Rumi: Soul Fury

Coleman Barks

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062351005
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this seminal collection of Rumi poetry—the medieval Sufi mystic who is the most popular poet in America—and his "soul friend, " Shams Tabriz, foremost Rumi translator and author of The Essential Rumi Coleman Barks focuses on friendship and love. Rumi: Soul Fury is a must-own book for every Rumi fan.

In this stunning translation, Coleman Barks brings to light Rumi's theme of "love as religion"—that to reach its most profound depths requires mindful practice—as well as love in its most meaningful form: soul friendship. These short poems by both Rumi and Shams Tabriz, rich in beauty and spiritual insight, capture the delight and the impermanence of these bonds that pierce deep into the human mind, heart, and soul.

Rumi's poetry is honored and enjoyed by many traditions and cultures. Today, many people from all walks of life have moved beyond traditional notions of spirituality, embracing a sense of the sacred that transcends a singular religion, belief, or text. Rumi's poetry speaks to them and nourishes their divine yearnings. Joyous and contemplative, provocative and playful, Rumi: Soul Fury is a sterling addition to the modern Rumi oeuvre, and is sure to be embraced by his wide and devoted readership.

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Rumi

This Day I Cannot Say—Quatrains

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Introduction: Rumi

TANDEM CREATION

What are the qualities of a deepening awareness? To some it feels right to call that the friend. For others, it is more like a spaciousness, an emptiness, or silence. Many of Rumi’s short poems circle around the delight, and the impossibility, of saying this blessed inwardness, the friendship. What is it to drop the ego? To let go, to surrender, to trust? All the quatrains of Rumi and all the sayings of Shams are trying, in their different and combining forms of soul fury and kindness, to help that happen in each reader. It often does not happen all at once, the final push of the ego over into the dissolution, or rebirth. It has many names, that process of transformation. Rumi says, “I have longevity, inside this dying I have so long desired” (#3).

Rumi always works in tandem, with a friend, or friends. Or, to say it another way, his poetry is communal, with very personal touches. It is difficult to describe the process, though we all have probably experienced it. Out of his deep friendship with Shams Tabriz came the overflowing creativity of the collection he calls The Works of Shams Tabriz, or the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, often now called just The Shams. At the end of the poem, where the poet traditionally signs the poem by mentioning his own name, you will never find Rumi’s name. Most often he mentions Shams, but sometimes another friend, Saladin Zarkub the goldsmith. Sometimes he gives the poem back into silence, sometimes into sunlight. And out of his friendship with Husam Chelebi—his scribe and chief disciple, and his tandem-work friend after Shams and Saladin were gone—came the ocean of the six books of the Masnavi. He calls the whole thing “The Book of Husam.” Here is how the prelude to Book IV begins:

Husamuddin! Ziya-Haqq, God’s light, you draw this Masnavi out

into the open again, your rope around its neck

leading God knows where!

Some have expressed gratitude for this poem; this poem itself

lifts hands in thanksgiving, glad as a vineyard in summer heat.

The caravan loads up and breaks camp. Patience leads the way

into joy. Face down, flat on the earth.

Husam, the sun-sword of one light, many wander in moonlight,

but when the sun comes up, the markets open.

Exchange gets clear. Buyers and sellers can tell false coins from true.

Thieves recede from the scene. Only counterfeiters

and those who need to hide avoid sunlight.

Let Book IV be part of the light!

That is what his tandem creativity sounds like in action with Husam Chelebi. It is clear evidence of Rumi’s kindness. The interior of a Rumi poem is friendship with a specific human being and with the mystery of Allah, which he calls the friend, or the unsayable absence, or daylight, or night, or the presence inside the growing springtime green, or many other things. Rumi’s poetry is very consciously engaged in collaborative listening and making, the friendships and the powerful conversational dynamic going on in and around it there in the moment of its making. The poems come out of his love, and perhaps we love them for the glimpses they give of that, as well as for the light and the grief—for the taste of how it is to be, and how it is to be nothing at all.

I am not interested in placing these poems in a particular religious tradition. Rumi was a devout Muslim, a Sufi. Many of these poems are glosses on passages from the Qur’an. But he has also been heard as a more universal voice. This is what I try to bring forward. His poetry is honored and delighted in by many traditions and cultures. A great percentage of the world’s people now are drawn to a sense of the sacred that is beyond belief and beyond a specific sacred text, beyond a church and a priesthood and beyond the bureaucracy of religious culture. This new and very ancient way is experiential, exploratory, and so has attracted the Sufis with their all-incl...