The Sage and the Peacock
The Beauty That Draws Arrows
Masnavi V · tr. E. H. Whinfield, 1887Tear not thy plumage off, it cannot be replaced;Disfigure not thy face in wantonness, O fair one!That face which is bright as the forenoon sun,—To disfigure it were a grievous sin.’Twere paganism to mar such a face as thine!The moon itself would weep to lose sight of it!Knowest thou not the beauty of thine own face?Quit this temper that leads thee to war with thyself!It is the claws of thine own foolish thoughtsThat in spite wound the face of thy quiet soul.Know such thoughts to be claws fraught with poison,Which score deep wounds on the face of thy soul.
- First attested
- 1278Masnavi V.553–558 in Nicholson's numbering, from the tale of the sage and the peacock that begins at V.536. No autograph survives. The earliest complete manuscript, the Konya copy, was finished in December 1278, five years after Rūmī's death; Nicholson judged the Qoniya MS., dated 677 A.H., the most authoritative text of the poem, and his printed text from Book III, v. 2836 onward follows it. The English quoted here rests on something later: Whinfield made his translation from the Bulaq edition of 1268 A.H., keying his section pages to the Lucknow edition of 1282 A.H., and it is quoted from the London printing of 1887 (Trübner & Co.).
- Claimed
- the 1270sasserted by Nicholson, in the Introduction to his translation of Books V and VI (dated Cambridge, 19 April 1933), places both books in the years when Rūmī was nearing seventy; Whinfield gives Rūmī's dates as born at Balkh in 604 A.H. (1207) and died at Qonia in 672 A.H. (1273), and Book VI breaks off unfinished. The 1270s decade is this entry's reading of those two statements: no manuscript from Rūmī's lifetime survives to date the book.
The peacock does not refute the sage. At V.652–660 it grants that a self-restrained man should keep his feathers and meet temptation with the shield of restraint, and says it is not that man: like a child or a drunkard handed a sword, it will throw its weapons into the well. Whinfield compresses this into one prose sentence about hunters.
Masnavi V.641–664, the peacock's answer (Nicholson's translation of Books V–VI, 1934; paraphrased, not quoted); Whinfield 1887, Book V, Story III, p. 228.
A sage finds a peacock tearing out its own feathers and pleads with it to stop; the bird has its reasons.
Masnavi Book V opens on the four birds Abraham was told to cut in pieces (Qurʾān 2:260), which Whinfield summarises as the duck of gluttony, the cock of concupiscence, “the peacock of ambition and ostentation” and the crow of bad desires (V.42–44). The peacock's tale begins at V.536 in Nicholson's numbering: a sage finds a peacock tearing out its feathers and pleads with it. The lines here close his plea and carry Rūmī's gloss on it, V.553–558. Rūmī then sets the ḥadīth “There is no monkery in Islam” over the counsel to turn the heart from the feathers rather than tear them out (V.574–578). The peacock weeps, and answers (V.641–664) that fowlers and archers hunt it for its plumage and it cannot restrain itself, so it will be ugly and safe. Whinfield gives the tale in prose and marks his cut after these lines with a row of dots.
Light
It refuses the easy piety of renunciation: a gift torn out “cannot be replaced”, and the wound that matters is dealt not by the beak but by “the claws of thine own foolish thoughts”. The feathers are to be kept and the heart turned from them.
Shadow
The sage's rule is written for the self-possessed, and the peacock names who it leaves out: one who knows he cannot restrain himself. Rūmī lets the bird argue that for such a one, rending his own face is no sin (V.664) — a case easily bent into self-mutilation dressed as prudence.
