If here and there a slip or fault you see,
May he not lay the blame of all on me.
May he correct my errors, or befriend
With generous silence faults he cannot mend.
If the work be regarded as a love poem, without its mystical interpretation, Yúsuf may well be regarded as a cold, statuesque young man of the St. Anthony type, but cast in a more beautiful mould. While we may equally well regard Zulaikha as a passionate young lady sadly lacking in worldly wisdom. The coldness of Yúsuf would probably irritate us were we not frequently reminded of the way in which poor Zulaikha plagues him with her too constant attentions. Neither strike us as being very ordinary human people for precisely reverse reasons. There are occasions, however, when Zulaikha awakens our sympathy. It is touching to note that when she finds her own love slighted she should send other women to try their fortune with him, intending, should they succeed, to subtly take their place by strategy of some kind. Again, in the splendid Palace of Pleasure, painted all over, floor and wall and ceiling, with love-entwined figures of Yúsuf and Zulaikha, there is an idol—"A golden idol with jewelled eyes," representing this fatuous woman's love. The idol is placed behind a curtain, and on Yúsuf asking the reason, Zulaikha replies:
If I swerve from religion I would not be
Where the angry eyes of my god may see.
Then we watch the honeyed sweetness of Zulaikha's passion burst forth into bitter hate and shameless lying. We see the proud, chaste Yúsuf cast into prison on false pretences and quite melodramatically freed by the marvellous utterance of a babe at its mother's breast.[5] But Zulaikha finds the gossip of Memphis hard to be borne—the insinuations, the sneers, the cruel reproaches for the unrequited and ill-fated love of hers. Moreover, Zulaikha, like the women of Austria at the beginning of the eighteenth century,[6] had a husband as well as a lover, Potiphar, Grand Vizier of Egypt. These two concocted a scandalous story, which was easily set going and as easily believed by the common people. It resulted in Yúsuf being again sent to prison. At this point of the poem we are once more reminded of the Bible story of Joseph, for Jámí also mentions the interpretation of Pharaoh's dream, the release of the interpreter, and the unlimited power as the king's right hand that followed.
So we watch Yúsuf rise from slave to be the king's chief adviser, and in consequence the fall of the Grand Vizier and Zulaikha. The success of Yúsuf awakens little admiration. He is so far from being human that we should not have been very surprised if he had eaten one of the Pyramids.
But Zulaikha's condition is to be pitied. She is now a widow. Her jewels are gone, her dress is in rags, there are wrinkles in her once beautiful face, and her back is bent. But more than all these trials is the loss of her eyesight. We see her crouching in the road, listening eagerly for the sound of the coming of the proud Yúsuf on his wonderful steed,[7] happy to feel the dust of his passing procession. There is a note of real pathos in this scene. We see for the first time, perhaps, that Zulaikha's passion is changing into a fairer, nobler thing. Sometimes the boys who preceded Yúsuf would shout to her as she sat by her cottage of reeds, "Yúsuf is nigh!" But Zulaikha's heart, sore and hungry and yearning, knew better than they the approach of her lord. The eyes that had seen the Palace of Pleasure saw more now that they were blind! And yet the old passion had not quite burnt itself out. We see the bent form crouching on the ground, feeling the statue of her Yúsuf with her thin, trembling fingers, and piteously praying for some recognition.
The sound of Yúsuf's steed is heard in the distance, and a great shout rends the air: "Make room! Make room!" Zulaikha again crouches in the roadway. How long has she "made room" for the selfish and unfeeling ambitions of a man who was once her pampered slave! It is then, for the first time, that the soul of Zulaikha asserts itself and the mysticism of the poem becomes strongly evident. The material spell of a fleshly love is broken at last. In humility and absolute resignation Zulaikha shatters her once dear idol, destroys a sordid and hopeless dream. Her red rose of passion is turned into a white one, as she fervently cries:
O God, who lovest the humble, Thou
To whom idols, their makers, their servants bow;
'Tis to the light which Thy splendour lends
To the idol's face that its worshipper bends.
Still more triumphant are her words:
Glory to God! to a monarch's state
He has cast the king from his glory down,
And set on the head of a servant his crown.