The Merchant and the Parrot
Play Dead, Fly Free
Masnavi I.1825–1834 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926After that, he cast her out of the cage. The little parrot flew to a lofty bough.The dead parrot made such a (swift) flight as when the orient sun rushed onward.The merchant was amazed at the action of the bird: without understanding he suddenly beheld the mysteries of the bird.He lifted up his face and said, “O nightingale, give us profit (instruction) by explaining thy case.What did she (the parrot) do there (in India), that thou didst learn, devise a trick, and burn us (with grief)”?The parrot said, “She by her act counselled me—‘Abandon thy charm of voice and thy affection (for thy master),Because thy voice has brought thee into bondage’: she feigned herself dead for the sake of (giving me) this counsel,Meaning (to say), ‘O thou who hast become a singer to high and low, become dead like me, that thou mayst gain release.’”If you are a grain, the little birds will peck you up; if you are a bud, the children will pluck you off.Hide the grain (bait), become wholly a snare; hide the bud, become the grass on the roof.
- First attested
- 1278The text is Masnavi I.1825–1834. The oldest dated copy Nicholson used is the Konya manuscript, his G, "dated 677 a.h." — 1278, five years after Rūmī's death — which he judged in April 1930 "the most authoritative text of the Mathnawí". He translated Book I in 1926, before adopting G, and his 1930 volume lists in an appendix where G differs from that text. It records no reading of G inside this passage; at the head of the tale it gives the heading as "the merchant to whom the captive parrot" (I.1547) and at I.1552 "The parrot said to him". Book I carries no date of its own; Book II opens by dating its own start to A.H. 662 (1263–64), after a delay, so Book I was finished by then.
Whinfield's 1887 abstract reduces the parrot's message to one clause, "that he was kept confined in a cage". In Nicholson's line-by-line version it runs twenty-three lines (I.1552–1574), a lover's complaint that ends: "He is a lover of the Universal, and he himself is the Universal: he is in love with himself and seeking his own love."
Whinfield 1887, Book I, Story VII, "The Merchant and his Clever Parrot"; Nicholson 1926, Masnavi I.1552–1574 (pp. 85–86)
A caged parrot learns from a wild one's feigned death how to die, be thrown from the cage, and fly.
Masnavi I.1547–1912, a tale broken again and again by teaching. A merchant bound for India asks his household what to bring back; his caged parrot asks only that he tell the parrots of India her plight. Her message runs twenty-three lines (I.1552–1574), a lover's complaint: "I in this prison and ye in the rose-garden". In India one parrot "trembled exceedingly, fell, and died"; told of it at home, the merchant's own parrot does the same. Grieving, he throws her out of the cage, and the dead bird flies to a bough. The lines here, I.1825–1834, are that release and her explanation. The merchant takes her way as counsel for himself (I.1847), and Rūmī glosses the dying at I.1909.
Light
It gives death a meaning without softening it: the parrot must lie truly still, and the release is real. On the way it gives the reader one of the Masnavi's great complaints, the caged bird's "I in this prison and ye in the rose-garden".
Shadow
Freedom here is won by a trick — the merchant asks what taught her to "devise a trick" (I.1829) — and by giving up the voice that made the bird loved; the moral that follows, "Hide the grain", makes concealment a rule, and the generous master who kept her is left behind.
