Spiritual Verses: the Masnavi

Spiritual Verses
Jelaluddin Rumi
translation by Alan Williams 
Penguin Books, 2006
ISBN-13:9780140447910

More about Jelaluddin Rumi 

From the introduction by Alan Williams:

To whom is the poetry of the Masnavi addressed? One of its most striking features is its psychological immediacy: the whole poem is addressed to the second-person ‘you’ of the human reader, and to the ‘You’ of the divine presence – though often the two are implicitly linked. Rumi addresses ‘you’ from the first line, when he commands ‘Listen’. The stories that run through the work are told in the third person (i.e. never in the first person) about characters from folklore, scripture and myth, but then Rumi’s gaze returns to ‘you’, addressed affectionately as ‘my son’, ‘father’, ‘dear reader’, ‘lad’ .

Rumi is both a poet and a mystic, but he is a teacher first, trying to communicate what he knows to his audience. Like all good teachers, he trusts that ultimately, when the means to go any further fail him and his voice falls silent, his students will have learnt to understand on their own.

Extract from ‘The King and the Slave Girl’ 110-120

The sign of being in love’s an aching heart;
there is no suffering like the suffering heart.
The lover’s suffering’s like no other suffering:
love is the astrolabe of God’s won mysteries.

No matter whether love is of this world
or of the next, it seals us to that world.
Whatever words I say to explain this love,
when I arrive at love, I am ashamed.

Though language gives a clear account of love,
yet love beyond all language is the clearer.
The pen had gone at breakneck speed in writing,
but when it came to love it split in two.

The explaining mind sleeps like an ass in mud,
for love alone explains love and the lover.
The sun alone is proof of all things solar:
if you need proof, do not avert your face.

Although the shadow gives a hint of it,
the sun bestows the light of life at all times.
The shadow brings you sleep like bedtime stories,
and when the sun comes up, ‘the moon is cloven.’

There’s nothing like this sun in all the world,
the spiritual Sun’s eternal – never setting.
Although the outward sun may be unique,
still you can contemplate another like it.

And yet the sun from which the aether comes
has no external or internal likeness.
How can imagining contain His essence,
and likeness of Him come into conception?