The Man of God
A King Beneath the Darvish-Cloak
Dīvān-e Shams, ode VIII · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1898The man of God is drunken without wine,The man of God is full without meat.The man of God is distraught and bewildered,The man of God has no food or sleep.The man of God is a king ’neath darvish-cloak,The man of God is a treasure in a ruin.The man of God is not of air and earth,The man of God is not of fire and water.The man of God is a boundless sea,The man of God rains pearls without a cloud.The man of God hath hundred moons and skies,The man of God hath hundred suns.The man of God is made wise by the Truth,The man of God is not learned from book.The man of God is beyond infidelity and religion,To the man of God right and wrong are alike.The man of God has ridden away from Not-being,The man of God is gloriously attended.The man of God is concealed, Shamsi Dīn;The man of God do thou seek and find!
- Earliest record
- 1441The oldest witness Nicholson names is V, the Vienna manuscript dated 4th Muḥarram 845 A.H. (May 1441). He printed the ode from the Leyden manuscript (L), dated 851 A.H.; the foot of the Persian on p. 28 reads “L Lakh. V”, and his Appendix III gives it in the Lakhnau edition (p. 28) and as no. 22 of Rosenzweig's Auswahl (Vienna, 1838), with no Tabriz-edition reference. Ibrahim Gamard lists it among seven of Nicholson's forty-eight odes that “are no longer considered authentic Rumi poems” and are not in the earliest manuscripts.
Nicholson's 1898 note sets “king ’neath darvish-cloak” beside Ḥāfiẓ's “crownless kings” and Abū 'l ʿAtāhiya's “a king in beggar's garb”.
Nicholson, Selected Poems (1898), note on VIII. 3, p. 219, citing Ḥāfiẓ (I. 366. 6) and Abū ’l ʿAtāhiya in the Transactions of the Ninth Congress of Orientalists, Vol. II, p. 114
Twenty lines on one phrase, “The man of God”: drunk without wine, a king in a darvish-cloak, beyond religion.
More context
Ode VIII, ten couplets, printed here whole. Nineteen of its twenty lines open on "The man of God", whom Nicholson's note calls "the perfect Sūfī". The man it describes needs nothing: no wine, no meat, no books. The last couplet names Shamsi Dīn and tells the reader to seek and find him. Nicholson printed the ode as Rūmī's, but Ibrahim Gamard lists it among seven that "are no longer considered authentic Rumi poems"; it is not in the earliest manuscripts.
Light
The repeated phrase turns a list into an incantation: a portrait of freedom from need, not a rank to be claimed.
Shadow
Nicholson glosses “right and wrong are alike” as the adept above law, and warns such theories mislead uneducated minds.