Where am I, where is poetry?
But that Turk breathes into me: Ho, who are you?

(d 1949)

This couplet, with its citation in Turkish, expresses Maulana's attitude toward his own verse: he never fully understood how he had turned into a poet. The deprecative remark in Fīhi mā fīhi that he spouts verses for the sake of entertaining his friends, “as if someone were to put his hand into tripe to wash it because his guests want to eat tripe,” is certainly surprising, coming as it does from a man who wrote nearly forty thousand verses of lyrical poetry and more than twenty-five thousand lines of didactic verse. But one has to remember that poetry, for many pious Muslims, was something almost immoral. Did not the Koranic verdict in Sura 26/266ff. warn against the poets “who roam through every valley and do not do what they say”? For poetry in pre-Islamic times was connected with magic, and in general dealt often with legally prohibited things such as wine and free love: hence Maulana's condemnation of poetry as a most despicable profession among the people of his native country. Yet from the moment Love carried away Maulana's heart “as a falcon carries away a small bird,” he, like so many other mystics, had no choice. And like other mystics of various religious traditions, he knew that the heart's highest experience, the ecstasy, the complete unification with the Divine Beloved, the losing of one's consciousness in the spiritual embrace, could not be expressed in human words and—what is equally important—must not be expressed lest the uninitiated misunderstand. His father had tried to speak of the secret of God's overnear proximity in terms that shocked the few who read his diaries.

But the spiritual experience is so strong that it must be expressed, albeit through the poor agency of words, expressed in seemingly meaningless paradoxes that, Maulana felt, were like “dust on the mirror Soul.” Yet after the first verses that came from his lips soon flowed an almost limitless stream of poems, born during the sound of music, in the whirling dance into which Love's strong hand had dragged him unawares. But is it not astonishing that the poetry thus born in inspiration was in complete harmony with all the rules of classical Arabo-Persian rhetoric? Not at all. Maulana, like every educated gentleman in the medieval Islamic world, had learned by heart large parts of the Koran and knew an immense number of ḥadīth (traditions of the Prophet), so that he could readily insert a Koranic quotation or a ḥadīth in every first hemistich of a verse (thus d 2346). And if this was thanks to his training as a theologian, yet beyond theology he had also studied religious and nonreligious prose works in Arabic and Persian and many more works in poetry. His main interest seems first to have been classical Arabic poetry, the powerful qaṣīdas of Mutanabbi (d. 965) being his favorite book. It is told that Shams thoroughly disliked this poetry and revealed his aversion to his friend in a strange dream in which Shams was shaking poor old Mutanabbi like a shabby puppet. Still, one finds allusions to and occasional quotations from Mutanabbi in Maulana's verse as well as in Fīhi mā fīhi, as in the following closing verse of ghazal:

Silence your Persian words, I'll talk in Arabic:
“Our heart is consoled by the wine.”

(d 2266)

Maulana must have read the great masterpiece of rhetorical artistry, Hariri's Maqāmāt, and he was surely acquainted as well with the Kitāb al-aghānī, “The Book of Songs,” whose author, Abu'l-Faraj al-Isfahani, records everything concerning those Arabic verses that had been set to music in his time, the tenth century. Most of Maulana's animal stories in the Mathnawī are taken from Kalīlah wa Dimna, a collection of fables of Indian origin that was introduced into Arabic in the late eighth century and has since inspired storytellers all over the world; but Kalīlah wa Dimna is, as Rumi says in the Mathnawī, “only the husk,” while the true kernel of the stories is to be found in his interpretation of the tales.

There is no doubt that young Jalaluddin had studied the classical Arabic works on Sufism such as Abu Talib al-Makki's Qāt al-qulūb, (“The Nourishment of Hearts”) and Qushayri's Risāla, to this day the handiest treatise on Sufism available. Yet he jokes in the Mathnawī that “Noah lived happily for nine hundred years without ever studying the Qūt or the Risāla.” Strangely enough, he does not openly mention the work that provided a major source of inspiration for his Sufi thought and that influenced certain stories as well as his way of argumentation: Iḥyā' ‘ulūm ad-dīn (“The Revivification of the Sciences of Religion”) of Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (d. 1111).

Even more profound is Rumi's indebtedness to classical Persian literature. His verse easily calls upon names of the great lovers of early Persian romances such as Wis and Ramin or Wamiq and ‘Adhra; allusions to the famous love story of King Mahmud of Ghazna and his Turkish officer Ayaz do not lack either, and the heroes of Nizami's Khamsa, the epical, romantic “Quintet,” likewise occupy a special place in his work. Particularly close to his heart is the figure of Majnun, who lost his reason under the overwhelming experience of his love for Layla, with whom he felt, in the end, completely identified. Khusrau, Farhad, and Shirin, another group of famous lovers, appear as well, though these do not figure so prominently. A contemporary of Nizami known primarily for his qaṣīdas was Khaqani, whom Maulana admired, apparently for his unsurpassable power of language and imagery, or perhaps for his outspoken religious stance. Rumi sometimes quotes a line by Khaqani either directly or through allusion, although he rarely mentions this master poet by name. He also borrows lines from the other great qaṣīda writer, Anwari (d. ca. 1190).

Different is the situation with Sana'i, the mystic of Ghazna, whose work was particularly dear to Maulana's instructor Burhanuddin Muhaqqiq, so much so that some of his disciples even objected to the constant references to Sana'i, as is mentioned in Fīhi mā fīhi. Sana'i's Hadīqat al-ḥaqīqa (“The Orchard of Truth”) had become the model for all later mystical mathnawīs. It appears that Maulana was also well acquainted with Sana'i's lyrical and panegyric verse, which is distinguished by its vast rhetorical skill and profound thought; but the somewhat earthy, matter-of-fact style of the Hadīqa impressed Maulana, and a number of Sana'i's favorite expressions, such as nardibān (“ladder”) and barg-i bī bargī (“the possession of not-possession” or “the leaf of leaflessness”) occur frequently in his poetry. Even Sana'i's remark that his dirty jokes are not dirty jokes but instruction found its way into the fifth book of the Mathnawī (where one can find a number of such “jokes”).

The influence of the second great mathnawī-writer, Fariduddin ‘Attar, seems to be slightly less prominent, although Maulana certainly knew and appreciated ‘Attar's works, especially Manṭiq uṭ-ṭayr (“The Birds' Conversation” or, in a more accurate rendering, “The Language of the Birds”). The title is an expression of Koranic origin (Sura 27/16) that Rumi, like his predecessor, uses to refer to the secret language of souls that the mystical guide Sulayman (Solomon) speaks with the soul birds. Having studied all these works and probably a great many other sources that cannot be determined with certainty, Maulana was fully acquainted with the rules of poetry and rhetorical forms, and when inspiration descended he had not the slightest problem in applying, knowingly or unwittingly, all the rules of prosody and rhetorics to his verse. In the early period he used exclusively the lyrical forms of ghazal and rūbā‘i. The ghazal, the traditional form of love lyric, consists generally of five to twelve lines and employs one single rhyme throughout the whole poem. The rhyme often grows into a radif, an overrhyme that consists of a word, several words, or even a full sentence. The repetition of a question such as “Where are you?,” an assertion (“It is he … it is he …”), a statement (“Slow! I'm drunk!”), or a request (“Don't go without me … don't go without me!”) over seven, ten, and even more lines gives the poem a strong expressiveness. The form is sometimes reminiscent of the refrain in folk songs. If the meter permits, the poem may also be split into smaller units within the hemistich, which rhyme with each other while the main rhyme continues through the whole ghazal. In ghazal form, which (like all Persian poetry) follows strict metrical rules, Maulana could sing almost everything; a study of the relation between meter and content of his poems would be welcome. The rubā‘ī quatrain (known in the West through Omar Khayyam's Ruba‘iyat) has the form aaxa; these short, pithy verses were frequently sung at mystical concerts, as becomes clear from some of Maulana's remarks.

But the enraptured mystic sometimes complains of the fetters of meter and form, and there are verses—probably from the earliest period—in which he simply fills a line with the traditional Arabics catchwords for meters, fā‘ilātun mufta‘ilun, or fā‘ilātun fā‘ilātun, and he may sigh, “This fā‘ilātun mufta‘ilun has killed me,” or he says in an Arabic ending:

My friend and physician fills the cup—leave
the fā‘ilun mufta‘ilun and fā‘ilātun and fa‘l

Elsewhere, he sighs:

Half a ghazal remained unspoken in my mouth
but alas, I have lost head and foot!

(d 2378)

Yet the variety of meters used in the Dīwān is amazing. What seems even more astonishing is that many of Rumi's poems, although written in perfectly correct ‘arūz (as the traditional metrics are called), can easily be scanned according to stress, and one is often tempted just to clap one's hands and reinterpret the musical rhythm out of which this or that poem might have been born. The ghazals sometimes give us insight into the process of inspiration:

Without your presence the samā‘ [whirling dance] is not lawful …
Not a single ghazal was said without your presence,
But in the taste of hearing of your letter (nāma)
Five, six ghazals were composed.

(d 1760)

This emergence of poetry from the dancing movement accounts also for Maulana's predilection for repetitions and for long anaphoras. A frequently quoted example of his typically strong rhythmical and sound patterns is the following passage from a spring poem, with its repeated long stressed ā:

Bahār āmad bahār āmad bahār-i mushkbār āmad
ān yār āmad ān yār āmad ān yār-i burd-bār āmad …
The spring has come, the spring has come, the spring with loads of musk has come,
The friend has come, the friend has come, the burden-bearing friend has come. …

Even stronger is the sound of this poem:

Biyā biyā dildār-i man dildār-i man
dar ā dar ā dar kār-i man dar kār-i man
Tū-ī tū-ī gulzār-i man gulzār-i man,
bi-gū bigū asrār-i man asrār-i man

(d 1785)

Come, come my beloved, my beloved,
Enter, enter into my work, into my work!
You are, you are my rose garden, my rose garden;
Speak, speak my secrets, my secrets.

In certain cases we know how a particular sensual impression triggered off a first line of a poem, as when someone disturbed Rumi by chatting during a samā meeting:

I heard the nonsense which the enemy said, in my heart

(d 1623)

Another story, which cannot be verified from the poems preserved in the Dīwān but has a ring of truth to it, tells how a peddler once passed by Maulana's house with fox skins for sale. His cry in Turkish, “Tilkü, tilkü!” (“Fox, fox!”), immediately inspired Maulana to compose a poem beginning with the words

Dil kū? Dil kū?
Where is the heart, where is the heart?

In many poems the first line is provocative, intended to attract the listeners' attention. The poet may refer to a comical story:

A Kurd once lost his donkey …

or will ask:

What did you eat? Let me smell!

or will begin by describing a neighbor's ailment, which ultimately turns out to be lovesickness.

To this day it is impossible to establish the exact sequence of Rumi's poems. For the works of Persian poets are always arranged according to the alphabetical order of the rhyme, beginning with ā as the rhyming letter, and inside this sequence often according to the meter. Thus, early and late verses stand side by side, and only with the help of some inner criteria (such as favorite expressions or allusions to certain events) may we be able to determine which ones belong to the earlier and which to the later period of Maulana's life. In any event, one can assume that passionate ghazals with sometimes bizarre imagery belong to the earliest works, for none of them has the name of Shams as takhalluṣ (the poet's pen name inserted in the last verse of a poem). Many have not even a proper final line; others end with khāmūsh (“Quiet!”), a smaller number with bas (“enough!”). Both words, however, appear also in other, lengthy poems that contain stories or allude to themes told in the Mathnawī or in Fīhi mā fīhi and are most likely to have been written after 1256. The word khāmūsh occurs so frequently that some scholars have even taken it as a kind of pen name for Maulana. It seems, however, that the tendency to admonish oneself to silence when the inspiration flags, or when one feels that one has already talked too much, is a natural part of inspired poetry. As Maulana says:

Enough, enough! You are not less than the water vendor's horse:
When he has found a customer, he takes the little bell off its neck.

(d 25)

And when intellect, which acts as the imām (prayer leader), has fled before the arrival of Love, the muezzin should also silently come down from the minaret (d 2357), as Rumi says half jokingly.

The early poems never mention Shams-i Tabrizi's name directly, yet allude to him subtly where they refer here and there to the sun or play with astronomical terms. For instance, Rumi mentions no name as he asks:

Is this the Divine Light? Has it come from near God?

(d 2279)

Then gradually Shams's name begins to appear (a fine example of this period of transition is d 757, when the poet tells how he sought his lost heart at midnight and finally found the poor little thing in a corner, whereupon it called out “Shamsuddin!”). Then, at the point when Maulana has realized his identity with the Beloved, Shams's name appears as the takhallus where the poet's name should stand. Maulana mentions his own name, Jalaluddin, at the end of a single ghazal only, while his friend's name appears a few lines earlier (d 1196).

A similar development is visible in the case of Salahuddin, whose name first appears in the middle of poems that often still bear Shamsuddin's name as takhalluṣ. There are also allusions to the zarkūb, the goldsmith, before his actual name is revealed. In the third stage of Maulana's life, an identical development takes place with Husamuddin's name, which first appears in connection with that of Shams. Small allusions in some of Maulana's Persian and Arabic verses also help to establish the order of the poems to a certain, though very modest, extent. Yet a good number of poems seem either to belong to the same time period when the Mathnawī was composed or to stem from the period between the completion of the first and the beginning of the second book of the Mathnawī, that is, between 1258 and 1262. One also finds poems addressed to people outside the circle of his close friends, threnodies for figures unknown to us, wedding songs for his son, educational ghazals, and so on. That shows that Maulana continued to compose lyrical poetry to the very end, and some of his most touching verses about death and resurrection were undoubtedly written during the last months or even weeks of his life.

Maulana sometimes pondered the meaning of poetry. Why did he feel himself impelled to say all these verses?

I read the lovers' story day and night—
Now I became a story in my love for you

(d 1499)

He is, of course, aware of the source of inspiration:

Each hair of mine has turned to verse and ghazal thanks to your love!

(d 2329)

He warns his readers, or rather listeners, to enjoy his verses immediately, for they are “like Egyptian bread that will be stale tomorrow.” Sometimes he jokes with the beloved, who has asked him to recite a poem:

Give me a kiss for every verse!

(d 1856)

or, in another poem:

I said, “Four verses,” but he said, “No, something better!”
All right—but give me first some heady wine!

(d 2080)

Sometimes he complains also that, although he does not want to sing,

When I don't sing a ghazal he splits my mouth!

His poetry—so he thinks in moments of high ecstasy—is “food for angels,” and when he does not talk, the hungry angel comes and forces him to speak. Yet every mystic knows that these words are merely a weak reflection of Reality, like “the fragrance of heavenly apple trees”; and the word is nothing but a nest for the bird “Meaning.” One of the finest comparisons is that of poetry with the scent of Yusuf's shirt:

The preeternal moon is his face, verse and ghazal his scent—
Scent is the share of him who is not familiar with the sight.

(d 468)

In other words, poetry conveys the fragrance of the Beloved to those who are blind, like Jacob, and consoles them with its scent, but it can never convey the fullness of Reality.

“Beacon lights”—that may be another description of words; and the stories Rumi tells in the Mathnawī are like measuring vessels for the grain “Meaning,” or “Inner Sense.” Maulana knows well that the poet's words come according to the understanding of his listeners, but the words are necessary. A child must read books in school, for the maturing spirit needs metaphors, but once it is fully grown, it no longer needs toys or books.

But Rumi knows also that speech hides as much as it reveals: to speak means to close the window opening onto Reality; and the dust that is stirred up by the movement of the broom “Tongue” settles on the mirror “Experience.” Hence the constant reminder to be silent:

Whether you are Arab or Greek or Turk—
Learn the tongue without tongue!

(d 1183)

And when the poet seeks his heart, he is admonished to be silent:

I called out: “Where does the intoxicated heart go?”
The king of kings said: “Quiet! It is going toward us!”

(d 898)

Maulana repeated time and again:

Without your word the soul has no ear,
Without-your ear the soul has no tongue …

(d 697)

and in the Mathnawī he confesses:

I think of rhymes, but my beloved says:
“Don't think of anything but of my face!”

The absolute union with the mystical beloved, which is the basis of so many poems has been expressed in a charming ghazal.

When I seek peace, he is
          the kindly intercessor,
And when I go to war,
          the dagger, that is he;
And when I come to meetings,
          he is the wine and sweetmeat.
And when I come to gardens,
          the fragrance, that is he.
When I go to the mines, deep,
          he is the ruby there,
When I delve in the ocean,
          the precious pearl is he.
When I come to the desert,
          he is a garden there.
When I go to the heaven,
          the brilliant star is he …
And when I write a letter
          to my beloved friends,
The paper and the inkwell,
          the ink, the pen is he.
And when I write a poem
          and seek a rhyming word—
The one who spreads the rhymes out
          within my thought, is he!

(d 2251)

Rumi's ghazals are formally and technically correct, but because they were born out of living and often overwhelming experience, they are different in style from the refined, diamondlike ghazals of poets like Hafiz or Jami. Hence they contain words and ideas that one rarely finds anywhere else. Rumi plays sometimes with Greek and Turkish vocabulary, and does not hesitate to address his friend in a Greek radīf as agapos, “beloved” (d 2542), or insert little Turkish dialogues into his ghazals. His use of Arabic, both in isolated instances and in whole lines or even entire poems, is remarkable.

There are lines of frightening cruelty, such as the following, with its remarkably hard alliterative effect:

Kūh kun az kullahā …
Make a mountain of skulls, make an ocean from our blood …

(d 1304)

Indeed, the subconscious memory of Shams's blood on his door-step may be reflected in such lines or in the expressed wish to drink blood from the dogs' vessels, “to sit with the dogs at the door of fidelity” (d 2102).

These verses do not reach the cruelty of later Persian poetry but are much more heartfelt than the highly sophisticated descriptions of tortures offered by poets of the postmedieval period. And who but Rumi would have seen the beloved as a trader in hearts, livers, and guts? These grotesque images and comparisons are further served by his outspoken tendency toward the personification of abstracts. Even though Persian and Persianate poetry creates a whole universe of mysterious interconnections, by metaphors become truth—the rose is the beloved's cheek, the narcissus is an eye—yet, in Maulana's verse one finds an abundance of images that borders on the mythical. Suffice it to mention his numerous verses about poor Sleep, who, mistreated by Love's fists, runs off, or is drowned in an ocean of tears when he wants to enter the lover's eyes; or the numerous descriptions of the heart; or in particular the metaphors for Love, which appears to the poet in every possible form, as king and as thief, as ocean and as fire, as mother and as lion.

Sometimes Maulana finds unusual rhymes or devices, such as a poem featuring a string of deprecating diminutives, in which the ending -k is put everywhere (d 2772 is a fine example), and the “shabby little philosopher,” faylasūfak, or the “ghastly old hag ‘World,’” kampīrak, appears more than once. He uses puns frequently and takes an oath:

By the panther (palang) of your glory,
by the crocodile (nihang) of your jealousy,
by the hedgehog (khadang) of your glance,

(d 772)

and he complains (or boasts, perhaps?) that

in our palms was wine (bāda) and in our head was wind (bād).

(d 7723)

Unusual comparative forms appear frequently: the beloved is addressed as “more gazelle than a gazelle, more moon than the real moon” (ahūtarī, qamartarī), and one feels the absolute ease with which such verses were written, said—or, rather, flowed out of him.

Sometimes Maulana inserts proverbs and folk sayings into his verse, in the manner of many poets. A common proverb about the ostrich (shuturmurgh or devekushu, “camel bird” in Persian and Turkish respectively) is elaborated into a satire about an unreliable person:

Ho, master, what a bird are you?
          Your name? What are you good for?
You do not fly, you do not graze,
          you little sugar birdie!
You're like an ostrich. When one says,
          “Now fly!” then you will say,
“I am a camel, Arab!—When
          did camels ever fly?”
And comes the time to carry loads,
          you say, “No, I'm a bird!
When did one burden birds? Oh please,
          leave this annoying talk!”

(d 2622)

One can also find hidden allusions to tradition or folklore. The verse

How should I worry about the sting of the scorpion, O moon,
For I am drowned in honey like a bee?

(d 1015)

sounds perfectly clear with its juxtaposition of two stinging creatures. A fuller reading, however, lies in the folk tradition that the position of the moon in Scorpio is most unfortunate for any undertaking—yet the lover has left this sphere entirely and enjoys the sweetness of union. There is a further allusion: the friend's face is a moon, his curls are scorpions, as many Persian poets claim.

Not only numerous allusions, but even full poems call upon the images of chess and backgammon, with dramatic descriptions of a game with the beloved during the night (d 1558). To decipher such verses properly one needs a solid knowledge of backgammon technique, just as a knowledge of alchemical processes and medicine is necessary for a thorough understanding of Rumi's (and indeed all Persian) poetry.

Sometimes Rumi speaks of actual visions, visions of the ocean of Being out of which figures and bodies rise like foam and billows; sometimes he sees faqr, spiritual poverty, as a radiant ruby that confers upon him a ruby-red robe of honor. The visionary account of the Mongol siege of Konya on 25 November 1256 is as remarkable as the long description of Daquqi's experience in the Mathnawī, with its changing figures of seven candles, seven human beings, and seven trees.

Rumi finds his images everywhere. He sees the gypsies ropedancing in the streets of Konya and likens his heart to such a gypsy; he transforms the activities of ragpickers and police officers into the acts of Love personified, and confiscation and laundering into symbols of spiritual states. It is this close relation between earthly imagery and the spiritual realities behind it that makes his poetry so unique. One should not expect logical development of imagery, neither in the Dīwān nor in the Mathnawī, for the poet is carried away by associations, although sometimes whole stories unfold from a single initial remark in the Dīwān. In numerous ghazals one can feel how, after a strong, ear-catching initial line, the poet holds on more or less to the sheer thread of rhyme and rhythm, often adding verses that cannot match the poem's strong beginning. Then he may joke that his poem has become too long:

because I mentioned a camel in the first line, and, after all, a camel is long.

(d 1828)

Or he says that he would like to sing another fifty verses but is afraid lest his beloved be fed up with his words. Often, the end line seems to be absolutely unconnected with the beginning. One of the longest ghazals begins with a sad complaint about the autumnal misery in the world, yet the poet soon reverses this negative attitude as he directs his thoughts to the day when spring will reappear. In other ghazals, however—especially the great spring odes—the imagery is consistent.

His poetry is like a flame that rises, changes color, sinks back, rises again. Even in the Mathnawī, which is meant to serve as a spiritual guide, one cannot detect the same logical structure as in the mathnawīs of ‘Attar, where the stories are rather clearly separated from one another. Here, this story grows out of that tale, the tale turns into a mystical teaching or, sparked off by a word, a sound, turns into another story; the text sometimes reaches the heights of great poetry, yet on the whole is less “poetical”—but also less paradoxical—than the earlier part of the Dīwān. The Mathnawī, so Rumi says, is the “shop of Unity,” and if he were to say all he had to say, forty camels would not be able to carry it. The Mathnawī, swathed as it is in commentaries composed in almost all the languages of the Muslim East, is in a certain way easier to comprehend and appreciate than the Dīwān, the poetical expression of an overwhelming experience. The power of the expression, as it seems, sometimes almost scared the poet himself; he was even afraid lest he hurt the friend's feelings:

If my talk be not fitting for your lips,
Take a heavy stone and break my mouth!
When an infant babbles nonsense, does not the kind mother
Put a needle into his lip to teach him?

(d 2083)

But whatever the expression was, Maulana knew that he could only speak when he was touched, like a flute, by the breath of the beloved, which made him eloquent; and yet poetry remained a veil, so that he admonishes himself at the close of one ghazal:

Leave the ghazal—look into azal, pre-eternity!

(d 2115)