Jalaloddin Rumi

Now, my first review is going to be of something that many of you are unlikely to care about, but it’s really impressed me. There hasn’t been a lot in my World Lit class that’s just stuck out to me, but right now, we’re studying Islamic literature, and we’ve been looking at the poetry of Jalaloddin Rumi. And he’s pretty amazing. He writes these poems, and they’re all pretty short (some only a few lines), and all tend to deal with the Sufi ideals, like separating yourself from the material world and being unified in nature and whatnot. Very sort of transcendental stuff. And the language is very simple, you know? Not extremely flowery, and easy to read. They’re pretty much first draft poems too, because he just recited them, and others wrote them down, and he rarely changed any lines once he read them. These amazing, beautiful poems were first tries. Brilliant.
And what’s really remarkable is that, although the literature is Islamic, it can be applied to our God, and to other religions. Several times, he refers to God as “Friend,” and sometimes God refers to the human as “Friend,” which I really like—viewing God as our best, most important friend. It has themes of God being our support, and how we have to give up our lives to God in order to really live, and letting God use you for His will. It’s pretty powerful stuff. I have every intention of reading more of it than is in my Lit book.

Here are a few of his poems that I particularly liked:


Friend, our closeness is this:
Anywhere you put your foot, feel me
in the firmness under you.

How is it with this love,
I see your world and not you?




Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.




Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.





A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it’s being boiled.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

The cook knocks it down with the ladle.

“Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you,
I’m giving you flavor,
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.

Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.”

Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.



I don’t know if you’ll like these as much as I do, but I think you should read them a couple of times and mull them over for awhile. If you’re interested in more of his poetry, I just found a lot of it at http://www.armory.com/~thrace/sufi/poems.html