What Was Said to the Rose

About What Was Said to the Rose

What Was Said to the Rose is a short ghazal from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, widely known in English through Coleman Barks's popular rendering. The poem draws its force from a single conceit: that every beauty in the created world is the visible response to an inward instruction. The rose opened because something was said to it. The cypress grew tall because something was said to it. The body of the beloved became what it is because something was said to it. And the speaker, in his own body, in this chest, received the same thing — the same word.

The poem belongs to Rumi's extensive lyric treatment of the relationship between inward address and outward form. For Rumi, form is never arbitrary. It is the visible sign of a communication that preceded it. The rose is not decorative; it is a reply. The trees, the clouds, the stars, the human face — all are answers to questions no one asked aloud. The poem asserts that the speaker has received, in his own being, the same instruction that shaped the rose, and that this shared reception is the deep kinship between his interior and the natural world.

Nicholson's 1898 Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz contains several ghazals on this theme, and the specific lines that have entered English as 'What Was Said to the Rose' are a compilation popularized by Barks. The underlying Persian material is genuine Rumi — his preoccupation with the hidden address that precedes manifest beauty runs through hundreds of ghazals. The compiled English version draws on several sources, and a reader should treat the Barks rendering as a popular American version of a real Rumi theme rather than a direct translation of a single poem.

The theological background is the Qur'anic teaching that God's creative act is a speech — kun, 'Be!' (Qur'an 2:117, 3:47, 16:40, and elsewhere). The universe exists because it was spoken into being. Rumi extends this teaching into the aesthetic dimension. Not only does each thing exist because it was spoken; each thing is beautiful because of a particular quality of the speech that addressed it. The rose's red is a response to an address of a particular tone. The cypress's height is a response to another tone. The human soul's capacities — its capacity to love, to grieve, to recognize beauty — are responses to addresses pitched exactly for a human listener.

The poem has resonated widely outside Sufi contexts because the intuition it names is intelligible to anyone who has stood in front of a flower or a sky and felt that something was being communicated. Rumi's claim is that this feeling is correct. What the observer senses as communication is communication. The rose is responding to the same presence the observer is responding to. The poem is a lyric picture of the kinship between the human heart and the rest of creation, grounded in the doctrine that both are conversations with the same speaker.

In the Divan's larger architecture, the ghazal sits among Rumi's many poems on the hidden instruction. The tradition calls this kalam — the speech of God — in both its absolute form (the Qur'an, which is God's uncreated speech) and its creative form (the address that shapes each created thing into its own form). Rumi's lyric theology often operates at the intersection of these two meanings, treating the soul's inward reception of the Qur'an and the rose's outward reception of its shaping word as two forms of the same event.

Original Text

Translation

What was said to the rose that made it open
was said to me here in my chest.

What was whispered to the cypress that raised it to the sky
was whispered to me where I stand.

What was told to the jasmine that gave it its scent,
what was spoken to the apple that taught it to ripen,
what was sung to the ruby that called color into the stone,
was told and spoken and sung to this heart of mine.

Beneath every speech there is another speech,
the first of which made you what you are.
If you have ears, listen for it.

Every beauty in the garden is the answer to a word.
My beauty, whatever it is, is the answer to that same word,
spoken once, and still speaking.

Commentary

The ghazal opens with a claim that is not argued, only asserted. What was said to the rose was said to me. No qualifier, no apology, no attempt to make it less strange. Rumi is reporting a recognition, not building a case. The rose's opening is an answer. The speaker's existence is an answer. Both are responses to the same speech.

The Qur'anic word behind this is kun — Be. God creates by speaking. The universe is an ongoing response to this speech. In medieval Islamic theology, the speech is not a single historical event; it is continuous. The created world is the present-tense unfolding of the divine utterance. A rose opens because the utterance is still being spoken in its direction. When the utterance ends, the rose wilts. When a new utterance begins, a new rose opens. The world is, in this understanding, a conversation without pause.

Rumi's poetic move is to claim that the human soul is in this same conversation. Not a separate species of being — the heart of a sage, the mind of a mystic, set apart from the natural world. The soul is a rose that speaks. The heart is a jasmine that knows it is a jasmine. The creative utterance that opened the flower also opened the human, and the two are, underneath everything, replies to the same voice.

The line beneath every speech there is another speech, the first of which made you what you are carries the poem's key teaching. What we say to each other in ordinary language is layered over a prior speech that shaped our capacity to say anything at all. What a flower presents to the world through its color and perfume is layered over a prior speech that shaped its capacity to present. This is not mysticism in a soft sense. It is metaphysics: existence precedes speech precedes meaning, and the order is not reversible. A word from elsewhere makes a thing, and the thing, once made, participates in the same conversation by its being.

Rumi's teaching here overlaps with later Islamic philosophy's doctrine of existence as divine breath — nafas al-Rahman, the Breath of the Compassionate, as Ibn Arabi developed it. Every moment of every created thing's existence is a new breath of the divine. Remove the breath and the creature vanishes. The poem does not use Ibn Arabi's technical vocabulary, but it lyricizes the same metaphysics. The rose is opening now because the breath is reaching it now.

What the poem offers practically is a way of being in the natural world. Most people walk past a rose without recognizing that the rose is a response. The speaker has been given the capacity to recognize this, and the ghazal is partly an invitation to the reader to develop the same capacity. The Sufi practice that corresponds is nazar ila al-khalq — the gaze upon creation — which treats every created thing as a sign (aya) of the one who shaped it. The Qur'an uses this term constantly: the verses of the Qur'an are called ayat, and the things of the world are also called ayat. The world is a text. The poem is a lyric version of learning to read that text.

The poem is also, in its emotional tone, a lyric of kinship. The speaker is not alone in being addressed. The rose has received what he has received. The cypress has received it. The stone, the apple, the wind. When a person recognizes this, loneliness changes its character. The usual human loneliness — the sense that one is a discrete center of experience, surrounded by things that are not experiencing anything — is replaced by the recognition that all the other things have also been spoken to, and are all responding in their own modes. The rose does not respond by becoming conscious and having opinions; it responds by opening. The cypress by rising. The human by everything the human does. But all the modes of response are responses.

This is close to what Hopkins, writing in a Christian context six centuries later, called inscape — the distinctive signature of each created thing as it fulfills the divine idea that sustains it. The kingfisher catches fire, Hopkins wrote, because it is doing what a kingfisher does: being itself, in its specific quality of being, which Christ plays in ten thousand places. Rumi's rose opening and Hopkins's kingfisher catching fire are the same observation in two traditions.

There is a potential misreading worth naming. The ghazal is not a work of natural mysticism in the modern sense — the sense that one can reach the divine by communing with nature apart from revelation. Rumi is not saying the rose is enough, or that the world's beauty is a substitute for prayer. He is saying that the rose is a sign of the same speech whose fullest articulation is the Qur'an, and that a heart attuned to one will be attuned to the other. The poem assumes revelation as background. It is not an alternative to the mosque; it is what the mosque trains the heart to see everywhere else.

For a contemplative practitioner, the poem can be taken as a pointer to a daily exercise. Look at one thing today — a flower, a leaf, a bird, a person's face — and ask what has been said to it. Do not expect an answer in words. The answer is already in front of you, as the form of the thing. The exercise is not to generate meaning but to notice the meaning that is already being presented. The Sufi word for this attentiveness is tadabbur — reflective consideration — and when it is applied to creation, it yields what Rumi calls dhawq, the direct taste of the divine presence in the form.

A final note on the poem's provenance. The particular English version commonly titled 'What Was Said to the Rose' was assembled and popularized by Coleman Barks, working from scholarly translations and from his collaborators' readings of the Persian. Rumi did write ghazals on exactly this theme, in exactly this tone; the compiled English poem is faithful to the spirit. Readers who want the original Persian should look in Foruzanfar's edition of the Divan, where ghazals on the hidden address appear at multiple numbers, including 1846, 2057, and related poems. Nicholson's 1898 selections contain earlier examples of the same motif in the same voice.

The poem ends without resolution, which is its own teaching. The speech that shaped the rose and the speaker is still speaking. The ghazal closes as one sentence in a longer utterance, and the reader, if attentive, can begin to hear the rest.

The Persian phrase tradition for this theme uses the verb guftan — simply 'to say.' The mystery of the poem is carried by the ordinariness of the verb. What God does with creation is said to be saying. Nothing more dramatic than speaking. The rose is what a word looks like after it has settled. The cypress is what a different word looks like. Each thing in the garden is a different word of the same speaker, and the garden together is a paragraph that will not repeat itself in quite this form again. This attention to the specificity of each created word is a signature of Rumi's lyric theology. No rose is generic. No cypress is replaceable. Each is the only reply to the only word that produced it.

Worth noting as well is the gender and intimacy of the speech in Rumi's register. The word spoken to the rose is not a command in the Persian sense of imperative; it is closer to a whisper between lovers. The Beloved, in Rumi's ghazal, speaks tenderly to the things the Beloved is making. The created thing is not forced into form; it is invited. Something is said that produces the opening. This tonal specificity shapes how the poem should be read. The rose did not open because it was commanded; it opened because it was loved. The same holds for the human heart. The work of the path is partly the work of letting one's own opening be a response to that tone rather than to the self's own commands.

Themes

Creative speech (kun). The Qur'anic doctrine that God creates by speaking — kun fa-yakun, 'Be! and it is' (Qur'an 2:117, 3:47). Every created thing exists because it was addressed; the addressing is continuous. Rumi's ghazal is a lyric rendering of this doctrine.

The rose as reply. Form as response. Each created thing's specific shape and quality is the answer to the specific address that shaped it. The rose is not decorative; it is a sentence in a conversation. The same holds for the soul.

Nafas al-Rahman (the Breath of the Compassionate). Ibn Arabi's doctrine that every moment of every creature's existence is a fresh breath from the divine. The poem does not use this vocabulary but lyricizes the same metaphysics. The rose opens now because the breath reaches it now.

Kinship with creation. The recognition that all created things have been addressed, and that the human soul is in the same conversation as the rose and the cypress. This produces a specific quality of presence with the natural world that is neither sentimental nor utilitarian.

The ayat (signs). The Qur'anic teaching that both the verses of scripture and the things of creation are called ayat — signs. Creation is a text. The practice is learning to read it. See Sufism for more on this reading tradition.

Nazar ila al-khalq (the gaze upon creation). The Sufi contemplative practice of attending to created things as signs. Distinct from mere aesthetic appreciation; the gaze is trained to see the divine address in the form. Hopkins's inscape is its Catholic counterpart.

Significance

What Was Said to the Rose is widely known in the English-speaking world, primarily through Coleman Barks's rendering. The compiled English is popular because it gives lyric form to an intuition many readers have had but lacked language for: that the natural world is somehow addressing them, and that beauty is a form of communication.

The ghazal theme it comes from is a major thread in the Divan and in later Persian Sufi poetry. Hafiz, Jami, Shabistari, and the Chishti poets of South Asia all wrote on the hidden address that precedes created form. Ibn Arabi's doctrine of nafas al-Rahman provides the technical metaphysical background. The ghazal's lyric rendering of this metaphysics has made it one of the most portable pieces of Rumi's theology — a reader who will not study Ibn Arabi will still be moved by the rose opening in response to a word.

In Annemarie Schimmel's treatment, this theme is central to Rumi's poetics of creation. William Chittick, in his studies of Ibn Arabi and Rumi, places the Divan's many ghazals on hidden speech within the larger Sufi metaphysics of existence as divine utterance. Franklin Lewis discusses the reception history of this and related ghazals in his biography, noting how the theme has been used by later Sufi writers as evidence for the continuity between Rumi and the Ibn Arabi school.

Outside Sufi studies, the poem has found readers in Christian contemplative writing (comparison to Hopkins's inscape is common), in Hindu devotional literature (Ramakrishna's reading of each creature's nature as God's play carries a similar flavor), and in environmental philosophy, where the ghazal is occasionally cited in arguments for a sacred cosmology of the natural world. The poem's effectiveness in these cross-tradition contexts is testimony to how close Rumi's lyric theology comes to articulating an intuition that belongs to no single tradition.

Connections

Hopkins's Inscape and Instress. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the nineteenth-century English Jesuit poet, developed the concepts of inscape (the distinctive signature of each thing as it expresses its divine idea) and instress (the energy sustaining the inscape). Hopkins's poetry, especially As Kingfishers Catch Fire, is a Catholic expression of the same intuition Rumi articulates: each thing is the visible signature of an inward shaping word.

Leela (Divine Play, Hindu). The Indian concept of leela — the play of the divine through the forms of the world — holds that each creature's nature is Krishna's spontaneous expression, not a mechanical fact. Ramakrishna taught that a flower is the Mother's play. The ghazal's rose opening in response to a word is a Sufi picture of leela, with the grammatical difference that Rumi's tradition maintains the divine-creature distinction more sharply than Advaita does.

The Logos (Christian). John 1:1-3 — 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him.' The Christian doctrine of the Logos as the creative Word through whom all things come into being is theologically parallel to the Qur'anic kun. Both traditions ground creation in divine speech. The ghazal's claim that each thing is a reply to an address fits within either framework.

Vak (Sacred Speech, Vedic). The Vedic tradition's doctrine of Vak — the creative feminine power of speech — holds that the cosmos is sustained by the divine utterance of the Vedas. The Rig Veda's hymn to Vak describes her as the power through whom all forms emerge. Rumi's ghazal has a structural resonance with this ancient teaching, though the theological frames differ.

Sign and Signifier in Qur'anic Epistemology. The Qur'an uses ayat for both its verses and the things of creation, placing the visible world and the revealed text in the same ontological category. The ghazal assumes this framing: a rose is a verse, and the heart that has been shaped by the Qur'an is trained to read it. This is one of the foundations of the Sufi sciences of reading creation.

Listening Practice and the Sama. The poem's closing lines — beneath every speech there is another speech, if you have ears, listen for it — connect to the Sufi practice of sama, spiritual listening. The practitioner trains the ear not primarily through ordinary hearing but through attending to the speech beneath the speech. Mevlevi dervish practice operates on this premise. Contemplative listening is the general category.

BEGIN and the Recognition of Being Addressed. In the Satyori 9 Levels, BEGIN includes the recognition that one is the subject of an address. The poem is a picture of BEGIN's aesthetic extension: what has been recognized in one's own heart is also visible in the rose, and the rose becomes a companion in the conversation. Satyori's teaching on attention to the sacred in the ordinary aligns with the ghazal.

The Environmental Implication. If every thing is a reply to the same speech, then the relationship of the human to the rest of creation is not extractive or decorative; it is filial. Contemporary Muslim environmental ethics has drawn on Rumi and Ibn Arabi to argue for a sacred cosmology of the natural world, in which exploitation of the earth is also violence against the text of divine speech. This application is consistent with Rumi's theology, though not explicitly articulated in the poem.

Further Reading

Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz by Reynold A. Nicholson (Cambridge, 1898) — The scholarly translation of the Divan. Public domain. Essential for the ghazals behind the compiled 'What Was Said to the Rose.'

Mystical Poems of Rumi by A.J. Arberry (University of Chicago Press, 1968) — The second essential scholarly English translation of the Divan.

The Sufi Path of Knowledge by William C. Chittick (SUNY Press, 1989) — Chittick's major study of Ibn Arabi. Essential for the doctrine of nafas al-Rahman and the metaphysics behind the ghazal.

The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi by Annemarie Schimmel (SUNY Press, 1993) — Schimmel on Rumi's poetics of creation.

The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (various editions) — For the concept of inscape. 'As Kingfishers Catch Fire' is the closest Christian analogue to the ghazal's claim about form as reply.

The Study Quran edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr (HarperOne, 2015) — For the Qur'anic background, especially the passages on kun and on creation as divine speech.