This Is Love

About This Is Love

This Is Love is a ghazal from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, the vast lyrical collection Rumi composed in the voice of, and in devotion to, his spiritual teacher Shams-e Tabrizi. The Divan contains roughly 3,200 ghazals and 1,700 quatrains. Where the Masnavi is didactic, organized, and sequential, the Divan is incandescent. It pours out in waves of ecstatic imagery, often composed during or after sama (the whirling meditation of the Mevlevi order). This poem belongs to that ecstatic register.

The ghazal form itself matters here. A ghazal is a series of self-contained couplets (bayts) linked by a common rhyme scheme (aa, ba, ca, da) and, in Persian tradition, by a common mood or subject. Each couplet is a complete unit of meaning. The ghazal does not build an argument the way a Masnavi passage does. It circles a single experience from multiple angles, each couplet a different window into the same room. For this poem, that room is ishq, the annihilating love that Sufism identifies as the engine of all creation and the fire of all spiritual transformation.

Rumi did not title his ghazals. The titles by which they are known in English come from translators and anthologists selecting a striking first line or recurring phrase. 'This Is Love' derives from the opening declaration: 'This is love: to fly toward a secret sky.' The Persian uses the word ishq, not the gentler hubb or muhabbat. This distinction is load-bearing. Hubb is affection. Muhabbat is tender love. Ishq is a force that destroys the lover's sense of separate selfhood. It is the love that precedes reason, survives death, and cannot be contained by any form. Rumi is not describing a feeling. He is describing a power.

The poem was composed sometime during the period of Rumi's most intense creative output, after the disappearance of Shams-e Tabrizi (circa 1248) and before Rumi's death in 1273. The loss of Shams catalyzed the Divan. Rumi poured into poetry what he could no longer pour into conversation with his beloved teacher. The Divan is the record of that overflow, and poems like this one are its distillation: raw, uncompromising declarations of what love demands from the one who would follow it to its source.

Reynold A. Nicholson included a version of this poem in his 1898 anthology Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, one of the earliest serious English translations of Rumi's lyrical work. Nicholson's rendering, while Victorian in style, preserves the poem's theological precision. The ghazal has since been widely anthologized, particularly in Coleman Barks's popular American renderings, which have brought Rumi to an enormous English-speaking audience but have also stripped much of the Islamic mystical framework that gives the poem its original meaning and force.

Original Text

Translation

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

First, to let go of life.
Finally, to take a step without feet.

To regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.

Heart, I said, what a gift it has been
to enter this circle of lovers,

to see beyond seeing itself,
to reach and feel within the breast.

My soul, where does this breathing arise?
This beating, what is this strange energy?

Bird of my soul, speak in your own words,
for I can understand you.

The heart replied: I was in the workshop
the day this house of water and clay was fired.

I was given wings and a soul
so that I might fly beyond all boundaries.

I was formed from love and even now
I am warmed by what gave me form.

Literal prose translation based on Nicholson (1898) and Arberry (1968), adapted for contemporary readers. The rendering follows the Persian closely, prioritizing theological precision over poetic license.

Coleman Barks's popular American rendering of this ghazal, published in The Essential Rumi (1995), reframes it in accessible free verse: 'This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, / to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. / First to let go of life. / Finally, to take a step without feet.' Barks captures the poem's kinetic energy and its sense of paradox. His version has introduced millions of English-language readers to Rumi. It should be read as a creative interpretation rather than a translation: Barks works from English intermediary versions (primarily Nicholson and Arberry) rather than from the Persian, and his renderings consistently remove the Islamic theological vocabulary, the Qur'anic allusions, and the Sufi technical terms that give the original its doctrinal precision. The poem's force in Persian depends on the word ishq and its entire theological freight. In Barks's hands, ishq becomes 'love' without qualification, which is accurate in the broadest sense but loses the distinction between ishq and every lesser form of attachment that Rumi spent his life articulating.

Commentary

This poem is a definition. Rumi is not describing love or praising love or longing for love. He is pointing at it and saying: this. This is what it is. The entire ghazal is structured as a series of identifications, each couplet adding another face to a reality that cannot be reduced to any single image. This is the ghazal form at its finest: not building toward a conclusion but circling a center that cannot be named directly, only approached through iteration.

Ishq vs. Hubb: The Two Loves

The poem opens with the word ishq, and everything depends on the weight of that word. In Arabic and Persian, there are multiple words for love, and they are not interchangeable. Hubb (Arabic) or dust (Persian) is ordinary love: the love of a parent for a child, a person for a friend, a creature for its comfort. Hubb is warm. It sustains. It does not destroy. Muhabbat is tender affection, gentle and reciprocal. Ishq is none of these.

Ishq entered the Sufi vocabulary from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, where it described a love so intense it could drive a person to madness or death. The lover afflicted with ishq was called majnun, literally 'possessed by jinn,' and the archetypal ishq story in Arabic literature is Layla and Majnun: a love so consuming that Majnun wanders the desert, loses his mind, and dies. When the Sufis adopted ishq as a technical term, they kept its violence. Ishq is love that annihilates the lover's sense of separate selfhood. It burns through every boundary between the soul and God. It is not a feeling you have. It is a fire that has you.

Rumi's teacher Shams-e Tabrizi was unequivocal about the relationship between ishq and the spiritual path. In the Maqalat (Discourses of Shams), Shams says: 'Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries. Whether love comes from heaven or earth, it always leads us above.' But Shams also insisted that ishq is not comfortable: 'Love will tear you open, shake you to your core, and leave you bare.' This is the love Rumi invokes when he opens the poem. He is not inviting his listeners into a warm experience. He is warning them about a fire.

The Sufi tradition drew a direct line between ishq and the hadith qudsi (divine saying not found in the Qur'an but attributed to God through the Prophet Muhammad): 'I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known, so I created creation in order to be known.' The Arabic word used in this hadith is ahbabtu, from the root h-b-b (hubb), but the Sufi commentators, particularly Ibn Arabi, interpreted the creative force behind existence as ishq rather than hubb. The argument is that hubb alone does not explain the violence and beauty of creation. Only ishq, love that overflows its own boundaries and shatters every container, accounts for a God who breaks open the nothingness of non-existence to bring the world into being. When Rumi says 'This is love,' he is pointing at the force that made the universe. Not a sentiment. A cosmological engine.

'To Fly Toward a Secret Sky': The Hidden Realm

The opening image is flight toward a sky that is secret (pinhani or ghaybi). This is not the physical sky. In Sufi cosmology, the 'secret sky' or 'hidden heaven' is the alam al-ghayb, the realm of the unseen that lies behind the alam al-shahada, the realm of the visible. The Qur'an speaks repeatedly of the ghayb: 'He knows the unseen and the seen' (6:73); 'With Him are the keys of the unseen' (6:59). The soul's journey toward God is a journey from the visible to the invisible, from the surface to the depth, from form to meaning.

Flight, in this context, is not metaphorical ornamentation. It is the Sufi description of what happens when ishq seizes the soul. The soul rises. It leaves the ground of ordinary perception. It moves toward a reality that the senses cannot access and the intellect cannot map. This is the mi'raj in miniature: the Prophet Muhammad's night journey through the heavens is the archetype for every soul's ascent through the stations of love. Rumi is saying that love itself is the vehicle of ascent. You do not fly toward God through study, argument, or moral perfection alone. You fly through ishq. Love is the wing.

'A Hundred Veils to Fall Each Moment': The Doctrine of the Veils

The image of veils falling is rooted in a specific hadith: 'God has seventy thousand veils of light and darkness. Were He to remove them, the glories of His Face would burn away everything perceived by the sight of His creatures.' Some versions of this hadith give the number as seventy thousand; others say seven hundred. The number does not matter. The teaching is that between the human soul and the divine reality lies an almost infinite series of veils, obscurations that simultaneously hide God from the soul and protect the soul from the overwhelming intensity of God's presence.

The Sufi path is the progressive lifting of these veils. Each station (maqam) on the path represents the removal of a veil. Each spiritual state (hal) is a moment when a veil thins and the divine light breaks through. But Rumi says love causes a hundred veils to fall each moment. This is not the patient, station-by-station progress of the methodical Sufi wayfarer. This is the ishq method: love tears through the veils at a pace that the intellect cannot follow and the ego cannot survive. Where the methodical seeker removes one veil at a time through discipline and practice, the lover swept up in ishq loses a hundred veils in a breath.

This is a tensions within Sufism that Rumi embodies more than almost any other teacher. The sober tradition (represented by Junayd of Baghdad) emphasizes the systematic traversal of the stations: repentance, patience, gratitude, trust, contentment, each mastered in sequence. The intoxicated tradition (represented by Bayazid Bistami and Mansur al-Hallaj) emphasizes the overwhelming power of divine love to bypass the stations entirely. Rumi stands with the intoxicated school, though he knows both. His Masnavi is methodical. His Divan is drunk. This poem is pure Divan: the veils do not fall one by one through careful practice. They fall in sheets, torn away by a force the lover did not choose and cannot control.

'Let Go of Life': Love as Death

The couplet 'First, to let go of life / Finally, to take a step without feet' is the poem's most compressed teaching, and it requires unpacking.

'Let go of life' in Persian carries the sense of releasing the nafs (the ego-self, the commanding soul) and its grip on existence. This is fana, the Sufi doctrine of annihilation. Fana does not mean physical death. It means the death of the separate self, the dissolution of the boundary between 'I' and 'God.' Abu Yazid al-Bistami (Bayazid), the ninth-century Sufi master, described fana in terms that scandalized his contemporaries: 'I sloughed off my self as a snake sloughs off its skin. I looked and saw that lover, beloved, and love are one.' Mansur al-Hallaj went further, declaring 'Ana al-Haqq' (I am the Truth/God), for which he was executed in 922 CE. The statement was not blasphemy. It was the report of someone who had undergone fana so completely that no separate self remained to claim it was separate.

Rumi says that love begins here: with the letting go of life. Not at the end of the spiritual path but at the beginning. This inverts the conventional understanding. Most spiritual frameworks treat ego-death as an advanced attainment, something that happens after years of practice. Rumi says it is the first step. You cannot begin to love until you have released your grip on the life you thought was yours. Everything before that release is preparation, warm-up, stretching. Love itself starts at the point where you let go.

The relationship between love and death runs deep in the Sufi tradition. The Prophet Muhammad said: 'Die before you die.' This teaching, central to Sufi practice, means: undergo the death of the ego while the body is still alive, so that physical death, when it comes, is not a catastrophe but a reunion. The Sufis called this voluntary death mawt al-iradi (the volitional death), and they distinguished it from mawt al-tabii (natural death). Natural death is something that happens to you. Volitional death is something you do. Love, in Rumi's teaching, is the force that makes volitional death possible. You cannot kill the ego by force of will. The ego is too clever, too resilient, too deeply embedded in every thought and perception. But ishq can do what willpower cannot. Ishq dissolves the ego the way heat dissolves ice: not by attacking it but by transforming it into something else entirely.

'A Step Without Feet': Action Beyond the Physical

The final line of the key couplet introduces a paradox that is central to Rumi's teaching: taking a step without feet. This is not poetic flourish. It is a precise description of a mode of being that the Sufi tradition calls baqa, the subsistence that follows fana. If fana is the annihilation of the separate self, baqa is what remains: a mode of existence in which action continues but the actor has dissolved. The foot is the ego's instrument of movement. A step without feet is movement without the ego as its origin. It is action that arises from the divine will rather than from personal intention.

This teaching connects to the hadith qudsi in which God says: 'When I love My servant, I become the hearing with which he hears, the sight with which he sees, the hand with which he grasps, and the foot with which he walks.' The step without feet is the step taken when God has become the foot. The lover who has undergone fana does not stop moving. They stop being the one who moves. They become the movement itself, animated by divine will rather than personal desire.

Rumi's image echoes across the Divan. In another ghazal, he writes: 'I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I have been knocking from the inside.' The door opens because the boundary between inside and outside has dissolved. The step without feet happens because the boundary between the walker and the walked-upon has dissolved. This is the lived experience of tawhid (divine unity): not a theological proposition but a mode of being in which the multiplicity of self and other collapses into a single reality.

Correcting the Sentimentalization of Rumi

This poem is a frequently quoted in the Coleman Barks canon, and it is a frequently misread. In its popular American reception, 'This is love' has been printed on wedding invitations, motivational posters, and Instagram feeds as an affirmation of romantic passion. The poem has been drained of its theological content and repurposed as a celebration of emotional intensity.

This is a misreading so complete it reverses the poem's meaning. Rumi is not celebrating the feelings of the lover. He is describing the destruction of the lover. 'Let go of life' is not a metaphor for emotional vulnerability. It is a description of ego-annihilation. 'A hundred veils to fall each moment' is not a metaphor for deepening intimacy. It is a description of the progressive dissolution of everything the self uses to maintain its sense of separation from God. 'A step without feet' is not a metaphor for courage. It is a description of action after the death of the one who acts.

The modern sentimentalization of Rumi is not simply a translation problem. It reflects a broader cultural pattern: the extraction of individual images from their doctrinal framework and their reassembly as affirmations of the autonomous self. Rumi's poetry is about the annihilation of the autonomous self. Every line of this ghazal describes a diminishment: veils falling, life released, feet abandoned. The poem moves toward less, not more. Less self, less control, less ground. The modern reader who finds in this poem an affirmation of personal empowerment has read it exactly backward.

Omid Safi, in his scholarship on the Western reception of Rumi, has argued that the de-Islamicization of Rumi's poetry by popular translators constitutes a form of cultural erasure. When ishq becomes generic 'love,' when the seventy thousand veils become a vague sense of deepening, when fana becomes emotional openness, the poem loses not just its Islamic context but its teeth. Rumi's love is dangerous. It kills. That is what makes it holy. A love that does not threaten the ego is, in Rumi's framework, not love at all. It is hubb, affection, and affection is fine for daily life but useless for the journey to God.

The Workshop of Creation

In the later couplets, the heart speaks. It says: 'I was in the workshop the day this house of water and clay was fired.' This is a direct reference to the Qur'anic creation narrative. God created Adam from clay (tin) and water (ma'), and breathed His spirit (ruh) into the form (15:28-29, 38:71-72). The heart's claim is that it was present at creation, before the body existed, before the veil of physical existence fell between the soul and its source.

This is the Sufi doctrine of the pre-eternal covenant (mithaq). In Surah Al-A'raf (7:172), God asks the unborn souls of all humanity: 'Am I not your Lord?' (Alastu bi-Rabbikum?). They answer: 'Yes, we bear witness' (Bala, shahidna). The Sufis teach that the soul's longing for God is a remembering of this pre-eternal moment: the moment when the soul knew God directly, before birth, before form, before the veils. When the heart in Rumi's poem says it was present in the workshop, it is claiming this pre-eternal memory. Love, in this framework, is not something new. It is the oldest thing. It is the soul's recognition of what it knew before the body, before the world, before time itself.

The image of the workshop (karkhana) is important. A workshop is a place where raw materials are shaped into finished forms. The soul was shaped in God's workshop, fired like clay, given wings and sent into the world. But the soul remembers the workshop. It remembers the hands that shaped it. And that memory is what Rumi calls ishq. Love is not something the soul produces. It is something the soul remembers. The journey of love is a journey backward, toward the origin, toward the moment before the veils fell, before the world intervened between the lover and the beloved.

The Islamic Context: Why It Cannot Be Removed

This poem is Islamic mysticism. Its vocabulary is Qur'anic. Its cosmology is drawn from the hadith literature. Its doctrine of love is built on centuries of Sufi commentary from Rabi'a al-Adawiyya's assertion that she loved God 'not from fear of hell or hope of paradise, but for the beauty of His face,' through Hallaj's martyrdom for the declaration of unity, through Ibn Arabi's metaphysics of the imagination, to Rumi's own synthesis of all these streams.

To read this poem outside its Islamic context is to read music without hearing the key it is played in. Every image gains its meaning from the tradition. The secret sky is the ghayb. The veils are the hijab between the soul and God. The step without feet is the hadith about God becoming the servant's foot. The workshop is the Qur'anic creation narrative. Remove these references and you have a collection of pretty images. Restore them and you have a map of the soul's journey to its origin, drawn by someone who had made the journey and was reporting from the other side.

Themes

Ishq as Cosmic Force. The poem's opening word sets its register. Ishq in the Sufi tradition is not an emotion but a cosmological principle. It is the force that drove God to create the universe ('I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known'), the force that drives the soul back toward God, and the fire that burns away everything between the soul and its source. Rumi uses ishq with full awareness of its technical meaning. He is not writing about a feeling a person has. He is writing about a force that has a person. The lover does not choose ishq. Ishq chooses the lover, seizes the lover, and does not release its grip until the lover has been consumed. This understanding of love as a force rather than a feeling distinguishes Sufi poetry from romantic poetry in any tradition. Romantic love empowers the self. Ishq empties it.

Fana: The Annihilation of the Self. Every image in the poem describes a form of diminishment. Veils fall. Life is released. Feet are abandoned. The world becomes invisible. The self is disregarded. This is the progressive mapping of fana, the Sufi term for the annihilation of the ego in the divine presence. Fana is not metaphorical death. It is the experiential dissolution of the boundary between the individual soul and the divine reality. The great Sufi masters described fana with clinical precision: Junayd called it 'the passing away of the attributes of the self,' while Qushayri defined it as 'the ceasing of consciousness of one's own qualities through awareness of God's qualities.' Rumi's poem traces the process through its stages: first the soul flies (moves toward God), then the veils fall (the obscurations dissolve), then life is released (the ego-self dies), then the step without feet (action continues without a separate actor). This is fana followed by baqa, annihilation followed by subsistence in God.

The Veil Between the Soul and God. The Sufi doctrine of the veils (hujub) teaches that the soul is separated from God not by distance but by obscuration. The veils are made of the soul's own attachments, fears, identities, and desires. Each veil is a layer of selfhood that the soul has mistaken for reality. The spiritual path is the progressive removal of these veils, and love is the force that tears them away. Rumi says love removes a hundred veils each moment, which is to say: the pace of love is faster than the pace of discipline. A lifetime of ascetic practice might remove one veil. A single moment of ishq can remove a hundred. This is the Sufi argument for the superiority of love over law, of the path of the heart over the path of the mind. Both lead to God. Love arrives faster and with more destruction.

Paradox as Spiritual Method. The poem is constructed from paradoxes: flying toward something secret, stepping without feet, seeing beyond seeing. These are not decorative. In the Sufi tradition, paradox is a teaching method. The rational mind works by distinction: this or that, here or there, self or other. The experience of divine unity dissolves all distinctions. It cannot be described in rational language because rational language depends on the distinctions it dissolves. Paradox is the language that points beyond language. When Rumi says 'a step without feet,' the rational mind stumbles. That stumble is the teaching. The mind's failure to grasp the image is an invitation to experience what the image describes: a mode of being that the mind cannot contain.

The Pre-Eternal Memory of Love. The heart's claim that it was present 'the day this house of water and clay was fired' points to the Sufi teaching that love is not acquired but remembered. The soul loved God before the body existed. Birth did not create the soul. It veiled it. The spiritual path is a process of remembering what was always known, returning to what was never left. This teaching has parallels in Plato's doctrine of anamnesis (learning as recollection of pre-birth knowledge), but the Sufi version is rooted in the Qur'anic covenant: the soul's pre-eternal 'Yes' to God's question 'Am I not your Lord?' Love, in this framework, is the soul's oldest possession, older than the body, older than the world, older than time.

Significance

This ghazal occupies a specific position in Rumi's body of work and in the broader reception of Sufi poetry in the English-speaking world. Within the Divan-e Shams, it belongs to the cluster of poems that attempt to define ishq directly rather than dramatize it through narrative (as in the Masnavi) or invoke it through erotic imagery (as in other Divan ghazals like Like This). The poem's structure, a series of declarative identifications ('This is love: to...'), gives it a catechetical quality rare in the Divan. Rumi is teaching here, not singing. The ecstasy is present but contained within a framework of definition. Each couplet answers the question 'What is love?' with a different answer, and the accumulation of answers creates a composite portrait that no single answer could provide.

Within the Sufi commentary tradition, this ghazal has been used to teach the distinction between ishq and every lesser form of attachment. The commentators read the poem as a diagnostic tool: does the seeker's experience of love match what Rumi describes here? Does it involve flight toward the unseen? Does it cause veils to fall? Does it require the release of life? Does it produce action beyond the ego's capacity? If not, then whatever the seeker is experiencing, it is not yet ishq. It may be hubb (affection), or hawa (desire), or uns (intimacy), all of which are genuine and valuable but none of which carry the radical and destructive power that ishq carries. The poem functions as a litmus test for the depth of the seeker's engagement with the path.

The poem's role in Rumi's Western reception is equally specific and more fraught. It has become one of the most-quoted Rumi passages in popular culture, largely through Coleman Barks's rendering. Its lines appear on merchandise, in wedding ceremonies, on social media. This popularity has introduced millions of people to Rumi's name and to the idea that a thirteenth-century Persian Muslim mystic has something relevant to say about love. That introduction has value. But the terms of the introduction have also distorted the poem's meaning by removing it from its Islamic context and reframing it as a universal affirmation of emotional intensity. The gap between the poem's popular reception and its doctrinal content is a clearest illustrations of what happens when a mystical text is extracted from its tradition and consumed as self-help.

The poem's doctrinal content is Islamic mysticism at its most concentrated. The secret sky is the Qur'anic ghayb. The veils are from the hadith of the seventy thousand veils. The workshop of water and clay is the Qur'anic creation narrative. The step without feet is the hadith about God becoming the servant's limbs. None of these references are optional. They are the structure on which the poem stands. Without them, the poem is a collection of evocative images. With them, it is a map of the soul's journey through annihilation to union, drawn by a master who spent his life walking that path and reporting what he found.

For practitioners of any contemplative tradition, the poem offers a test question that cuts through spiritual materialism: Is your practice making you more, or less? Is it adding to your sense of self, or dissolving it? Rumi's love removes. It strips. It causes things to fall. If your spiritual path is building a bigger, more impressive, more spiritual self, this poem suggests you may be moving in the wrong direction. The direction of love, as Rumi describes it, is toward less self, not more. Toward emptiness, not fullness. Toward the secret sky that can only be reached by releasing everything that keeps you on the ground.

Connections

Bhakti and Viraha: Love in Separation. The bhakti tradition of India, particularly the Vaishnava devotional poetry of the Hindu tradition, knows the same love Rumi describes, though it calls it by different names. Viraha is the pain of separation from the beloved (whether Krishna, Rama, or the formless divine), and the bhakti poets treat viraha not as an obstacle to union but as a form of union itself. Mirabai, the sixteenth-century Rajasthani poet-saint, sang: 'Without the dark one, I cannot sleep, / My body is consumed with longing.' Her language echoes Rumi's in its insistence that love is not a pleasant addition to life but a force that consumes the lover. The bhakti tradition adds a dimension that Rumi's ghazal touches but does not develop: the social cost of love. Mirabai was a queen who abandoned her royal life to wander as a beggar-devotee. Her love for Krishna destroyed her social position, her family relationships, and her reputation. Rumi's 'let go of life' is abstract; Mirabai's letting go was concrete and public. Both traditions teach that ishq and viraha are not feelings to be enjoyed but fires to be endured, and that the endurance transforms the lover into something the world does not recognize.

The Song of Solomon: Fierce Love in the Abrahamic Tradition. The Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible contains a line that mirrors Rumi's teaching with startling precision: 'Love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord' (8:6). The Hebrew word used here is ahavah, and the Song presents it as a force equal in power to death itself. The rabbinic and Christian mystical commentaries on the Song of Solomon read it as an allegory of the soul's relationship with God, just as the Sufi commentators read Rumi's love poetry. In both traditions, erotic love becomes the metaphor for divine love not because the divine is being sexualized but because erotic love is the strongest force the human body knows, and only the strongest force can serve as an analogy for what the soul undergoes in its approach to God. The Church Father Origen, in his third-century commentary on the Song, argued that God deliberately chose the language of eros to describe the soul's journey because no other language was intense enough. Rumi would agree.

Sappho and the Destructive Force of Eros. Sappho's Fragment 31, which describes the physical symptoms of desire with clinical precision (tongue breaks, thin fire runs under the skin, eyes see nothing, ears hum), presents love as a force that undoes the body. The Greek word she uses is eros, which in pre-Platonic usage was a cosmic force, not merely a sexual one. Hesiod's Theogony places Eros among the primordial deities, born alongside Chaos and Gaia. Sappho's experience of eros as a power that fragments the self has a direct parallel in Rumi's description of ishq. Both poets describe love not as something they feel but as something that happens to them, something that takes their faculties apart. The key difference is teleological: for Sappho, the fragmentation has no stated spiritual purpose. For Rumi, the fragmentation is the purpose. The self must be taken apart so that only the divine remains.

Bodhichitta: The Awakened Heart in Buddhism. The Buddhist concept of bodhichitta (the mind/heart of awakening) shares structural features with Rumi's ishq. In the Mahayana tradition, bodhichitta is the aspiration to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. It has two aspects: relative bodhichitta (compassion for all beings) and absolute bodhichitta (direct insight into the empty nature of reality). The relative aspect parallels the Sufi concept of rahmah (mercy), while the absolute aspect parallels fana: the direct perception of reality without the intermediary of the ego. Shantideva's Bodhicharyavatara (Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life) describes bodhichitta as a force that transforms the practitioner from the inside out, dissolving self-concern and replacing it with universal compassion. Rumi's ishq performs a similar transformation, but with a different destination: where bodhichitta leads to compassion, ishq leads to union. Both, however, require the death of self-centeredness as a prerequisite. Both treat the separate self as the primary obstacle. And both describe a force, not a decision, that accomplishes what the will alone cannot.

Eros and Agape in Greek Thought. The Greek philosophical and theological traditions distinguish between eros (ascending love, the soul's desire for the divine) and agape (descending love, God's unconditional love for creation). Anders Nygren's influential study Agape and Eros (1930-36) argued that these two loves are incompatible: eros is self-seeking, agape is self-giving. But Rumi's ishq collapses this distinction. Ishq is simultaneously the soul's desperate flight toward God (eros) and God's overwhelming love pouring into the soul (agape). The hadith qudsi 'I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known' describes God's eros: God's desire to be known drives creation. The lover's annihilation in ishq describes the human eros: the soul's desire for God drives self-destruction. In Rumi's framework, these are not two movements but one. God's love for the soul and the soul's love for God are a single current, and the soul's flight toward the secret sky is simultaneously God's pull drawing the soul upward. Pseudo-Dionysius, the sixth-century Christian mystic, made a similar argument: divine eros and human eros are one movement, seen from two perspectives. Rumi's poem embodies this unity without arguing for it. The love that flies and the sky toward which it flies are not two things. They are one thing, experienced as two by a consciousness that has not yet finished dissolving.

Within Rumi's Own Canon. This ghazal gains depth when read alongside other Rumi poems on this site. Like This, another Divan ghazal, uses the body's longing as a doorway to the soul's longing, approaching ishq through erotic imagery rather than direct definition. Love Dogs teaches that the cry of longing is itself the connection to God, that the pain of separation is not a sign that love has failed but a sign that love is working. Together, these three poems form a triangle around Rumi's understanding of love: This Is Love defines it (a force that annihilates), Like This embodies it (through the body's own language of desire), and Love Dogs consoles the lover who fears the pain of it (the pain is the proof). Each poem corrects a different misunderstanding. This Is Love corrects the belief that love is gentle. Like This corrects the belief that love is disembodied. Love Dogs corrects the belief that unanswered longing means failure.

Further Reading

Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz by Reynold A. Nicholson (1898). The earliest major English translation of Rumi's lyrical poetry, containing this ghazal. Nicholson's Victorian prose is formal but theologically precise, preserving the Islamic mystical vocabulary that later popular renderings remove.

Mystical Poems of Rumi by A.J. Arberry (1968). Arberry's translation of 400 ghazals from the Divan-e Shams, with scholarly introduction. More readable than Nicholson while maintaining academic rigor and fidelity to the Persian.

The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi by William C. Chittick (1983). Thematic study organizing Rumi's thought around his own categories, with extensive treatment of ishq, fana, and the relationship between love and knowledge in the Sufi framework.

Rumi: Past and Present, East and West by Franklin D. Lewis (2000). The definitive biography and critical study, essential for understanding the historical Rumi versus the popular Western construction. Includes detailed analysis of translation issues and the de-Islamicization of Rumi in American popular culture.

The Teachings of Rumi by Andrew Harvey (1999). Harvey's translations and commentary emphasize the devotional and radical dimensions of Rumi's poetry, with particular attention to ishq as the central doctrine of the Divan.

The Essential Rumi by Coleman Barks (1995). The most widely read English-language Rumi collection. Barks's renderings are free interpretations rather than translations, working from Nicholson and Arberry rather than from the Persian. Valuable as an introduction; should be supplemented with scholarly translations for doctrinal accuracy.