
 head rises
And for one head, how could anyone wash
 his hands of you?⁵

The poems are full of references to heads, especially disembodied heads and decapitations.

When in the road you see a severed head
Which is rolling towards our city square,
Ask it, ask it, the secrets of the heart.⁶

These events can be imagined in the mind's eye, although they cannot be seen in the real world, but the poems are full of events which cannot be visualized:

A hundred thousand sweet apples you may
 count in your hand.
If you want them to be one, press them all
  together.⁷

or

The world is like a body without a head
  without that king.
Fold yourself around such a head like a
  turban.⁸

Metaphors such as these show us how far away Mawlana is from any desire for mimesis.

Phantasy is a process of endless change. There are no limits on change in the imagination and anything can become anything else. Mawlana constantly transforms his metaphors. In any given poem one thing may not simply be represented by many different things, but may become many different things—and usually a number of things in a given poem are transformed in this way. If there are several sets of things, each set may be involved in a partially completed story. In the poem Bar charkh sahargah yiki mah 'iyan shud, the poet is successively: watching the moon, carried off by the moon, invisible, the soul, a ship, and the sea. The moon appears and seizes the poet like a falcon and receives into itself the nine spheres of heaven. The sea breaks into waves, intellect, and a voice. Its foam becomes anonymous, multitudinous forms dissolve and become spirit in the sea. The events are first of the sky and then of the sea. The poem is what it is not only because of the number of these changes but also because of the abruptness and speed with which they happen (this example is a short poem of nine bayts).⁹

Beyond this, that these transformations can be called abrupt means that they are not fully explained or prepared for in the poem, and that we do not feel immediately their interrelation. This accounts for some of the strangeness and incongruity of Mawlana's work. Valèry states that the secret of all great minds "est et ne peut ètre que dans les relations qu 'ils trouvèrent,— qu'ils furent forcès de trouver—entre des choses dont nous èchappe la loi de continuitè."¹⁰ One might say that the genius of Mawlana consists of seeing relations between things which are not related in the world and are related only in his unconscious. That is, when he combines and connects in ways that remain strange even after he has pointed them out, he is putting things in relation according to the structures and associations of his unconscious. Every writer does this and every writer does it in a unique way. Mawlana makes, I believe, a deliberate use of incongruous elements in his poetry, but has, at the same time, a special sense of what is congruous in his poems and in any given poem, as there are many possible incongruities which are not found in his poems.

Another way of saying this is that the structures of his poems are the structures of his unconscious phantasies. The poems are reworkings of phantasies and what happens in them happens according to the laws of phantasy. This again is something which is true of all poets, but each person is unique and, therefore, each person does unique work. The uniqueness of Mawlana is in the amount of phantasy not under conscious control that he had made available to himself in his poetry.

The sudden changes in Mawlana's poems also involve changes of subject and changes of tone, the introduction of new matter into the poems, or a change in behaviour to what is happening there. He appears to interrupt himself, with a vocative or a rhetorical question or by speaking directly to the reader or listener. His own voice keeps breaking through whatever metaphorical structure he may have created. It is as if at a certain point he cannot bear the artificiality of poetry or the way in which it separates and hides him from his audience, and he seeks for a moment a closer contact with his audience. This causes him to address his listeners more directly, or to undermine or alter in some way the nature of his communication as a poetic whole, as when he transforms his metaphors or makes them strange or incongruous. Here, I believe, is one of the reasons for the large number of vocatives in his poems and for their placement in individual poems. It is equally significant that he never forsakes poetry. He returns from direct speech to artificiality. He speaks directly but in metaphors. For all their individuality, the poems are conventional, and I think it is especially significant that each poem has a poetic conclusion. At the end he is absorbed more by the demands of the poem as a whole and the desire to speak more directly is not expressed.

The phrases khamush kardam or khamush kun or variations on them constantly appear in his poems. This is particularly striking in a poet who is so obviously concerned to make himself heard. It is to be noted that this call for silence is usually at the end of a poem if not in the final bayt. I am not certain I agree with Ritter that khamush is a takhallus, although the functions of these phrases is similar to that of a takhallus, and in using them as he does Mawlana reveals his sense of the form of the ghazal and its unity.¹¹

It is not the case that these statements show that Mawlana stops short of the ultimate religious experience and refuses to describe what is most sacred to him. He did not believe that there were some aspects of religious experience about which one could not speak. His poems are full of his attempts to imagine union with the absolute. As he wants to see the invisible, he wants to express the ineffable. He only stops talking when he has had his say, and the enormous size of the Divan and of the Masnavi are proof that he never satisfied his need for self-expression and communication. The command khamush is significantly often spoken to the audience. These phrases are usually the sign that the poem is about to end, and they dramatize the poem by pointing to the hush which follows its conclusion, as if pointing out what a difference it makes when the poet stops speaking. In this they seem a call for the poem to continue its existence silently in the minds of the poet and his audience, an attempt to create an unheard echo or reverberation.

Ritter points out that an analysis of Mawlana's thought cannot depend on the commentators of the Masnavi who "read into the work the views of their own time or their personal views."¹² Similarly, it is no longer satisfactory to gloss the Divan with the Gulshan-i Raz as Nicholson does on the assumption that "Sufism has few ideas, but an inexhaustible wealth and variety of illustrations."¹³ This is essentially an ahistorical view which appears to ignore the great expanse of space and length of time over which sufism developed, and to deny that sufism is the creation of individuals (each with a unique historical existence), and that many made distinctive and personal contributions to sufism. It does not, I think, follow from the truth of Nicholson's other assumption that "all manifestations of the mystical spirit are fundamentally the same, in so far as each is not modified by its peculiar environment.…"¹⁴

Mawlana, I believe, must be understood as a poet. The thought of a poet cannot be separated from his poems, cannot be arranged and discussed under headings such as: God, nature, man, the soul, or life after death. As his work proves, Mawlana is not a philosopher. He is the author of 5,498 poems, a book of essays (Fihi ma fihi), which tend to become stories and which resemble his poems in many ways, and a number of sermons, but not one work of philosophy. This total includes 1,995 poems of two bayts each (the ruba'i), but also one poem of around 27,000 bayts (the Masnavi).¹⁵ If one assumes that Mawlana lived sixty-six years (1207-1273) and that he began writing poetry when he was twelve, then he composed about 100 poems a year, on the average of one every three or four days. If one accepts the tradition that the bulk of his poems were written after the death of Shams-i Tabrizi (1247) in the last twenty-six years of Mawlana's life—say 5,200 of the 5,498, then that is about 200 poems a year, on the average of one every two or three days.¹⁶ These figures are only approximate, but they demonstrate that this is indeed a life devoted to poetry.

Nicholson is wrong, I belive, when he states that "Sufistic theosophy is the fountainhead of Jalal's inspiration."¹⁷ Mawlana did not try to elaborate or explain a philosophy. He was trying to understand his experience—and work through it—by expressing it. Every poet writes about himself and out of a need for self-expression—somehow the process of writing poems is necessary to him. Poets are rarely philosophers and vice versa. Poetry and philosophy are essentially different modes of thought and activities which involve different psychologies.

Mawlana is not a philosopher because he is satisfied with the truth of his own experience. The person who lives deeply in individual moments, or who is trying to escape from living deeply in individual moments, is rarely a maker of systems. Mawlana is more interested in his experience—the experience of his imagination or the continuous daydream of his conscious mind, not in his experience of the world—than in any abstraction of that experience. He comes back to the same subjects and the same experiences again and again. He never finishes with them. Philosophers and all those who work with abstractions characteristically want to come to a conclusion. Mawlana, like most poets, is absorbed in getting to the end of a poem—and then beginning again. As Nicholson observes he "has no special term to denote the highest hypostasis. His favourite metaphors, referring to Absolute Being, are Sea, Light, Love, Wine, Beauty and Truth."¹⁸ Unorganized diversity such as this is the opposite of systematic work. Abstractions, which are extreme simplifications of experience, might be defined as ways of coming to a conclusion. Abstractions are never stable in Mawlana's poems. They become metaphors. They are personified or take on the forms of the world (such as "the cup of the light of the absolute"), or become involved in stories.¹⁹ The ship of being disappear in the sea of the divine and a visit to eternity is a journey by caravan. The poems of Mawl n are vague and partial stories in which he is the protagonist—often under an assumed name—and the other characters are abstractions and/or metaphors.

The work of art approximates itself. Philosophy is an attempt to approximate something other than itself.

However abstract it may be, it is evidence of a belief in the value of the world. This is truer in the Islamic tradition than in the European where works of philosophy are more often autobiographies and works of art (at least after Descartes). Art is independent; philosophy is dependent. Mawlana's lack of interest in philosophy reveals his scepticism about the value of the world and how deeply rooted is his belief in its transcience.

When one looks at Mawlana's work as a whole, his greatness is that of a great lyric poet and the poems in the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi are his major achievement. The Masnavi has been preferred to the lyrics because of the belief that a long poem is superior to a short poem, the persistent and false notion that major work has to be big (as if the Divan were not big enough!), because the unity of the ghazal as a form has not been understood (even Nicholson writes: "If my book were not addressed to students of Persian rather than to lovers of literature, I should have been tempted to imitate Abu Tammam, whose Hamasa is a compilation of verses torn from their context. Such a plan is peculiarly favoured by the loose structure of the ghazal, where couplets complete in themselves are strung together in the slightest fashion."), and because most of the scholars who have written about Mawlana have read both the Divan and the Masnavi for the ideas, not as poems.²⁰ Certainly the Masnavi is unique as a record of discursive genius, but one might say of it what Henry James said of War and Peace (in his Preface to The Tragic Muse) that it is a "large loose baggy monster." I do not want to deny either its importance or its beauty, but to put forward that it is in the Divan that Mawlana's best work is to be found. There he appears to be most himself. Each poem is a moment or a unit of thought. It sometimes seems that the poems represent his feelings at their highest pitch and that what we have is an ecstasy of words. The disorder, the continuous metamorphoses, the unsystematic and unexpected connections are integral parts of the whole. The passion is not lost. The poet, with a curious disregard for form, creates his own forms, moving back and forth between the world and the universe of his phantasy. There, after 750 years, we still hear the sound of a living voice.

Here the world, there the world, I am seated
  on the threshold.
On the threshold is that person who is the
  mute speaker.
This intimation you have spoken is enough,
  speak no more, draw back the tongue.…

Notes

1. All the citations from Mawlana in this essay are from the Kulliyyat-i Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi [Kulliyyat], with introductions by Ali Dashti and Badi^c al-Zaman Furuzanfar (Tehran, 1345 A.H.S.) and the references are to the number of the poem in this edition (and sometimes also the bayt and misra^c). This is poem 1,462.
2. Jerome W. Clinton, The Divan of Manuchihri Damghani. A Critical Study (Minneapolis, 1972), pp. 114-115.
3. Bukhari, Le Receuil de traditions mahomètans, L. Krehl and T. W. Juynboll, eds. (Leiden, 1862-1908), vol. II, p. 41 and vol. IV, p. 106, as cited by K. A. Creswell, "The Lawfulness of Painting in Early Islam," Ars Islamica, 11-12 (1946), 162, n. 21. Creswell states (p. 161) that the hadith literature is "uniformly hostile to all representations of living forms." This attitude hardened, he believes, toward the end of the eighth century. For an extremely interesting discussion of this matter, see Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven, 1973), 75ff.
4. Kulliyyat, 622.2.
5. Kulliyyat, 239.3-4a.
6. Kulliyyat, 1077.8.
7. Kulliyyat, 3055.9.
8. Kulliyyat, 649.
9. Paul Valéry "Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci," Oeuvres, Pléiade edition (Paris, 1957), vol. I, p. 1160.
10. H. Ritter, "Djalal Ai-Din Rumi," The Encyclopaedia of Islam (New Edition) [NEI], vol. II (1965), p. 395.
11. Ritter, NEI, vol. II, p. 395.
12. R. A. Nicholson, selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz (Cambridge, 1898) [Nicholson], p. viii. The Gulshan-i Raz was composed by Shabistari in 717 A.H. (v 'Abbas Iqbal, Tarikh-i Mughul, (Tehran, 1341, A.H.S., 545). Mawlana died in 672 A.H.
13. Nicholson, p. xxx.
14. These totals are from the Kulliyyat. For the size of the Masnavi, see J. Rypka, History of Iranian Literature (Dordrecht, 1968), 241.
15. Almost none of Mawlana's poems can be dated. The assumption that he began writing poems when he was twelve is problematical and somewhat arbitrary, but it is perhaps more likely to have been later than earlier, which is the important point for these calculations. There are many stories about him as a child prodigy, but most of them concern his religious experiences
16. Nicholson, p. xxxviii.
17. Nicholson, p. xxxii, n. 2.
18. Kulliyyat, 2389.3a.
19. Nicholson, p. ix.