The Song of the Reed

The Cut That Sings

Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations—Saying, “Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament hath caused man and woman to moan.I want a bosom torn by severance, that I may unfold (to such a one) the pain of love-desire.Every one who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united with it.In every company I uttered my wailful notes, I consorted with the unhappy and with them that rejoice.Every one became my friend from his own opinion; none sought out my secrets from within me.My secret is not far from my plaint, but ear and eye lack the light (whereby it should be apprehended).Body is not veiled from soul, nor soul from body, yet none is permitted to see the soul.”This noise of the reed is fire, it is not wind: whoso hath not this fire, may he be naught!’Tis the fire of Love that is in the reed, ’tis the fervour of Love that is in the wine.The reed is the comrade of every one who has been parted from a friend: its strains pierced our hearts.Who ever saw a poison and antidote like the reed? Who ever saw a sympathiser and a longing lover like the reed?The reed tells of the Way full of blood and recounts stories of the passion of Majnún.Only to the senseless is this sense confided: the tongue hath no customer save the ear.In our woe the days (of life) have become untimely: our days travel hand in hand with burning griefs.If our days are gone, let them go!—’tis no matter. Do Thou remain, for none is holy as Thou art!

Masnavi I.1–16 · extract · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926
Earliest record
1278The earliest complete witness to the text is the Konya manuscript, transcribed A.H. 677 = A.D. 1278, five years after Rumi's death. Nicholson did not have it when he edited and translated Books I and II. Writing at Cambridge in April 1930 he states that he considers "the Qoniya MS. (G), dated 677 a.h., to be the most authoritative text of the Mathnawí", and prints an appendix "showing the changes required in order to bring the translation of Books I, II and III (vv. 1-2835) into agreement with" it; under Book I that appendix corrects five passages of the Arabic preface and then the poem's first two verses in turn. A separate 1930 list of corrections adds the closing quotation mark after "to see the soul" at v. 8, ending the reed's speech there. The composition itself is undocumented outside the poem and the tradition around it: Rumi's Arabic preface names Ḥusām al-Dīn but carries no date, and the usual placing of the work in roughly the last decade of his life is scholarly reconstruction rather than a dated record. In Nicholson's 1926 printing (vol. II, p. 5) a blank line divides line 18 from line 19, with no heading; the eighteen lines' standing as a unit comes from the tradition.
Said to date from
the 1260sasserted by Aflākī's Manāqib al-ʿĀrifīn, written between 1318 and 1353, which reports on the authority of Sirāj al-Dīn, the Masnavi-reciter at Rumi's tomb, that when Ḥusām al-Dīn Chalabī asked for a book in the manner of Sanāʾī and the metre of ʿAṭṭār, Rumi put into his hand a paper taken from the top of his turban on which the eighteen opening verses were already written — so the tradition holds that the passage predates the poem it opens.

The line English readers know as Nicholson's is not the line Nicholson ended up wanting in 1930, with the Konya manuscript of 1278 before him. He directed that the Masnavi's first verse be read "Listen to this reed how it complains, telling a tale of separations". That puts the complaint first, the tale second: the reverse of what he printed in 1926.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, Volume II: Containing the Translation of the First & Second Books (1926); Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, Volume IV: Containing the Translation of the Third & Fourth Books (1930).

The eighteen lines opening Rumi's Masnavi: a reed cut from the bed, its cry read as the soul's for God.

More context

Rumi (1207–1273) composed the Masnavi at the request of his disciple Ḥusām al-Dīn Chalabī, whom he names in the Arabic preface that calls the poem the expounder of the Qur'ān. Aflākī's hagiography, written between 1318 and 1353, reports that the opening eighteen lines already existed on paper, drawn from the top of Rumi's turban when the request was made. A reed sounds only after it has been cut from the bed, its inner nodes driven out and its finger-holes opened. So the complaint and the music are one event and not two. The extract here gives the first sixteen couplets in Nicholson's 1926 English; he revised its first line in 1930 against the Konya manuscript of 1278.

Light

Separation is made the condition of the song rather than a bar to it. The reed cannot sound until it is cut, so the reader's ache is the instrument working.

Shadow

Line fourteen gives this sense no confidant but the senseless; line eighteen, that no raw man understands the ripe. An outsider cannot settle the rest from the lines.

Sources6 sources

Primary source

  • Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī; ed. and trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, Volume II: Containing the Translation of the First & Second Books, 1926, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, New Series IV.2 (Cambridge University Press for the Gibb Memorial Trustees; Luzac & Co.); Proem, Mathnawī I.1-18 at p. 5 — I.1-4 quoted here; translator's Introduction, pp. xv-xviiThe English quoted in verse_text, verbatim as first printed, including the opening line 'Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations—'. In the same volume's Introduction Nicholson states that the translation 'does not attempt to convey the inner as distinguished from the outer meaning: that is to say, it gives the literal sense of the words translated without explaining either their metaphorical or their mystical sense'; that among the Oriental commentaries he 'profited most' by the Turkish of Ismāʿīl Anqaravī; and that 'the corrections which I look forward to publishing at a later stage, when the Commentary on this volume appears, are likely to be fewer, but also more important' than the textual corrections already issued.
  • Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī; trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, Volume II, 1926, Book I, Arabic prose preface, pp. 3-4, standing immediately before I.1Rumi's own preface calls the Masnavi 'the expounder of the Qur'an', applies to it Qur'anic phrases used of the Qur'an itself ('None shall touch it except the purified'; 'Falsehood doth not approach it either from before or behind'), and names the man at whose request it was composed: 'the Sword (Ḥusām) of the Truth and Religion, Ḥasan son of Muḥammad son of al-Ḥasan, generally known as Ibn Akhī Turk' and 'a native of Urmiya.'
  • Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, Volume IV: Containing the Translation of the Third & Fourth Books, 1930, Gibb Memorial New Series IV.4; Introduction dated Cambridge, April 1930; 'Corrections in the translation of the First and Second Books', pp. xiii-xiv; Appendix, Book INicholson's statement that he considers 'the Qoniya MS. (G), dated 677 a.h., to be the most authoritative text of the Mathnawí'; the Appendix 'showing the changes required in order to bring the translation of Books I, II and III (vv. 1-2835) into agreement with the text of the Qoniya MS., designated as G, which was transcribed in A.H. 677-A.D. 1278'; and within it, after five corrections to the Arabic preface, at Book I line 1, 'Read Listen to this reed how it complains, telling a tale of separations', at line 2, 'Read man and woman have moaned in (unison with) my lament', and in the separate corrections list at v. 8, 'Add quotation marks after to see the soul.'

The tradition itself

  • The Nay-nama, the eighteen opening lines of Rūmī's MasnaviThe esoteric reading given on this entry
  • Shams al-Dīn Aḥmad Aflākī, Manāqib al-ʿĀrifīn, 1353, composed between 1318 and 1353; the account attributed to Sirāj al-Dīn, Masnavi-reciter at Rumi's tomb. Persian ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, Ankara 1959-61; English trans. John O'Kane, The Feats of the Knowers of God (Brill, 2002). Read here in Ibrahim Gamard's English of the passage at dar-al-masnavi.org, not in the Persian or in O'Kane.The traditional account of the poem's beginning: that Ḥusām al-Dīn Chalabī asked Rumi for a book in the manner of Sanāʾī's Ilāhī-Nāma and the metre of ʿAṭṭār's Manṭiq al-Ṭayr, and that Rumi 'from the top of his blessed turban' put into his hand a paper on which, in the hagiographer's words, 'were the eighteen verses of the beginning of the Masnavi' — so the tradition holds that the passage predates the poem it opens.

Further reading