Divan of Shams of Tabriz

The Divan of Shams of Tabriz — also called the Divan-e kabir, "the great divan" — gathers Rumi's lyric poetry: in Badi al-Zaman Foruzanfar's critical edition, some 3,229 ghazals, forty-odd strophic poems and nearly two thousand quatrains. If the Masnavi is the master who teaches, the Divan is the lover who sings. It is one of the summits of Persian poetry and, by volume and intensity, one of the greatest mystical songbooks in any literature.

The book bears another man's name. Shams of Tabriz was the wandering dervish with whom Rumi, then a respected jurist and preacher in Konya, entered from 1244 into a spiritual relationship so all-consuming that it scandalised his disciples. Shams disappeared twice, the second time for good, and from that loss Rumi's poetry was born. In most of the ghazals the closing signature, which in Persian tradition is usually the poet's own name, is that of Shams: Rumi writes in his name, as if the beloved spoke through his mouth. Shams is at once a person, a mirror of the divine and the sun (which is what his name means) that illuminates the poet.

The Divan's single, endlessly multiplied theme is love: the longing of absence, the intoxication of meeting, the dissolving of the self in the beloved. Rumi uses the repertoire of Persian lyric — wine, the tavern, the cup, the cupbearer, the beauty of the face, the garden and the spring — but charges it with a spiritual meaning that does not cancel its sensuality. Many poems were born in sama, the sessions of music and whirling dance, and keep their rhythm: refrains, repetitions, emphatic metres, lines that seem made to be sung and danced. Alongside them are poems of extreme stillness that end with an invitation to silence; Khamush, "silent", is another of the poet's signatures.

The work matters for the freedom with which Rumi pushes the limits of tradition. He mixes Persian and Arabic, with occasional Greek and Turkish words; he moves from the loftiest language to the colloquial; he breaks with the courtly serenity of the classical ghazal to give voice to an ecstasy that overflows its forms. At the same time the Divan is an uneven collection: alongside the great pieces there are occasional poems, word games and repetitions, as befits poetry improvised and written down by others over thirty years.

For today's reader the Divan is the best-known Rumi — the Rumi of the love lines that circulate everywhere — and also the worst translated, since its music is easily lost and many successful versions are free paraphrases. Read in good translations, it reveals a voice of unparalleled intensity, in which mystical experience becomes song.