The way of love is not a subtle argument by Rumi
The way of love is not a subtle argument
by Rumi
trans. Coleman Barks
The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.
I love this just sheer acknowledgment that the doorway is devastation, and cannot be approached through reason.
Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi (1207–1273) was a Persian-language poet, theologian, and Sufi master, born in present-day Tajikistan, who lived most of his adult life in Konya, in what is now Turkey. The Masnavi (also rendered Mathnawi) is his six-volume mystical-didactic epic, often called the Persian Qur'an — one of the towering works of world religious literature. The poem is shaped throughout by Rumi's relationship with Shams of Tabriz, the wandering dervish whose arrival in Konya transformed Rumi's life and whose disappearance (probably murder) plunged him into the grief from which the Masnavi and the Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi both emerged. This fragment — the way of love is not a subtle argument — is Barks's distillation of a longer passage in the Masnavi about how love operates differently from reason.
Coleman Barks has done some beautiful translation, though I also want to note that this is translation of translation, into free verse, and that his work has sometimes been criticized for stripping the Islamic context from religious verse. The idea is still gorgeous.
