The Old Harper

Adulterated Coin

When the minstrel grew older and feeble, through not earning (anything) he became indebted for a single loaf of bread.He said, “Thou hast given me long life and respite: O God, Thou hast bestowed (many) favours on a vile wretch.For seventy years I have been committing sin, (yet) not for one day hast Thou withheld Thy bounty from me.I (can) earn nothing: to-day I am Thy guest, I will play the harp for Thee, I am Thine.”He took up his harp and went in search of God to the graveyard of Medina, crying “Alas!”He said, “I crave of God the price of silk (for harpstrings), for He in His kindness accepts adulterated coin.”He played the harp a long while and (then), weeping, laid his head down: he made the harp his pillow and dropped on a tomb.Sleep overtook him: the bird, his soul, escaped from captivity, it let harp and harper go and darted away.It became freed from the body and the pain of this world in the simple (purely spiritual) world and the vast region of the soul.

Masnavi I.2082–2090 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926

First attested

1278The text is Masnavi I.2082–2090. 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 one reading of G inside this passage, at I.2088: "when he had played a long while". 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.

An old harper, his voice gone, plays for God alone in the graveyard of Medina and falls asleep on a tomb.

Masnavi I.1913–2222, set "in the time of ʿUmar". A minstrel at whose song "the dead would arise" (I.1915) grows old until his voice is "like the bray of an old donkey" (I.2077). Penniless, he takes his harp to the graveyard of Medina and plays for God, then sleeps on a tomb while his soul sings in a garden it would not leave. God tells the sleeping ʿUmar to carry seven hundred dinars from the public treasury to "Our servant"; ʿUmar searches the graveyard and finds only the old harper. Long digressions interrupt the tale, among them the moaning pillar (I.2113), before the gold is given, the harper breaks his harp, and ʿUmar tells him that his repentance too is a veil. The lines here, I.2082–2090, are the old man's offering. Whinfield abridges the tale as Story VIII of Book I.