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Divani Shamsi Tabriz

Thousands of love poems for a friend who vanished, and about a third of them signed with the friend's name.

by Rumi5,912 passages held

  • Persian, the original language
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Original title
دیوان شمس
First published
(aged 66)
Original language
Persian

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Overview

A wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, arrived in Konya in November 1244, and Rumi — thirty-seven, and the town's teacher of religious learning in his late father's place — attached himself to the stranger so completely that his own disciples resented it. Shams left for Syria in 1246 and came back the next year; late in 1247 or in 1248 he disappeared for good. The poems of the Divan-e Shams grew out of that friendship and its losses: more than three thousand ghazals, short rhymed lyrics, along with strophic poems and nearly two thousand quatrains. Their claim is that love for one human being can open the way to God, and that it does so by taking the lover apart — the learned, respected self is exactly what such love burns away. Rumi signed about a third of them with Shams's name instead of his own, writing as though the two were one person; many others end on khamush, silence, the poet telling himself to stop. Most are in Persian, some in Arabic, and a few mix in lines of Turkish and Greek. Rumi never gathered them himself; his students collected them after his death. In 1898 the Cambridge scholar Reynold Nicholson published a selection in English; later scholars judged several of its ghazals not to be Rumi's at all. The text now cited is the critical edition that Badi al-Zaman Forouzanfar, an Iranian scholar, began publishing in 1957.

Key concepts

Who is the Beloved in the Divan-e Shams?

Often it is impossible to say, and the poems mean it that way. The beloved may be Shams of Tabriz, the friend who arrived in Konya and vanished, or God, and many ghazals move between the two without marking the change. That ambiguity is the book's claim in miniature: love for one human being, followed far enough, becomes love of God rather than competing with it.

What does it mean that lover and beloved become one?

It means the lover stops standing apart from what he loves. Rumi carried the idea into the poems' signatures, ending about a third of them with Shams's name instead of his own, as though the two were one person. The point is not a figure of speech but a claim about love: at its height the boundary between self and beloved stops holding.

What is self-effacement in Rumi's love poetry?

It is the passing away of the lover's separate self, which the Sufi tradition calls fana. In the Divan it is love's work rather than a discipline: the learned, respected self is burned away, and the poems greet the loss with ecstasy. What remains is not nothing but a renewed person, one no longer organised around keeping up the old name.

Why do the ghazals set love against reason?

Because reason, in them, is the faculty that holds back and weighs the cost, and love is the one that goes anyway. The poems do not call reason false; they call it too cautious to reach what love reaches. A mind that insists on staying safe cannot be taken apart, and in the Divan being taken apart is the way through.

What does khamush, silence, mean at the end of a ghazal?

It is the poet telling himself to stop. Many poems in the Divan close on the word, which marks the point where language gives out before its subject. Silence is therefore not the absence of the poem's meaning but its last move: an admission that what the lines were reaching for lies beyond them, and that further talk would only stand in the way.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Love of One Person as a Way to God

Can loving one human being open the way to God instead of standing in front of it? Written out of Rumi's friendship with Shams of Tabriz, the ghazals answer that it can.

Rumi was thirty-seven and Konya's teacher of religious learning when a wandering dervish arrived in 1244, and he attached himself to the stranger so completely that his own disciples resented it. The Divan claims that such love is no detour from the love of God but a door into it: in the beloved, the divine becomes present to one particular person. Signing about a third of the poems with Shams's name, as though the two were one, carries the claim into the signature itself.

  • love
  • divine love
  • mystical love
  • devotion
  • beauty
  • divine presence
  • transcendence
  • divine grace
  • spiritual guidance

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Love That Takes the Lover Apart

What if the self that love dismantles is the very one a person worked hardest to build? The poems name the learned, respected self as exactly what love burns away.

The Divan's second claim follows from its first: love opens the way by taking the lover apart. The learned and respected man is precisely what such love consumes, and the poems meet that loss with ecstasy rather than lament. Reason appears in them as the part that holds back and counts the cost, unable to follow where love goes; surrender is the only fitting answer to a force that remakes whoever it enters. What follows is a renewal no one can plan, since the self that would plan it is the one being undone.

  • selfhood
  • surrender
  • humility
  • reason
  • ecstasy
  • joy
  • renewal
  • soul
  • mystical experience
  • spiritual transformation
  • transformation

Enter a dialogue

Absence, Longing and the Call to Silence

What does a lover do with a love whose object has vanished, and with words that cannot reach it? The poems keep singing, and keep telling themselves to stop.

Shams left for Syria in 1246, came back, and late in 1247 or in 1248 disappeared for good, and the ghazals are written out of that absence as much as out of the presence before it. Separation does not end the love in them; it sharpens it into longing, and longing becomes its own kind of nearness. Yet the same poems distrust their own fluency. Many end on khamush, silence, the poet telling himself to stop, because what they are about will not go into words.

  • longing
  • spiritual longing
  • separation
  • suffering
  • desire
  • silence
  • ineffability
  • mysticism
  • spiritual perception
  • perception

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
5,912
distinct concepts
1,542
by passages held, corpus-wide
#2

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “divine love” and “longing”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 75 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine lovelonging364
divine lovemysticism287
devotiondivine love266
divine loveecstasy241
divine lovespiritual transformation231
divine lovesuffering209
longinglove143
devotionlove118
lovesuffering116
devotionlonging115
longingsuffering105
lovemysticism85
devotionsuffering84
mysticismspiritual transformation65
spiritual transformationsuffering64
ecstasymysticism61
ecstasylove56
ecstasylonging55
lovespiritual transformation55
longingmysticism45
devotionecstasy44
devotionmysticism43
ecstasyspiritual transformation40
longingspiritual transformation40
devotionspiritual transformation33
ecstasysuffering31
mysticismsuffering31
divine lovelove3

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1244 Selection from Seven Sermons of Rumi (مجالس سبعه)

    Seven addresses from the pulpit: Rumi's public preaching, each built from praise of God and a text of scripture, in contrast to the informal talks of Fihi Ma Fihi.

     FA
  2. 1260 The Masnavi (مثنوی معنوی)

    Rumi's best-known book and the work of his last dozen years: a long teaching poem in rhyming couplets, beside the lyrics he wrote in the name of Shams of Tabriz.

     FA
  3. 1273 Discourses of Rumi (فیه ما فیه)

    Where the Masnavi teaches in verse, these talks teach in conversation: the poem's ideas as Rumi put them in prose in Konya, to a mixed audience of disciples and officials.

     FA
  4. 1273 Divani Shamsi Tabriz (دیوان شمس) you are here FA
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