Mystic poets like Rumi and Whitman reveal a more humane and democratic image of the Divine than, say, do theologians or even philosophers.¹ A theologian, who may like to pose as a rather rationalist scholar of religion, is often inclined to conceptualize God in terms of the history and literature of a given religion, but a mystic with a poetic imagination always tends to intuit Him in his own being, in nature, and in all that exists in the universe. A theologian may also tend to characterize the Divine—or that particular image of the Deity with which he is concerned—according to a certain scriptural convention, but a mystic poet is always ready to humanize, democratize, and universalize Him in everything that lives. Rumi and Whitman are indeed such mystic poets. They are more concerned with the unity of the Divine than with His fragmented, sectarianized, and conceptualized images. In this way, God is not seen to be apart from the creation, but included and including all. “The Beloved,” says Rumi, “is all in all, the lover merely veils Him.”²

I

In other words, the unitive Divine image consists of the union of absolute objectivity with absolute subjectivity. That is to say, in pantheistic terms, God is all that exists. He cannot be defined, or restricted to the Biblical God, but His unitive image does include Him and even the Devil, as Whitman suggests in these lines from “Chanting the Square Deific”:

Santa Spirita, breather, life,
Beyond the light, lighter than light …
Including all life on earth, touching, including God,
                              including Saviour and Satan,
Ethereal, pervading all …
Essence of formal life of the real identities …
Life of the great round world, the sun and stars. …

(Leaves of Grass, p. 444)

“Santa Spirita,” as described in these lines, is both form and essence, the body and the soul, thus the universe in its absolute material and spiritual being. This is also the way Rumi perceives the Divine:

I have put duality away,
I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.
He is the outward, He is the inward.(3)

Neither Rumi nor Whitman brings dualism between the universe and its creative soul. Therefore not only do the seeming good elements in life pertain to the Divine; things deemed to be evil also issue from His unitive images, as Rumi asserts in these lines:

He is the source of evil, as thou sayest,
Yet evil hurts Him not. To make that evil
Denotes in Him perfection …
The heavenly Artist paints
Beautiful shapes and ugly. …(4)

In the first scene of Goethe's Faust a similar unitive image of God is also presented. God addresses the Devil as only a minor part of His creative scheme:

Therein thou art free, according to thy merits;
The like of thee have never moved My hate.
Of all the bold, denying spirits,
The waggish knave least trouble doth create.(5)

Mystic poets such as Rumi and Whitman never want to dualize what appeared to be dual to many poets and philosophers in world literature. The Manichean concept of the Devil as Anti-God or Anti-Christ, with its horde of macabre goblins and demons which has fascinated a number of Medieval and Romantic writers, has no influence on the mystical democracy of Rumi and Whitman. What is called evil is often experienced by the mystic to be a mere temporary phenomenal fact which is relative, not absolute. Rumi affirms such a concept of evil, as Emerson does in his essay on “Fate,” in the following lines:

There is no absolute evil in the world;
                              evil is relative.
In the realm of time there is nothing that
                              is not a foot to one and a fetter to another.(6)

Rumi and Whitman see man and nature and the whole universe as diverse images of one unifying and creative force. “All this multiformity is one; whoever sees double is a squint-eyed manikin,” says Rumi. In “A Persian Lesson”—a poem as deeply mystical as “Chanting the Square Deific”—Whitman makes the “greybeard sufi speak for the old poet in the same kind of Sufi language one can notice in Rumi's poems. These are Whitman's lines:

Finally my children, to envelop each word, each
                              part of the rest,
Allah is all, all—is immanent in every life and
                              object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes—yet Allah,
Allah, Allah is there.

(LG. [Leaves of Grass], 553)

It should be remembered that this is the Sufi voice of Whitman at the age of sixty-nine, three years before his death in 1892. That he included “A Persian Lesson”—originally called “A Sufi Lesson”—in the section “Good-Bye My Fancy” may suggest that he came across Rumi once again, as he did first almost twenty-seven years earlier in Poetry of the East, and strongly identified with him. To prove how Whitman's “A Persian Lesson” might have received the impact of Rumi's mysticism, compare these last lines of the poem with those of Rumi which follow them.

Whitman:
It is the central urge in every atom,
(Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and in object, without one exception.

(LG., 553)

Rumi:
The motion of every atom is towards its origin;
A man comes to be the thing on which he is bent.
By the attraction of fondness and yearning, the soul and the heart
Assume the qualities of the Beloved, who is the Soul of souls.(7)

It is also a central urge in every true mystic to intuit, and identify with, the unifying universal force in man and in all other phenomenal forms. This force may be described as an “archetypal force” (Rumi's term) or as an “eidolon” and “the seed perfection” (Whitman's terms), or in the guises of various nature deities, but, in essence, it is the same universal unifying force. For example, in Bhagavad-Gita Krishna claims to be that force:

For I am Brahman
Within this body,
Life immortal
That shall not perish:
I am the Truth
And the Joy for ever.(8)

Brahman in Hinduism, Al-Haq in Sufism, and Santa Spirita or the Over-soul in Transcendentalism are terms for the same cosmic force. In the beautiful lines of Tagore's Gitanjali this force is felt to be the universal blood-vessel of all living things:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins
          night and day runs through the world and dances
          in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust
          of the earth in numberless blades of grass breaks
          into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle
          of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.(9)

I am not attempting to compare Krishna's or Tagore's concept of creative cosmic force with the ideas of Rumi and Whitman; rather, I am trying to emphasize that all mystic poets seem to adhere to an emotional and imaginative realization of the unitive images of the Divine.

In Rumi's mystical odes and quatrains, teeming with wine and music and dance imagery, such an emotional realization of the Divine unity is often turned into an intoxicating and ecstatic one. Rumi calls God his “Beloved” and the “Wine” that mixes with his blood: “God is the Saki and the Wine; / He knows what manner of love is mine.”¹⁰ Therefore for him “phenomenal forms are pitchers with draughts of the Ideal, / Like a pitcher, we all are being filled with and emptied continually.”¹¹ In the same way, in “Eidolons” Whitman also sees forms being filled with eidolons—spiritual effluxes of the one Ideal Eidolon permeating the universe. Although forms are shown to be “pitchers” of the “Ideal draught” or temples of eidolons, as Whitman would say, they are not held as mere illusions. Indeed phenomenalism is considered by both Rumi and Whitman to be life in everlasting renewing process, for it proceeds from spirituality, as Rumi asserts:

What is this fountain …
The Soul whence issue all created things,
Doubtless the rivers shall not cease to flow
Till silenced are the everlasting spring.(12)

The erroneous contention that the “Eastern” mystics dismiss the world as being maya or illusion does not apply to Rumi. One must feel the burden of these words before making any such allegations: “I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one. … He is the outward, He is the inward.” The world, for Rumi, is divinely real: “God hath mingled in the dusty earth / A draught of beauty from His choicest cup.”¹³ This draught of beauty is what Tagore calls “the stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.” The reality of the mystic's world is not a static one; it is the reality of permanent life-death-rebirth process, as Whitman so well describes it in “Song of Myself”: “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world” (LG., 31).

Seeing the world in “procreant urge”—in progressive flux—most often mirrors the inner dynamic quality of the transcendent self or the soul dramatized through flight and circle imagery in their poems. A brief discussion of this kind of kinship between the two poets may be opportune here, although I examined it in detail in another essay “Motion Imagery in Rumi and Whitman.”¹⁴ Mystic seeing, which includes identifying with or becoming the things being seen, may be different from ordinary seeing in which distance between the subject and the object often remains unbridged. Mystic seeing—that which Emerson calls a “transparent eyeball (I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God …)” and Whitman dramatizes its tangible omniscience in his “Salut au Monde!”—is indeed nothing more than the same all-seeing dynamic transcendent self, which we always encounter in the works of most mystics. The self is by nature a dynamic force, being different from the fettered ego, and thus it experiences the world within and the world without in a state of flux.

Furthermore, it quests for self-perfection, to become reintegrated in the Higher Self. The path it must take to reach that aim goes through the lowest forms of life—inorganic, vegetative, animal, human—and ascends to highest spiritual stages. These lines of Rumi outline the evolutionary stages of the self from ore to pure spirit in reunion with the Higher Self:

I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar with
          angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on …
Oh, let me not exist; for non-existence
Proclaims in organic tunes, “to Him we shall return.”(15)

The dynamic self in “Song of Myself,” which is the drama of its evolution, is depicted to be primordial, co-eternal and co-existent, with the spirit and the stuff of the world:

Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was
          even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the
          lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Long I was hugg'd close—long and long.
Immense have been the preparation for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me.
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
          boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings …
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
All forces have been employ'd to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

(LG., 69)

Rumi in his “The Soul of the World” (the title of this and other poems is given by Reynold Nicholson, Rumi translator and scholar) identifies his soul with the creative spirit of the universe: “I have circled awhile with the nine Fathers in each Heaven. / For years I have revolved with the stars in their signs. / I was invisible awhile, I was dwelling with Him. Man is born once, I have been born many times.”¹⁶ Having identified himself with various forms of life, as Whitman does in “Song of Myself,” he claims creative immortality: “I am both cloud and rain: I have rained on the meadows. / Never did the dust of mortality settle on my skirt, O dervish!” Fluid and permeating, the soul feels no hinderance before its movements. Like a light wave it goes through life and animates it. As seen by Rumi and Whitman, the soul is the active conscious pulse, the dynamic principle, and thus identical with the life-force of the earth.

Seeing into things and feeling them, embracing them as parts of a whole, is the drama of the self performed in the mystical poems of Rumi and Whitman. In tune with his central vision, which is truth-in-unity, the mystic sees diverse images of the earth interlinked, flowing into one another, and becoming one another, because the life-death-rebirth cycle is a unitive urge on the earth which never ceases. Therefore time and space lose their dimensions in this universal flux. And thus the drama of identifications, the chief actor of which is the self, can move on with ease.

The mystic often feels united with the earth because he is from the earth and the earth is in him, as much as a child is linked to his mother. “I am ever in concord with this father (earth) of ours,” says Rumi, “and the earth ever appears to me as a paradise.”

Each moment a fresh form, a new beauty,
So that weariness vanishes at these ever-fresh sights,
I see the world filled with blessings,—
Fresh water ever welling up from new fountains,
The sounds of those waters reach my ears,
My brain and sense are intoxicated therewith,
Branches of trees dancing like fair damsals,
Leaves clapping hands like singers …
Thse glories are a mirror shining through a veil. …(17)

In “Song of the Rolling Earth” Whitman explains what it means to be “in concord” with the earth:

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him
          or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or
          her who is jagged and broken.

(LG., 223)

In “Song of the Rolling Earth” the earth is depicted to be the Logos, “the substantial words.” The earth is “complete,” “positive and direct,” and her “greatness and power” are ideals to be emulated. In “Song of the Universal” Whitman presents the earth as the universal divine mother bearing “the seed perfection.” For the two poets the earth is more than a temple of signs and symbols indicating the presence of some outer spiritual force. The universal soul or “the seed perfection” is indeed an organic part of the earth, and nowhere else is it better animated, humanized, and translated into urge and movement than in the earth.

II

Having discussed the unitive and pervasive images of the Divine in nature, with the self as a unifying and identifying force, I shall proceed to examine how He is internalized in the human heart as a source of love. In such religions as Christianity and Islam God is conceived in anthropomorphic terms, being often imbued with such human emotions as compassion and anger. In the Bible and the Koran there are numerous passages in which He is depicted sometimes as a stern and wrathful judge, sometimes as a moral tribal legislator, and most often a loying and forgiving Father. One might argue that God, like man, also suffers from certain emotional conflicts within Himself, but theologians can always get around such contradictions and offer us their time-honored answers.

The noble heresy of Rumi and Whitman is that they have transformed the “temperamental” Biblical God into the “Divine Beloved” and the “Great Camerado”—or God as a source of love and harmony. In being so represented He is not only humanized, but man is deified by realizing that love is in him. Love therefore is a means, as well as an aim, which links man to his real nature and to his Origin. To the mystic poet “the motion of every atom is towards its origin” and that origin, being the foundation of life—“a kelson of the creation”—is love, as Whitman says in “Song of Myself.”

God as the source of love is for the mystic poet an inclusive image consistent with his vision of universal unity. This image is felt to be identical with the sea as a primeval unifying and creative force. Both Rumi and Whitman resort to sea imagery to envision the Divine in terms of love and energy. The sea—“the Ocean of Creative Energy”¹⁸—is used in their poems to be the realm of the unitive cosmic soul, as well as the original source of life. In the poems of Rumi death in the sea is always desired because it is imagined to be a dissolving into the immortal origin of life, and symbolically, it is a oneness of the Drop (the individual self) with the Sea (the Higher Self). In terms of Rumi mysticism, man, as a microcosm of the divine sea, carries in his soul echoes of the Primeval Sea, within which he once lived in union with his Origin. Rumi often uses the drop or pearl image to symbolize his mystic relationship with the sea:

Happy was I
In the pearl's heart to lie;
Till, lashed by life's hurricane
Like a tossed wave I ran.
The secret of the sea
I uttered thunderously;
Like a spent cloud on the shore
I slept and stirred no more.(19)

In “Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd” Whitman thinks of himself as a “part of that ocean … the cohesion of all” to which he longs to “Return in peace.” The predominant image in this poem is that of the drop with which the poet identifies his mystic relationship to the sea. In “Passage to India,” as well as in “Out of the Cradle,” the sea assumes its highest mystic symbolism, where, as in many poems of Rumi, the poet seeks to be dissolved into the sea. In the frequent use of such lines as “lave me all over, / Bathe me O God in thee …” (419) Whitman, like Rumi, wishes for a unification of his soul with God symbolized by the sea, as in these ending lines from “Passage to India”:

The seas all cross'd … the voyage done,
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim
          achiev'd,
As fill'd with friendship, love complete, the Elder
          Brother found,
The Younger melting in fondness in his arms.

(LG., 419)

Eastbound, sailing on “the seas of God” toward “the realms of budding bibles” and “the primal thought,” Whitman on this mystic voyage at last encounters his “Comrade Perfect”—a figure very similar to Rumi's image of his master, Shamsi Tabrizi, who also stands for the Divine Beloved. This figure appears in Whitman's other quest poems too, as in “Song of Myself”: “The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms, / The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there” (LG., 83). In the odes of the Divan Rumi ritually re-enacts his spiritual union with the God of love by embracing his ideal friend and master, Shamsi Tabrizi. Therefore Rumi's spiritual relationship to Shams is identical with that of Whitman to the great Camerado, as Frederik Schyberg also notes:

At the end of the road (in “Song of Myself”), as the conclusion of all the wandering, the transformations and visions, there stands the Great Camerado whom Whitman mentioned in Section 45. We cannot fail to recall the Persian Rumi who also described his reunion with a friend (his real friend Shamsi Tabriz) as symbolic of his union with God. By coincidence in world literature … Whitman used as a conclusion for his pantheistic vision the very same lyrical imagery as the Persian poet, that of a friend into whose arms he falls to be united finally and completely with the Infinite and Whole.²⁰

To conclude, the God of wrath may have His place in a universe tainted with sin and evil, but He has no relevance to a universe experienced by the mystic to be teeming with love and unity. Although the anthropomorphic God is not rejected, all anthropomorphism in Him is transformed into love and love is seen as a primeval force in the creation, therefore identical with God. Sometimes Rumi associates life in love with immortality: “The fount of immortality in love is found, / Then come, and in this boundless sea of love be drowned.”²¹ For Whitman “a kelson of the creation is love” (LG., 33). And God is addressed as the original source of love in “Passage to India”: “Thou mightier center of the true, the good, the loving, / Thou moral, spiritual fountain—affection's source—thou reservoir …” (LG., 419). This deep realization of the unity of the Divine in terms of love, comradeship, and brotherhood saves the mysticism of Rumi and Whitman from becoming a dogmatic one. God thus felt in man and nature inspires poetry in the soul, and poetry then becomes the source of revelation in their mysticism. Perhaps nothing is more poetic and mystical than to call all men lovers and God the Beloved of all, as Rumi does. Or to call all men brothers and comrades and God the Elder Brother and the Great Camerado, as Whitman does. The human image of this God and His love for His children or brothers fills the world of the mystic poet with love, ecstasy, and unity.

Notes

1. Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273), the greatest classical Persian poet, is the author of two monumental works in Persian literature: the Mathnavi (a long mystical epic as widely known in the Islamic world as Dante's Divine Comedy is in the Western world) and the Divani Shamsi Tabriz (a huge collection of odes inspired by the poet's encounter with Shamsi Tabrizi, his friend and master, and his Muse). He is better known to the West as the founder of his Sufi order the “Whirling Dervishes.” In his “Proud Music of the Storms” Whitman has this accurate description of the order: “I hear dervishes monotonously chanting, interspers'd with frantic shouts, as they spin around turning always toward Mecca, / I see the rapt religious dances of the Persians and the Arab. …” (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Blodgett, Harold W. and Sculley [New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1973], p. 444. All references are to this edition and will appear in the body of the text.) Although Whitman never mentions Rumi in his works, he did become familiar with some of his poetry translated in W. R. Alger's Poetry of the East, a copy of which was given to the poet as early in his career as 1861. Although Whitman's personal copy of Poetry of the East has not been available to me, it has been examined by T. R. Rajasekhariah in his The Roots of Whitman's Grass (New York: Fairleigh University Press, 1970). Rajasekhariah cites this inscription written by the poet on the flyleaf of his copy of Alger's book: “Given me by WRA the author in Boston it must have been in 1861 or '2. Have often read (dabbled) in the Introduction to Oriental Poetry pp. 3 to 92 and over and over again … two or three of my jaunts thro' the war, I carried this volume in my trunk—read in it—sometimes to hospital groups, to while away the time” (The Roots of Whitman's Grass, p. 47). Rumi's poems selected in Alger's anthology, retranslated from Ruckert's German versions, and Purgstall's, may have inspired Whitman's later editions of Leaves, particularly his poem “A Persian Lesson”—originally called “The Sufi Lesson”—which appeared in the second annex of 1891 edition. Although Whitman does not mention Rumi in prose and poetry, his inscription on the flyleaf of his copy does testify to his having read the introductory section on Rumi and his poems, which occur in the first ninety-two pages. The second source through which Whitman might have become familiar with Rumi and other Persian poets, such as Hafiz and Saadi, was Emerson's essay, “Persian Poetry,” which Whitman mentions in his Notes and Fragments, pp. 77 & 84. In my dissertation Mystic Ideas and Images in Jalal al-Din Rumi and Walt Whitman (University of Arizona, 1978) I have dealt with the question of Rumi's influence on Whitman in more detail, but I believe that the striking resemblance one encounters in the works of the two poets more often results from a common psycho-mystical temperament or consciousness they had reached than influence per se.

2. Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Masnavi, trans. & ed. by E. H. Whinfield (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1975), p. 3.

3. Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, trans. & ed. by R. A. Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), p. 127.

4. R. A. Nicholson, Rumi, Poet and Mystic (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1956), p. 150.

5. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, A Tragedy, trans. by Bayard Taylor (New York; Washington Square Press, 1965), p. 12.

6. Rumi, Poet and Mystic, p. 152. [See note 4, above.]

7. Selected Poems from the Divan, p. 152.

8. Bhagavad-Gita, trans. by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1951), p. 110.

9. A Tagore Reader, ed. & trans. by Amiya Chakravarty (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 305. Tagore was a great admirer of Whitman. In his World of Personality he says that “no American has caught the Oriental spirit so well as Whitman” (A Tagore Reader, p. 264). In the same poem quoted in the text of this essay Tagore uses similar kinds of nature and motion imagery (“blades of grass,” “life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow”) which one can notice in the poems of Whitman and Rumi. Like those of Rumi, Tagore's Gitanjali and other poems teem with flute, dance, bird, and sea imagery.

10. The Masnavi, p. 3.

11. Selected Poems From the Divan, p. 28 (see the Introduction.)

12. Rumi, Poet and Mystic, p. 109.

13. Ibid., p. 45.

14. Ghulam M. Fayez, “Motion Imagery in Rumi and Whitman,” Walt Whitman Review (June 1979).

15. Rumi, Poet and Mystic, p. 103.

16. Ibid., p. 182.

17. The Masnavi, p. 214.

18. Rumi, Poet and Mystic, p. 37.

19. The Rubaiyat of Jalal al-Din Rumi, trans. by A. J. Arberry (London: Emery Walker, 1949), p. 25.

20. Frederik Schyberg, Walt Whitman, trans. from the Danish by Evie Allison Allen with an introduction by Gay Wilson Allen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), p. 93.

21. The Rubaiyat, p. 15.