The Festival of Spring, from the Díván of Jeláleddín: Rendered in English Gazels after Rückert's Versions, with an Introduction and a Criticism of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám — Rumi — John Shaqi
The Festival of Spring, from the Díván of Jeláleddín: Rendered in English Gazels after Rückert's Versions, with an Introduction and a Criticism of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Rumi · en
as he says, 'In the excellent Jeláleddín Rumi in particular we find the
unity of the soul with the One set forth, and that unity described as
Love; and this spiritual unity is an exaltation above the finite and
common, a transfiguration of the natural and spiritual in which the
externalism and transitoriness of nature is surmounted: in _this_
poetry, which soars over all that is external and sensuous, who would
recognise the prosaic ideas current about so-called Pantheism?' No;
Jelál is not to be tabooed, off-hand, and labelled merely as a Pantheist!
With Hegel's correction of Tholuck and his vindication of the
speculative standpoint of the Persian Poet, we are entirely agreed; but
Hegel is himself here not quite adequate. All students of philosophy
know that in this very relation has lain the chief ambiguity and
weakness of his own System, and it is reflected in his view of
Jeláleddín. With his dominating passion for systematising the evolution
of History and conforming it to a logical scheme of thought, he yet
fails to see—largely owing to the limitation of his material—how
practically modern and how spiritually personal Jelál really is. For,
after all, Jeláleddín is no mere idle dreamy mediaeval Mystic; he _is_
essentially a modern poet and thinker, and is _not_ to be pushed back
into the dim vagueness and impersonal materialism of ancient thought. He
has twelve centuries of Christian life and reflection behind him, with
all the dogmatic development of the ancient orthodox Church, on the one
hand; all the forms of Indian pantheistic and Greek freethought on the
other; and six centuries of austere restraining Mohammedan Monotheism as
his central curb and check—and well and clearly he knows them all. He is
at once universally eclectic and originally constructive, and he moves
freely and joyously with a larger insight all his own. The East and the
West meet in him again, more richly than they have done in any other for
centuries, and he binds them into a new, happy harmony, the 'heavenly
harmony' of poesy. He is a true Seer, like his own ancient Zarathustra,
like Lao-tse, like Buddha, and much more akin to Jesus, and Paul, and
John, than to the fierce, relentless, one-sided Prophet of Arabia, whose
barren religion he redeems from its mechanical inhumanity and quickens
with the breath of a purer and Diviner love. His intellectual kinship is
with Plato and the speculative Theologians of the Christian Church, and
with the deep dreamers who live in the highest vision and lose
themselves sweetly and gladly in God. He is the veritable Morning Star
of the new Day of the World, rising in pure brightness, afar in the
East—and after barbaric crusade and mad war, heralding, in a clearer and
sweeter Song of Divine Love, the triumph of the new time.
And the Nightingale thought, 'I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay,
For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away'!