The Song of the Reed
The Cut That Sings
Masnavi I.1–18 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926Listen 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!Whoever is not a fish becomes sated with His water; whoever is without daily bread finds the day long.None that is raw understands the state of the ripe: therefore my words must be brief. Farewell!
- First attested
- 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.
- Claimed
- 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" — the complaint first and the tale second, the reverse of what he printed in 1926.
The eighteen lines opening Rumi's Masnavi: a reed cut from the bed, its cry read as the soul's for God.
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, which ney-makers do by burning them through — so the complaint and the music are one event and not two. The English here is Nicholson's of 1926; 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 ache a reader brings to the poem is not evidence of failure but the instrument working.
Shadow
Line fourteen gives this sense no confidant but the senseless; line eighteen, that no raw man understands the ripe. Whether that names the self-emptied lover the poem speaks to, or a text declining to argue, is what an outsider cannot settle from the lines.
