We have a pattern in Bishr, the lover of Hind and her sister, and in Qays and Lubnā, and in Mayya and Ghaylān.”
Commenting on the last verse, the poet writes:
“Love, quâ love, is one and the same reality to those Arab lovers and to me; but the objects of our love are different, for they loved a phenomenon, whereas I love the Real. They are a pattern to us, because God only afflicted them with love for human beings in order that He might show, by means of them, the falseness of those who pretend to love Him, and yet feel no such transport and rapture in loving Him as deprived those enamoured men of their reason, and made them unconscious of themselves.”
Most of the great medieval Sūfīs lived saintly lives, dreaming of God, intoxicated with God. When they tried to tell their dreams, being men, they used the language of men. If they were also literary artists, they naturally wrote in the style of their own day and generation. In mystical poetry the Arabs yield the palm to the Persians. Any one who would read the secret of Sūfism, no longer encumbered with theological articles nor obscured by metaphysical subtleties—let him turn to ʿAttār, Jalāluddīn Rūmī, and Jāmī, whose works are partially accessible in English and other European languages. To translate these wonderful hymns is to break their melody and bring their soaring passion down to earth, but not even a prose translation can quite conceal the love of Truth and the vision of Beauty which inspired them. Listen again to Jalāluddīn:
“He comes, a moon whose like the sky ne’er saw, awake or dreaming,
Crowned with eternal flame no flood can lay.
Lo, from the flagon of Thy love, O Lord, my soul is swimming,
And ruined all my body’s house of clay.
When first the Giver of the grape my lonely heart befriended,
Wine fired my bosom and my veins filled up,