Friday, November 28, 2014

Rumi on Love



One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked.
A voice asked, "Who is there?"
He answered, "It is I"
The voice said, "There is no room for Me and Thee ."
The door was shut.

After a year of solitude and deprivation he returned and
knocked .
A voice from within asked, "Who is there?"
The man said, "It is Thee ."

The door was opened for him .

(Jalaluddin Rumi)

Anwari, like the Western magician-poets of old, emphasizes
that the poet and lover shade into one another :

If to be a lover is to be a poet, I am a poet ;
If to be a poet is to be a magician, I am a magician ;
If to be a magician is to be thought evil, I can be
thought evil ;
If to be thought evil is to be disliked by worldlings, I
am content to be such .
Disliked by worldlings is to be a lover of the true reality,
more often than not .

I affirm that I am a Lover!



A Sufi poet of the seventeenth century says, in the Key of
the Afghans:

The arrow needs an archer, and poetry a magician .
He must ever hold in his mind the scales of meter, rejecting
the long and the short. Truth is his mistress,
astride a black steed, veiled in allegory. From beneath
her lashes shoot a hundred unerring glances . The poet
will decorate her fingers with multihued jewels, adorn
her with the perfume and scent of saffron metaphor .
Alliteration will ring like foot bells ; on her bosom will
be the mystery of concealed rhyme. Together with the
secrets of inner meaning, the concealing eyes, these
make her body a perfection of mystery.

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