The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jalal al-Din Rumi · a poem in rhymed couplets · six books, between 25,000 and 26,000 couplets · dictated at Konya from about 1258 to 1262 until the poet’s death in 1273 · the six books as transmitted, in Nicholson’s text on the Konya manuscript of 1278, the spurious seventh book excluded and the broken close of the sixth kept · scored on Rumi’s Persian, read from knowledge with Nicholson’s prose for sense; Persian quoted only where its words are certain, transliterated, with the desk’s own close English
Mode
Mystical discourse in verse; tale, exegesis, address and argument woven into one dictated poem
Mythos
The reed cut from its bed; the soul’s exile and return; the self that deceives itself; form as the vessel meaning breaks; the prophets as states of the soul
Phase
No single action: the soul’s way from separation toward its source, told again in tale after tale across six books, the last broken off
Presentation
Poem; six books of rhyming couplets in one metre, the <i>ramal</i>, with Arabic prose prefaces and verse addresses to the scribe; well over two hundred tales, many nested and suspended
Register
From market jest and bawdy anecdote to Qur’anic exegesis, sermon, lament and vision; fast, close to speech, and turning at any couplet
Scale
The self, the household, the market, the court and the prophets’ histories, from the mineral to the angel and beyond
Governing Proposition
A reed cut from its reed-bed speaks of separation, and for six books and some twenty-five thousand couplets the poem finds that cry again in kings and slaves, grocers and prophets, beasts and lovers, opening tales inside tales and leaving them open. The wager of the poem is that every surface of the world is a figure of the soul’s exile from its source and its way back, and that a form which lets meaning overrun every story can say this more truly than a form that maps the way.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The poem begins with a command and a subject. Its first word is bishnaw, “listen”, and what the reed has to tell is az juda’iha, “of separations”. The second line of the couplet gives the reed’s whole history in a clause: “k-az nayistan ta mara bibrida-and”, “since they cut me from the reed-bed”. The reed cries because it has been cut, and its cry is its music. Eighteen couplets follow, the Song of the Reed, the ney-nama, and with them the poem has set out its figure before it has told a single story. The voice that speaks is an instrument, sounding only because it was severed from its source and only while a breath passes through it, and everything after is that voice speaking again.
It was made by speaking. Jalal al-Din Rumi dictated it in Konya to his disciple Husam al-Din Chalabi, who wrote it down and read it back, from about 1258 to 1262 until the poet’s death in December 1273. Book II opens by saying that the work had been delayed for a time, traditionally after the death of Husam’s wife; the dates of the pause are given variously. The scribe is in the poem: the verse turns again and again to address him, and the making is never hidden. The books carry Arabic prose prefaces. The text stands on the Konya manuscript dated 677 of the Hijra, 1278, copied within about five years of the poet’s death, on which R. A. Nicholson’s edition for the most part rests. A seventh book circulated in later centuries. It is not Rumi’s, and the six are the work.
The form is named in the title, Masnavi-yi Ma’navi, “Couplets of Inner Meaning”. A masnavi is a poem in rhyming couplets, each with its own rhyme, aa, bb, cc, and this one keeps a single metre, the ramal, fa’ilatun fa’ilatun fa’ilun, the metre of Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr. Six books run to between 25,000 and 26,000 couplets, more than 50,000 half-lines, about three times the lines of the Iliad. Within them are well over two hundred tales, many nested inside others and suspended for hundreds of couplets, woven with exegesis of the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet, with argument, and with direct address to the reader and to Husam. There is no journey and no plot to carry the whole. What carries it is the cry of the first couplet, found again in every place the poem goes.
Movement II
In the dark, men touch an elephant they cannot see. Each touches one part and names the beast by it: one calls it a fan, one a pillar, one a waterspout. The tale in Book III does not end by telling them what an elephant is. It says that if each had held a candle their quarrel would have ended, and the point is the candle, not a better argument. Every perception is partial, and the poem does not propose to correct a partial view by a fuller account; it proposes a light. The tale has become a figure the world uses.
In Book II Moses hears a shepherd speaking to God. The shepherd offers to comb God’s hair and kill his lice, and Moses rebukes him for speaking so of the Lord. Then God rebukes Moses for parting a servant from his Lord. The tale turns on the prophet, and what it weighs is the heart, not the words: a prayer that would be blasphemy as doctrine is accepted as love, and the correct rebuke is the fault. The prophets of the Qur’an come back throughout the poem in this way, Moses, Joseph, Solomon, Abraham and Jesus, each made a state of the soul while remaining a particular man in a particular scene. A guest who can find no other gift for Joseph brings him a mirror, so that he may see his own beauty.
The self is the poem’s constant subject, and it is a liar of great skill. The nafs, the lower self, appears in dozens of disguises, in tales of greed and pride. The same truth is found in a grocer’s parrot, in a lion and a hare, in a Sufi’s donkey. In Book I a wife argues with her poor Bedouin husband, and the poem lets her argue. The first tale of all, of a king, a slave girl and a goldsmith, with its false physicians, is a story and becomes, as it goes, an allegory of the soul and of the tale itself, a vessel the meaning overruns. Truth is found again and again, and the finding is the method, as remembrance repeats a single name.
Movement III
The didactic Sufi masnavi was an inheritance. Sana’i had made it in the Hadiqat al-Haqiqa, and Attar had given it a strong frame in the Mantiq al-Tayr, where the birds’ journey to the Simurgh holds every tale in its order and the way can be followed from start to end. Rumi kept Attar’s metre and broke the frame. In the Masnavi a tale is opened and abandoned, resumed a hundred couplets later, opened again inside another tale, interrupted by the narrator, and closed with a line that admits it has not been closed. A critic appears inside the poem itself and scorns it as mere tales of prophets with no high doctrine, and Rumi answers him. The form risked looking shapeless, and it has been read so.
The poem has its own account of what it is doing. Form, surat, is the vessel of meaning, ma’na, and meaning breaks every vessel. Rumi calls the tale a measure for the grain, and the tale is overrun again and again by what it measures: the digression is that overflow made visible. A well-framed narrative would say that the way can be mapped. This one says it cannot, and shows it. The couplet is the right unit for such a poem, since it closes every two lines and lets any line open a new turn, and the dictated voice, breaking off to speak to Husam, is the voice passing through the reed. The open form also admits slack, and the poem does not hide that either.
Sacred and obscene sit side by side. In Book V a maidservant, a donkey and a gourd make a tale as frank as anything in medieval literature, and its moral is that imitation without knowledge kills. In Book III Daquqi sees seven candles become one, then seven trees, then seven men at prayer. Rumi says outright that the ribald tale is a figure as the vision is, and defends such tales as teaching. The two obey one law: every surface in the poem, from the market to the throne of God, from beast fable to exegesis, in Persian and in Arabic, is a figure of the soul’s separation from its source and its way back. The range is the widest of any medieval poem, and one physics holds it.
Movement IV
In Book III a chickpea leaps from the boiling pot, and the cook tells it that the boiling is love. In the same book the soul is shown its ladder. It rises from mineral to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to man, from man to angel, and past the angel to what imagination cannot enter. The two passages say one thing at two heights, in a kitchen and in the order of creation, and the poem moves between such heights without warning, as it moves between its tales.
The heights come often, and from small things. In Book I an old harper plays for God in the graveyard, and Umar seeks him out. In the same book a pillar moans and grieves when the Prophet leaves it for a pulpit. Daquqi’s vision of the candles, the trees and the men at prayer is a third summit, set among tales of the market. The Song of the Reed had set the first at the threshold, and the poem keeps returning to that height across all six books.
A lover walks back to Bukhara, the city that will kill him. In Book V the tale of Ayaz and his sheepskin carries a turn of the argument that no other tale carries. Between such summits lie long flats of exegesis and homily, and the ribald tales are not meant to rise and do not. The poem says its few great things many times: the exile of the soul, the deceit of the self, the gap between form and meaning, the lover lost in the beloved. Many tales could go without losing one of them. The great tales could not.
Movement V
The poem does not end. Book VI breaks off inside the tale of three princes and a fortress, before the third prince’s story is done. The break is a fact of the making, not a loss of the text, and the work’s law does not require a close. Unlike an epic whose plot lacks its end, the Masnavi was always open: its tales had been left suspended from the first book, and the reader had often been unsure whether a digression had come back. The last tale left open is one more of them, and the reed is still speaking when the breath stops.
The poem survived in an institution built to read it. From the poet’s son Sultan Walad onward the Mevlevi order made it its scripture after the Qur’an, read it aloud in its lodges through an office of its own, the masnavi-khwan, and commented on it line by line. The lodges spread from the Balkans to Egypt. Commentary followed in Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu and Arabic: Anqaravi in Ottoman Turkish, a long line in India, Sabzavari in Iran in the nineteenth century, Badi’ al-Zaman Furuzanfar and Karim Zamani in the twentieth, and Nicholson’s two volumes in English. The order was suppressed in Turkey in 1925, and the reading went on. Rumi’s preface to Book I had called the work the roots of the roots of the roots of religion, and seven centuries of labour have taken him at his word.
It became the central book of Persianate Sufism across three empires. Jami’s poetry follows it. Iqbal wrote his Asrar-i Khudi in its form and named Rumi his guide. Its tales and couplets became proverbs from Bosnia to Bengal, and it is a reason Persian is read by many who are not Persians. Its reach into Europe came late, from the nineteenth century, and has been mainly scholarly, and the modern fame of the poet’s name in English rests largely on paraphrase. The poem holds little of its own century: the Mongol conquest that drove Rumi’s family west is nearly absent from it. What it holds instead is the self, the household, the market, the court, the beasts and the prophets, each read as the one drama the reed announced in its first word.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is hard on this poem. There is no plot to require anything: tales are opened, left for a gloss, opened inside one another, resumed books later, and some never close. Runs of exegesis could be lifted, one exemplum exchanged for another that teaches the same point, and fifty tales with many homiletic stretches in Books IV and VI could go without the loss of one claim. Rumi calls the tale a measure and the meaning the grain in it, which concedes that the measure can be replaced. What holds the figure is a spine of return: the reed’s complaint is the law every later tale is told under, and some tales bear weight nothing else bears. Moses and the shepherd carries the theology of forms; the merchant’s parrot, which escapes its cage by feigning death, the death before death the whole poem teaches.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the poem discloses can be stated as true, and holds outside its faith. Longing is the motive of a life: the reed cries because it was cut from its bed, and everyone left far from his root seeks back the time of his union. Knowledge is partial by the organ that grasps it: in the elephant in the dark each man touches one part and names the beast a fan, a pillar or a waterspout, and a candle, not a better argument, would end the quarrel. God weighs the heart and not the words, as Moses learns before the shepherd. Reason without love walks on a wooden leg. Held below the top because a share of the teaching is inherited Sufi doctrine stated rather than found, and the argument between free will and compulsion is left as two sides.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The heights are very great, and they come in every book. The Song of the Reed sets one at the threshold. In Book III the soul dies from the mineral into the growing thing and climbs through animal, man and angel to what imagination cannot enter; Daquqi sees seven candles become one, then seven trees, then seven men at prayer. A lover walks back to Bukhara, the city that will kill him. In Book V there is Ayaz in his chamber with his sheepskin and his shoes, and a peacock tears out the feathers that are its danger. But the poem is long and level for much of its length, in exposition, gloss and homily, and many readers know its peaks from anthologies rather than from the books. These are peaks over plains, not a height sustained: frequency holds it here.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One myth is built, and it bears the whole. The reed cut from its bed is the soul cut from its source, sounding only while the breath, nafas, of the player passes through it, and every later lament and return tells it again. The merchant’s parrot dies to its cage to go free, and the death before death becomes the figure of the whole teaching; the ladder from mineral to angel builds a cosmology of becoming in a few couplets. But most of the myth is summoned rather than built. The prophets of the Qur’an come as exempla, the beast fables from Kalila wa Dimna and the common stock, and a tale serves its moral and is dropped. No single architecture carries the action, as the birds’ journey to the Simurgh carries Attar’s poem: the myth here governs by recurrence.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the didactic Sufi masnavi of Sana’i’s Hadiqat al-Haqiqa and of Attar, whose Mantiq al-Tayr holds its tales inside the birds’ journey to the Simurgh. Rumi kept Attar’s metre and broke the frame: a teaching poem with no frame and no ending, its voice breaking into its own tales to address Husam, God or itself, its tales nested three and four deep and dropped when the meaning has escaped them. Obscene tales are set inside exegesis on purpose, so that the lowest matter carries the highest, and God rebukes a prophet for correcting a herdsman’s crude piety. The stake was paid: some of the learned censured the poem, and a critic inside it scorns it as mere tales of prophets. Held here because the metre, the form and the method of tale and gloss were received, and the swerve perfects the freedom of a genre more than it breaks its terms.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The open form is the instrument of one knowledge: that form, surat, is the vessel of meaning, ma’na, and that meaning breaks every vessel. Tales open inside tales because the meaning will not stay in a story; the gloss overruns the tale because the tale was only the measure; the voice, speaking to Husam as he writes, interrupts itself because it is moved by what it says. The reed’s complaint, which the whole poem is, has no plot because separation has none. Yet much of the form is a container. Put the teaching into an anthology of tales with commentary, which is what Sana’i’s poem was, and most of it survives; the books could run to four or to ten and say the same; and the open form admits slack the knowledge does not need. The form knows something, and permits more than it knows.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The evidence is seven and a half centuries of return, by readers who disagree. The Mevlevi order read the poem aloud in its lodges through an office of its own, the masnavi-khwan, reciter and expounder. The commentaries run through the Ottoman world with Anqaravi, who read it through Ibn ’Arabi, through India with Bahr al-’Ulum, through Iran with Sabzavari and Furuzanfar, and into English with Nicholson, and after him Schimmel and Franklin Lewis. The questions stay open: whether its ontology is Ibn ’Arabi’s or its own, whether it teaches free will or compulsion, whether the obscene tales are exegesis or appetite, whether the broken sixth book is an ending. Held from the top because much of the return is devotional, the reading of a scripture by its order, which finds what it is taught to find.
Score: 9.4 / 10
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Persian poetry of the thirteenth century and, through it, the devotional literature of the Persianate world. The reach is named and particular: the reading life of an order whose lodges spread from the Balkans to Egypt; commentary in Ottoman Turkish, Indian Persian and Qajar Persian; Jami, who by tradition called it the Qur’an in the Persian tongue; Iqbal, who named Rumi his guide in Asrar-i Khudi (1915) and Javid Nama (1932). Held here because the force is a culmination rather than a reorganisation. The didactic masnavi was Sana’i’s form and Attar’s, and after Rumi it did not take a new course so much as stop beside him: later mystical poets, Jami among them, wrote under it rather than from it. Fame through paraphrase is presence, not pressure.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form: the text survives whole in the Konya manuscript of 1278, copied within about five years of the poet’s death; the broken close of Book VI is a fact of the making, not a loss in transmission, and the spurious seventh book was recognised and set aside. The presence: continuous from Anatolia to India in recitation, teaching and commentary, with an order built around its reading; the order’s suppression in Turkey in 1925 interrupted the institution, not the reading. The fabric carries no charge. The span is centuries, and the early manuscript and the unbroken reading earn the upper part of that step. Not its top: much of the poem’s presence outside Persian is in excerpts and free versions, and the six books whole are read far less widely than its fame.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on Rumi’s Persian, so far as this reading reaches it. The command is of the spoken line and the told tale. The ramal runs fast and close to speech; a couplet catches a grocer, a Sufi, a judge or a lion; the register cuts from the bazaar to the throne of God; the Sufis who sell a traveller’s donkey make a set piece of their refrain. In the opening couplet the reed is set speaking in two words, bishnaw, “listen”, and az juda’iha, “of separations”, and the Song is as finished as anything in Persian. Against this, Persian criticism has long held the diction rougher than Sa’di’s or Hafez’s: easy and repeated rhymes, hemistichs padded to the metre, transitions that only call the reader back to the tale. The poet says he thinks of rhyme and the beloved tells him to think of nothing but his face, a defence and a fact about the making.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law governs a very wide range: form and meaning, husk and grain, separation and return; every thing is a veil that discloses as it hides. Take the two most distant elements, the bawdy tale of the maidservant, the donkey and the gourd in Book V and Daquqi’s candles in Book III. They obey it together: Rumi says the ribald tale is a figure as the vision is, and its moral, that imitation without knowledge kills, is a law the vision also keeps. Even the argument for free will and the argument for compulsion are each shown as the arguer’s veil. What holds it lower is that the range is wider than the law can always hold. Some bawdy matter sits hard under the same physics as the ascent, Book VI ends unfinished, and the reader is sometimes unsure whether a digression has returned.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Many orders of reality are held in one structure, and no poem in Persian but the Shahnameh holds more. The inner life of the self, the nafs in all its disguises. The household, and the wife who argues with her poor Bedouin husband. Commerce and labour: the grocer, the merchant, the tanner, the ploughman. The state: kings, viziers, judges, and the slave who is a king’s favourite. Law, medicine and theology argued; animals as fable and as nature; the body and sexuality, frankly; the market, the mosque and the bathhouse; the orders of being from mineral to angel; and the sacred, which governs all of it. They are integrated, not listed, each read as the same drama of the soul. Family and labour are occasions for a moral, and the poem holds little of its own century: the Mongol conquest that drove Rumi’s family west is nearly absent.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.4, with The Encompassed at 9.3. A poem read aloud and expounded for seven and a half centuries by commentators who still disagree; a text whole from a manuscript copied within about five years of the poet’s death, its reading never broken; and the self, the household, the market, the state and the sacred held in one structure as one drama of the soul.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8, held by a poem with no plot to require its parts: tales and runs of exegesis could be lifted, or exchanged for others that teach the same point, without the loss of one claim, though a few tales bear weight nothing else bears. Next above it, The Living Form and The Made at 8.7: an open form that permits more than it compels and could run to another length, and verse rougher than the finest Persian, with easy rhymes and padded half-lines.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5, by three tenths, the narrowest margin on the page. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 107.1, an average of 8.93, which stands at 8.9.
Basis · Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Masnavi-yi Ma’navi, “Couplets of Inner Meaning”, scored as one poem: the six books as transmitted, with their Arabic prose prefaces and the verse addresses to Husam al-Din Chalabi, dictated at Konya from about 1258 to 1262 until the poet’s death in December 1273. The text is R. A. Nicholson’s (Gibb Memorial Series, 1925 to 1940), which rests for the most part on the Konya manuscript dated 677 of the Hijra, 1278, copied within about five years of the poet’s death. The apocryphal seventh book is excluded as not Rumi’s; the unfinished close of Book VI, the tale of the three princes and the fortress, is part of the unit as it stands, and is charged only, and lightly, under The Inner Law. No text was in hand, in Persian or in English; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on the Persian. Persian is quoted only from the opening couplet, whose words are certain, transliterated, with the desk’s own close English. Translations · Nicholson’s literal English prose (1926 to 1934), with his two volumes of commentary, was read for sense; Jawid Mojaddedi’s verse translation (Oxford World’s Classics) was known in part, for the poem in English verse. The popular English versions are paraphrases and were not used. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the poem. The sound of the Persian across its whole length is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. The length is given as a range, not an exact count. The dates of the pause before Book II are given variously, and are not fixed here. Where a passage could not be placed with confidence in its book, it is given without one; citations are by book and tale, and no couplet numbers are given.