The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Divan-e Kabir · a body of some three thousand ghazals, with strophic poems and quatrains beside them · composed at Konya over some three decades, from the poet’s meeting with Shams of Tabriz in 1244 to his death in 1273 · scored as the body is read, the ghazals first, in Badi al-Zaman Foruzanfar’s critical edition, the Kulliyat-e Shams (Tehran, ten volumes, 1957 to 1967) · scored on Rumi’s Persian, read from knowledge with Arberry and Nicholson for sense; no text in hand, Persian quoted only where its words are certain, transliterated, with the desk’s own English
Mode
Ecstatic lyric; love song, song of the dance, lament, devotion, comedy and vision in one voice, often spoken as if aloud in the middle of a gathering
Mythos
A real friendship made the load of the whole: Shams as the sun of the name, of the cosmos and of the heart; his absence as the beloved’s absence, his return as resurrection; the teacher who kills and remakes the disciple
Phase
No narrative: each ghazal turns from transport or grief toward its close, very often on the word <i>khamush</i>, “silence”; across the body, meeting, loss, waiting and return, never set in order
Presentation
Mono-rhymed ghazals in quantitative Persian metres, many with a <i>radif</i>, with strophic poems and quatrains beside them; signed most often with the name of Shams; arranged by rhyme letter and metre, not by date; Persian with some Arabic, and a few lines with Turkish and Greek
Register
From tavern comedy and colloquial bargaining to jealous grief and the soul’s ascent through the spheres; fast, refrain-driven and strongly stressed, close to speech and to song
Scale
One man and one friendship in one city, opened onto the sun, the moon, the seasons, the sea, the dead and the throne
Governing Proposition
Some three thousand ghazals, made over three decades by a jurist and preacher of Konya after he met a wandering dervish named Shams, “Sun”, and lost him, in which the poet signs the other man’s name where his own should stand. The poems turn round one centre as the dancer turns round one point: love as the force that undoes the self and makes it again, with the beloved, at once the missing friend and the divine, as the sun all things circle. The wager of the body is that the sacred is met in the near and the particular, that a self can die and come alive in one line, and that a poem tells the truth best at the point where it orders itself to be silent.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi lived from 1207 to 1273. His family had been driven from Balkh by the Mongol invasions, and in Konya he was a jurist and a preacher of standing, heir to his father’s chair. In 1244 he met there a wandering dervish, Shams al-Din of Tabriz, whose name means “Sun”. Shams left Konya, returned, and about 1247 to 1248 vanished for good. Rumi’s disciples had resented him; an early tradition says they may have driven him off or killed him, and that cannot be confirmed. What can be said is what the poems say: that a learned man threw over his public self for this friendship, and that through the loss, the waiting and the search in Damascus he went on making poems in the friend’s name to the end of his life.
The poems were made over some three decades, from the meeting to the poet’s death. By early report many were composed aloud during the sama, the gathering of musical audition and turning, and taken down by others; the detail of that practice cannot be verified poem by poem. They are in Persian, with some lines and whole poems in Arabic and a few lines that mix in Turkish and Greek. The ghazals are the work: some three thousand of them, with strophic poems and quatrains beside them, which the desk names as context and weighs lightly. The Masnavi, the long poem in couplets of the same poet’s last years, is a separate work.
A ghazal in Persian ends with a signature line, the takhallus, in which the poet names himself. In this Divan the name most often written there is not Rumi’s but Shams’s, and the book has carried it since: the Divan of Shams of Tabriz. Some ghazals sign instead with Salah al-Din or Husam al-Din, and a great many end on no name at all but on a command, khamush, “be silent”. The poet who gives away his own signature has made the loss of self in the beloved a fact of the form before any poem states it. Everything else in the body turns on that gift: the friend’s name in place of the poet’s, and the sun of the name in place of every other centre.
Movement II
“morde bodam zende shodam, gerye bodam khande shodam”, “I was dead, I came alive; I was weeping, I became laughter.” The line gives the whole body’s turn in one breath. The resurrection ghazal climbs in a single metre from death to laughter and from the grave to the sky, and every line of it drives the one turn of death into life. It is the turn the friendship made in the poet, and the poems never tire of making it again: a man undone by love of another and made new, a second birth, a self that dies before death and comes back speaking.
The form is inherited and remade. The ghazal had been a courtly and contemplative form, and the mystical ghazal had been made by Sana’i and Attar, whom Rumi names as his masters. In the Divan it becomes a song of the dance. The metres are taken from the fast and strongly stressed measures; the radif, the refrain word repeated at the end of every couplet, returns until the poem circles it as the dancer circles one point; colloquial phrases, refrains and repeated words break into the high diction; a line will slip from Persian into Arabic or Turkish. Many poems are spoken as if aloud in the middle of a gathering, to the musicians, to the company, to the friend. The poem becomes a thing done with the body.
This is also where the body is weakest. A poetry made in the gathering is not worked for years, and the Divan has slack lines, padded couplets and rhymes forced to fill a pattern, and the same turn of phrase recurs across hundreds of poems. Persian criticism has long set its finish below Hafez’s. The sound of the metres across the whole is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. What can be weighed is the drive of the best poems, which no polish could improve: the resurrection ghazal, the Hajj ghazal, the poems of the reed and the drum, where internal rhyme and the repeated word make the sound carry the sense.
Movement III
“ay qowm be hajj rafte, koja-id, koja-id / ma’shuq hamin-ja-st, biya-id, biya-id”, “O people gone on the Hajj, where are you, where are you? The beloved is here; come, come.” In two lines the pilgrimage is turned inside out. The travellers are called back from the road to Mecca, and the refrain, doubled in each half of the line, does what it says: the poem goes round the place it stands in, as the pilgrims go round the house, and finds the house there.
The Divan’s ghazals of the Hajj and of the house of the heart carry its plainest claim: that the sacred is met in the near and the particular, not far off. The claim holds outside any doctrine. The beloved is a man in Konya, and the divine is met in him; the self is made by love of another person; a teacher can be the occasion of a second birth. The doctrine of the self annihilated in the beloved was older than Rumi, and much of the Divan renders transport rather than stating anything. What the poems add is the inwardness with which a particular human bond is shown as the place where the highest thing happens.
That bond is shown in all its conditions. There are poems of absence written after Shams vanished, and poems calling for his return; poems of waiting and of jealousy; poems in which the learned man is humbled, and poems of joy when the friend comes back. The dread side of love is there as well as its rapture and in the lover burned. The social and moral world beyond the friendship is not disclosed with the same depth, and the Divan does not pretend to it. What it knows, it knows of love, loss, the teacher and the self.
Movement IV
“man gholam-e qamar-am, gheyr-e qamar hich magu”, “I am the slave of the moon; speak of nothing but the moon.” The line could stand for the whole body’s method. It speaks of one thing. A ghazal of tavern drunkenness and comic bargaining with a wine seller, a ghazal of the soul’s ascent through the spheres to the throne, a poem of jealous grief for a missing man and a poem in which all creation turns round the sun as the dancer turns: each obeys one law, love as the force that undoes the self and makes it again, with the beloved, at once Shams and the divine, at the centre.
The images are the common stock of the Persian Sufi lyric: the moth and the candle, Joseph and Zulaykha, Layla and Majnun, the reed, the tavern, the sea and the drop. What is not common is the load placed on one name. The sun of Shams’s name becomes the sun of the cosmos and the sun rising in the heart; his disappearance becomes the absence of the beloved in every poem of longing; his imagined return becomes the resurrection. The friendship stays particular, Konya, the quarrel, the search in Damascus, while it carries the archetypes, and the archetypes are built on it rather than summoned as atmosphere.
The single law is also a narrowness, and the body pays for it. Over some three thousand poems the same images return, and a severe reader finds many ghazals at a stock pitch of rapture. The range the law governs is wide, body and city, music and the cosmos, comedy and grief and the dead; but some orders it barely touches. Labour, the family and the state are nearly absent. The Mongol invasions, which drove the poet’s family from Balkh and shook Anatolia through his lifetime, hardly enter, and the social world appears only as a scandal the lover rises above. The Divan holds more than a single lyric sequence holds, and less than an epic.
Movement V
A great many ghazals end on one word, khamush, “silence”, “be silent”. The poet, who has given his signature to another man, signs instead with an order to stop speaking. The poem lifts to the point of what cannot be said and breaks off there. It is the body’s highest and most frequent summit, and its sharpest turn of form: a lyric that undoes its own speech in its last word, and so makes the failure of speech before what it must say the thing the poem shows. The Divan rises in this way again and again, so often that a reader can mistake frequency for sameness; the height is real each time.
The body was never shaped as a book. In the manuscripts, and in the modern edition, the poems are ordered by rhyme letter and by metre, not by date, and the order is an editor’s, not a narrative. Manuscripts of the poet’s own century and the next survive, but in later centuries the Divan was swollen with hundreds of ghazals by other hands, and the printed lithographs carried them. Badi al-Zaman Foruzanfar’s critical edition, the Kulliyat-e Shams (ten volumes, 1957 to 1967), sifted the poems of the early manuscripts from the spurious ones and gave a text sound enough to read the body as Rumi left it; the attribution of a margin of poems is still argued.
The poems have been sung for seven and a half centuries: in the sama of the Mevlevi order in Konya and beyond, in Persian, Afghan, Tajik and Turkish devotional music, and in sung ghazal across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and South Asia. The Mevlevi poets of Ottoman Turkish, Sheikh Galib among them, wrote in its manner; Iqbal’s Persian ghazals take Rumi as their guide; Friedrich Rückert made his Ghaselen (1819) after the Divan, and through them Hegel’s Aesthetics took Rumi as the type of pantheistic poetry. R. A. Nicholson’s selection of 1898, with the Persian facing, and A. J. Arberry’s four hundred ghazals carried it into English, and paraphrase has since carried the poet’s name much further than the poems. Under all of it the body still turns on one name and ends, over and over, on one word.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is brutal for this body, and it is what holds the figure here. Some three thousand ghazals come round in the end to one subject; by early report many were composed aloud and taken down as they came; the same images, sun, moon, wine, the reed, the tavern, Joseph, the sea and the drop, return in hundreds of poems, and whole ghazals could be removed without the body losing anything it does not say better elsewhere. Rumi did not select the Divan or order it: the order is the rhyme letter’s. Against that, the best ghazals are as necessary as any lyric in Persian, every line of the resurrection ghazal driving its one turn, and the repetition is the mode of a poetry of return, remembrance made verse. But the axis asks of the whole, and the whole is permitted, not compelled, in its scale.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Much of the Divan renders transport rather than stating a truth, and ecstasy is a mood; its doctrine of the self annihilated in the beloved was set out before it by Sana’i, Attar and the prose Sufis. What it discloses holds without any doctrine. The self is made and unmade by love of another person; a teacher can be the occasion of a second birth, and his loss the ground of one’s own voice; the sacred is met in the near and the particular, for the beloved “is here”, not in Mecca; and speech fails at the point of what it must say. The bond with Shams is disclosed as a human condition, in grief, waiting, jealousy, the humiliation of the learned man and the joy of return, with an inwardness no earlier Persian lyric has. Short of the widest disclosure of the social and moral world.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Elevation without relief cloys, and a severe reader finds many ghazals at a stock pitch of rapture. But the axis asks height and frequency, and here both are as high as anything in lyric. The resurrection ghazal climbs in a single metre from death to laughter and from the grave to the sky; the Hajj ghazal turns the whole pilgrimage inside out in two lines; the poems of the turning, of the reed and the drum and the sun rising in the heart, rise again and again, and the dread side is there in the poems of absence and of the lover burned. The repeated close on khamush makes silence itself the summit: the poem lifts to the point of what cannot be said, and stops. Few bodies in any language rise so often or so high.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The images are the common stock of the Persian Sufi lyric, the moth and the candle, Joseph and Zulaykha, Layla and Majnun, the reed, the ocean, and myth evoked in allusion would not hold this figure. What holds it is that one particular man, a wandering dervish of Tabriz named Shams, “Sun”, is made the load of the whole body. The sun of his name becomes the sun of the cosmos and the sun in the heart; the signature that should carry the poet’s name carries his; his disappearance becomes the archetypal absence of the beloved, and his longed-for return the resurrection. The lover and the beloved, the teacher who kills and remakes the disciple, the second birth: all are built on one historical friendship, which stays particular while it carries them, in Konya, in the quarrel, in the search in Damascus.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The mystical ghazal had been made by Sana’i and Attar, whom Rumi names as his masters, and the doctrine and much of the imagery are inherited; a reader of Persian may call the Divan an intensification. The turn is real and large. A courtly and contemplative form is made a song of the dance, in driving metres, colloquial phrases, refrains and repeated words, sometimes macaronic, often spoken as if aloud in the middle of a gathering; the poet gives his own signature away to another man; the poem ends by telling itself to be quiet. The stake was paid: a jurist and preacher of standing, heir to his father’s chair, threw over his public self for a dervish his disciples resented and, by an early tradition that cannot be confirmed, may have driven off or killed. The Divan is that wager in verse.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The ghazal is not Rumi’s form; he uses it as given, and much of what the Divan says is said again in the couplets of the Masnavi. But inside the poem the form is the knowledge. The radif, the refrain word at the end of every couplet, becomes a turning: “koja-id, koja-id”, “biya-id, biya-id”, the poem circling one word as the dancer circles one point. The metre, taken from the fast and stressed measures, makes the poem a thing done with the body. The signature given to Shams makes the self lost in the beloved a fact of the form; khamush closes the form by silencing it. Put these poems into narrative or prose and they can no longer show a self undone as it speaks. Below the top because the larger form, the Divan as a book, was never made.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The Divan has had less commentary than the Masnavi, which drew a great line of commentators in Persian, Turkish and Urdu, and less than Hafez’s Divan, read and glossed and consulted in augury in every Persian household; many readers know it in a few dozen anthology poems, and the whole has been comparatively little studied. That holds it below the most returned-to bodies. For it: seven and a half centuries of recitation in the Mevlevi sama and in Persian, Afghan, Tajik and Turkish devotional music, and a yield on return that is real, the same images opening differently as the reader moves between the erotic, the mystical, the personal and the cosmic readings, none exhausting the others. The scholarship of the last century, Foruzanfar, Nicholson, Schimmel and Lewis, found the body larger and stranger than its reputation.
Score: 8.8 / 10
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Persian poetry of the thirteenth century, and with it the lyric of the Persianate and Islamic world after it. The intrinsic force is very high: it showed what the ghazal could hold of ecstasy, of music and of a real person, and no Persian lyric after it could be quite so courtly again. Against it: the line of the Persian ghazal runs from Sa’di to Hafez, who learned more from Sa’di and Khwaju than from Rumi; the ecstatic manner was in some ways a summit without a school; and much of Rumi’s reach is the Masnavi’s and the Mevlevi order’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Mevlevi poets of Ottoman Turkish, Sheikh Galib among them, wrote in its manner; Iqbal’s Persian ghazals take Rumi as their guide; Rückert’s Ghaselen (1819) were made after it, and through them Hegel’s Aesthetics took Rumi as the type of pantheistic poetry; Nicholson and Arberry carried it into English.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a span of about seven and a half centuries. The form is whole and legible: manuscripts of the poet’s own century and the next survive, and Foruzanfar’s edition gives a text sound enough to read the body as Rumi left it. The charge on form: the later Divan was swollen with hundreds of ghazals by other hands, the true body was recovered only in the 1950s and 1960s, and the attribution of a margin of poems is still argued. The presence is continuous and wider than a book’s, in the sama of the Mevlevi order, in sung ghazal across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and South Asia, in schooling, and now in translation and paraphrase across the world, which earns a tenth at most and proves nothing. The fabric carries no charge.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged on Rumi’s Persian, so far as this reading reaches it; where the figure depends on hearing the metres fully, the limit is the reading’s, not the work’s. Persian critics have long weighed his ghazal below Hafez’s in finish, and rightly: the Divan has slack lines, padded couplets, rhymes forced to complete a pattern, the marks of improvisation, and the same turn of phrase met many times over. A body taken down from the gathering is not polished like a lyric worked for years. Against this, the metrical command is extraordinary: a wide range of metres, among them fast, strongly stressed measures, used with an ear for stress, internal rhyme and the repeated word that makes sound carry sense. The best ghazals have an economy and a drive no polish could improve, and the macaronic and colloquial play is controlled. At the top the making is load bearing; across the whole it is uneven.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the most distant elements: a ghazal of tavern drunkenness and comic bargaining with a wine seller, and a ghazal of the soul’s ascent through the spheres to the throne; a poem of jealous grief for a missing man, and a poem in which all creation turns round the sun as the dancer turns. They obey one law: love as the force by which the self is undone and remade, with the beloved, at once Shams and the divine, as the sun all things turn on. The law holds across the erotic, the devotional, the comic, the cosmological and the personal, and across three decades. A single law over three thousand poems can be a narrowness, and narrowness is not coherence; but the range here is wide, body, city, music, cosmos and the dead, and the law governs it rather than shutting it out.
Score: 9.0 / 10
A lyric body is not charged for being lyric, but what it holds is weighed as it is. It holds consciousness at its edge, the self dissolving and returning; friendship and its loss; the sacred; the natural order of sun, moon, seasons, garden and sea; music and the body in the dance; death and resurrection; and something of the city of Konya and its learned men. It holds little of labour, the family, the state or history. The Mongol invasions, which drove Rumi’s family from Balkh and shook Anatolia through his lifetime, barely enter, and the social world appears only as a scandal the lover rises above. What it holds it holds in one relation, integrated rather than listed: more than a single lyric sequence holds, less than an epic or a novel.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.4 and The Imperishable at 9.3, with The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and The Inner Law at 9.0. A body that rises as often and as high as any lyric, from death into laughter and to the edge of silence; seven and a half centuries of continuous recitation and song, on a text recovered from its early manuscripts; one historical friendship made to carry the archetypes of lover, teacher and second birth; a courtly form turned into a song of the dance, with the poet’s own signature given away; and one law of love holding the tavern, the spheres, grief and the cosmos.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6: some three thousand ghazals on one subject, the same images returning in hundreds of them, many poems removable without loss, and the whole never selected or ordered by the poet, its order the rhyme letter’s. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.4, which holds little of labour, the family, the state or the history of its century; then The Unconcealment, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, for ecstasy that often renders a mood rather than a truth, and for a share of commentary and reach that belongs to the <i>Masnavi</i> and the Mevlevi order rather than to the Divan.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth, the narrowest margin on the page. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Inner Law at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.3, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Swerve at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 7.6, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 105.9, an average of 8.825, which stands at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, also called the Divan-e Kabir, scored as a body of poems as it is read: the ghazals, with the strophic poems (tarji-band) and the quatrains named as context and weighed lightly. The text is Badi al-Zaman Foruzanfar’s critical edition, the Kulliyat-e Shams (Tehran, ten volumes, 1957 to 1967), which sifted the poems of the manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from the spurious ghazals of the later lithographs; the attribution of a margin of poems remains argued. The Masnavi is a separate work and is not scored here. Every axis is judged on the Persian. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Persian is quoted only where its words are certain, transliterated, with the desk’s own close English; the Divan is not numbered on this page, and the ghazals are named by their lines. The body is known in its kinds, themes and devices and in a few dozen ghazals, not ghazal by ghazal; the music of the Persian metres can be described here but not fully heard, and where an axis depends on it the limit is the reading’s and is not charged to the work. Translations · A. J. Arberry’s Mystical Poems of Rumi (two volumes, 400 ghazals, 1968 and 1979), for sense; R. A. Nicholson’s Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz (1898), with the Persian facing, for sense and commentary; Franklin Lewis’s versions and study, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (2000). The popular American versions are paraphrases from earlier English and are not the work; their spread is counted as presence under The Imperishable, at most a tenth, and nowhere else. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the poems. Exact counts of ghazals, quatrains and lines are not given; the account of how the poems were taken down in the gatherings rests on early report and is given as report; the tradition that Shams was killed is given as tradition.