Images of the Divine in Rumi and Whitman

Author(s): Ghulam M. Fayez

Source: Comparative Literature Studies , Mar., 1980, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Mar., 1980), pp. 33-
43
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40245736

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Comparative Literature Studies

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Images of the Divine
in Rumi and Whitman

GHULAM M. FAYEZ

Mystic poets like Rumi and Whitman reveal a more humane and
democratic image of the Divine than, say, do theologians or even
philosophers. A theologian, who may like to pose as a rather ratio
alist scholar of religion, is often inclined to conceptualize God in
terms of the history and literature of a given religion, but a my
with a poetic imagination always tends to intuit Him in his own
ing, in nature, and in all that exists in the universe. A theologian
also tend to characterize the Divine - or that particular image of
Deity with which he is concerned - according to a certain scri
convention, but a mystic poet is always ready to humanize, de
tize, and universalize Him in everything that lives. Rumi and Wh
are indeed such mystic poets. They are more concerned with the
of the Divine than with His fragmented, sectarianized, and conce
ized images. In this way, God is not seen to be apart from the cr
but included and including all. "The Beloved," says Rumi, "is
all, the lover merely veils Him."2

In other words, the unitive Divine image consists of the union of ab-
solute objectivity with absolute subjectivity. That is to say, in panthe-
istic terms, God is all that exists. He cannot be defined, or restricted to
the Biblical God, but His unitive image does include Him and even the
Devil, as Whitman suggests in these lines from "Chanting the Square
Deific":

Santa Spirita, breather, life,

Beyond the light, lighter than light. . .
Including all life on earth, touching, including God,
including Saviour and Satan,
Ethereal, pervading all. . .
Essence of formal life of the real identities. . .
Life of the great round world, the sun and stars. . . .
(Leaves of Grass, p. 444)

©1980 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

0010-4132/80/0300-0033/101.10/0

33

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
34 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

"Santa Spirita," as described in these lines, is both

the body and the soul, thus the universe in its absolu
spiritual being. This is also the way Rumi perceives t

I have put duality away,

I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.
He is the outward, He is the inward.3

Neither Rumi nor Whitman brings dualism between

its creative soul. Therefore not only do the seeming
life pertain to the Divine; things deemed to be evil a
unitive images, as Rumi asserts in these lines:

He is the source of evil, as thou sayest,

Yet evil hurts Him not. To make that evil
Denotes in Him perfection. . .
The heavenly Artist paints
Beautiful shapes and ugly. . . .4

In the first scene of Goethe's Faust a similar unitive image of God is

also presented. God addresses the Devil as only a minor part of His
creative scheme:

Therein thou art free, according to thy merits;

The like of thee have never moved My hate.
Of all the bold, denying spirits,
The waggish knave least trouble doth create.5

Mystic poets such as Rumi and Whitman never want to dualize what
appeared to be dual to many poets and philosophers in world litera-
ture. The Manichean concept of the Devil as Anti-God or Anti-Christ,
with its horde of macabre goblins and demons which has fascinated a
number of Medieval and Romantic writers, has no influence on the
mystical democracy of Rumi and Whitman. What is called evil is often
experienced by the mystic to be a mere temporary phenomenal fact
which is relative, not absolute. Rumi affirms such a concept of evil,
as Emerson does in his essay on "Fate," in the following lines:

There is no absolute evil in the world;

evil is relative.
In the realm of time there is nothing that
is not a foot to one and a fetter to another.6

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 FAYEZ 35

Rumi and Whitman see man and nature and the whole universe as
diverse images of one unifying and creative force. "All this multi-
formity is one; whoever sees double is a squint-eyed manikin," says
Rumi. In "A Persian Lesson" - a poem as deeply mystical as "Chant-
ing the Square Deific" - Whitman makes the "greybeard sufi speak
for the old poet in the same kind of Sufi language one can notice in
Rumi's poems. These are Whitman's lines:

Finally my children, to envelop each word, each

part of the rest,
Allah is all, all - is immanent in every life and
object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes - yet Allah,
Allah, Allah is there. (LG., 553)

It should be remembered that this is the Sufi voice of Whitman at the

age of sixty-nine, three years before his death in 1892. That he in-
cluded "A Persian Lesson" - originally called "A Sufi Lesson" - in
the section "Good-Bye My Fancy" may suggest that he came across
Rumi once again, as he did first almost twenty-seven years earlier in
Poetry of the East, and strongly identified with him. To prove how
Whitman's "A Persian Lesson" might have received the impact of
Rumi's mysticism, compare these last lines of the poem with those
of Rumi which follow them.

Whitman: It is the central urge in every atom,

(Often unconscious, often evil, do wnf alien,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however
distant,
Latent the same in subject and in object, without
one exception. (LG., 553)
Rumi: The motion of every atom is towards its origin;
A man comes to be the thing on which he is bent.
By the attraction of fondness and yearning, the
soul and the heart
Assume the qualities of the Beloved, who is the
Soul of souls.7

It is also a centred urge in every true mystic to intuit, and identify

with, the unifying universal force in man and in all other phenomenal
forms. This force may be described as an "archetypal force" (Rumi's
term) or as an "eidolon" and "the seed perfection" (Whitman's terms),
or in the guises of various nature deities, but, in essence, it is the same
universal unifying force. For example, in Bhagavad-Gita Krishna
claims to be that force:

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
36 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

For I am Brahman
Within this body,
Life immortal
That shall not perish:
I am the Truth
And the Joy for ever.8

Brahman in Hinduism, Al-Haq in Sufism, and Santa Spirita or the

Over-soul in Transcendentalism are terms for the same cosmic force.
In the beautiful lines of Tagore's Gitanjali this force is felt to be the
universal blood-vessel of all living things:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins

night and day runs through the world and dances
in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust
of the earth in numberless blades of grass breaks
into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle
of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.9

I am not attempting to compare Krishna's or Tagore's concept of

creative cosmic force with the ideas of Rumi and Whitman; rather,
I am trying to emphasize that all mystic poets seem to adhere to an
emotional and imaginative realization of the unitive images of the
Divine.
In Rumi's mystical odes and quatrains, teeming with wine and mu-
sic and dance imagery, such an emotional realization of the Divine
unity is often turned into an intoxicating and ecstatic one. Rumi calls
God his "Beloved" and the "Wine" that mixes with his blood: "God
is the Saki and the Wine;/He knows what manner of love is mine."10
Therefore for him "phenomenal forms are pitchers with draughts of
the Ideal,/Like a pitcher, we all are being filled with and emptied con-
tinually."11 In the same way, in "Eidolons" Whitman also sees forms
being filled with eidolons - spiritual effluxes of the one Ideal Eidolon
permeating the universe. Although forms are shown to be "pitchers"
of the "Ideal draught" or temples of eidolons, as Whitman would say,
they are not held as mere illusions. Indeed phenomenalism is consid-
ered by both Rumi and Whitman to be life in everlasting renewing
process, for it proceeds from spirituality, as Rumi asserts:

What is this fountain. . .

The Soul whence issue all created things,
Doubtless the rivers shall not cease to flow
Till silenced are the everlasting spring.12

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 F AYEZ 37

The erroneous c
world as being m
feel the burden o
"I have put dualit
He is the outward
ly real: "God hath
from His choicest
calls "the stream
runs through the
ity of the mystic
manent life-death
in "Song of Myse
ant urge of the
Seeing the world
most often mirro
self or the soul d
poems. A brief di
poets may be opp
other essay "Moti
ing, which includ
seen, may be diff
tween the subject
seeing - that wh
nothing; I see all;
me; I am part an
tangible omnisci
more than the sa
always encounter
a dynamic force,
experiences the w
Furthermore, it
in the Higher Sel
through the lowe
man - and ascend
outline the evolut
reunion with the

I died as miner
I died as plant a
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar with
angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on. . .
Oh, let me not exist; for non-existence
Proclaims in organic tunes, "to Him we shall return."15

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
38 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

The dynamic self in "Song of Myself," which is the d

lution, is depicted to be primordial, co-eternal and co
the spirit and the stuff of the world:

Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I

even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the
lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Long I was hugg'd close - long and long.
Immense have been the preparation for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me.
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings. . .
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

All forces have been employ'd to complete and delight me,

Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.
(LG., 69)

Rumi in his "The Soul of the World" (the title of this and other poems
is given by Reynold Nicholson, Rumi translator and scholar) identifies
his soul with the creative spirit of the universe: "I have circled awhile
with the nine Fathers in each Heaven./For years I have revolved with
the stars in their signs./I was invisible awhile, I was dwelling with Him. . . .
Man is born once, I have been born many times."16 Having identified
himself with various forms of life, as Whitman does in "Song of My-
self," he claims creative immortality: "I am both cloud and rain: I
have rained on the meadows. /Never did the dust of mortality settle
on my skirt, O dervish!" Fluid and permeating, the soul feels no hin-
derance before its movements. Like a light wave it goes through life
and animates it. As seen by Rumi and Whitman, the soul is the active
conscious pulse, the dynamic principle, and thus identical with the
life-force of the earth.
Seeing into things and feeling them, embracing them as parts of a
whole, is the drama of the self performed in the mystical poems of
Rumi and Whitman. In tune with his central vision, which is truth-in-
unity, the mystic sees diverse images of the earth interlinked, flowing
into one another, and becoming one another, because the life-death-
rebirth cycle is a unitive urge on the earth which never ceases. There-
fore time and space lose their dimensions in this universal flux. And
thus the drama of identifications, the chief actor of which is the self,
can move on with ease.

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 FAYEZ 39

The mystic oft

earth and the ea
er. "I am ever in
"and the earth

Each moment
So that wearin
I see the world
Fresh water ev
The sounds of
My brain and
Branches of tr
Leaves clapping
These glories a

In "Song of the
be "in concord" with the earth:

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him

or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or
her who is jagged and broken.
(LG., 223)

In "Song of the Rolling Earth" the earth is depicted to be the Logos,

"the substantial words." The earth is "complete," "positive and di-
rect," and her "greatness and power" are ideals to be emulated. In
"Song of the Universal" Whitman presents the earth as the universal
divine mother bearing "the seed perfection." For the two poets the
earth is more than a temple of signs and symbols indicating the pres-
ence of some outer spiritual force. The universal soul or "the seed per-
fection" is indeed an organic part of the earth, and nowhere else is it
better animated, humanized, and translated into urge and movement
than in the earth.

II

Having discussed the unitive and pervasive images of the Divine in

nature, with the self as a unifying and identifying force, I shall proceed
to examine how He is internalized in the human heart as a source of
love. In such religions as Christianity and Islam God is conceived in an-
thropomorphic terms, being often imbued with such human emotions
as compassion and anger. In the Bible and the Koran there are numer-
ous passages in which He is depicted sometimes as a stern and wrath-
ful judge, sometimes as a moral tribal legislator, and most often a lov-

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
40 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

ing and forgiving Father. One might argue that G

suffers from certain emotional conflicts within H
logians can always get around such contradictions a
time-honored answers.
The noble heresy of Rumi and Whitman is that they have trans-
formed the "temperamental" Biblical God into the "Divine Beloved"
and the "Great Camerado" - or God as a source of love and har-
mony. In being so represented He is not only humanized, but man is
deified by realizing that love is in him. Love therefore is a means, as
well as an aim, which links man to his real nature and to his Origin.
To the mystic poet "the motion of every atom is towards its origin"
and that origin, being the foundation of life - "a kelson of the crea-
tion" - is love, as Whitman says in "Song of Myself."
God as the source of love is for the mystic poet an inclusive image
consistent with his vision of universal unity. This image is felt to be
identical with the sea as a primeval unifying and creative force. Both
Rumi and Whitman resort to sea imagery to envision the Divine in
terms of love and energy. The sea - "the Ocean of Creative Ener-
gy"18 - is used in their poems to be the realm of the unitive cosmic
soul, as well as the original source of life. In the poems of Rumi
death in the sea is always desired because it is imagined to be a dis-
solving into the immortal origin of life, and symbolically, it is a one-
ness of the Drop (the individual self) with the Sea (the Higher Self).
In terms of Rumi mysticism, man, as a microcosm of the divine sea,
carries in his soul echoes of the Primeval Sea, within which he once
lived in union with his Origin. Rumi often uses the drop or pearl
image to symbolize his mystic relationship with the sea:

Happy was I
In the pearl's heart to lie;
Till, lashed by life's hurricane
Like a tossed wave I ran.
The secret of the sea
I uttered thunderously;
Like a spent cloud on the shore
I slept and stirred no more.19

In "Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd" Whitman thinks of him-

self as a "part of that ocean . . . the cohesion of all" to which he longs
to "Return in peace." The predominant image in this poem is that of
the drop with which the poet identifies his mystic relationship to the
sea. In "Passage to India," as well as in "Out of the Cradle," the sea
assumes its highest mystic symbolism, where, as in many poems of
Rumi, the poet seeks to be dissolved into the sea. In the frequent use
of such lines as "lave me all over,/Bathe me O God in thee. . ." (419)

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 F AYEZ 41

Whitman, like R
symbolized by th
India":

The seas all cross'd . . . the voyage done,

Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim
achiev'd,
As fill'd with friendship, love complete, the Elder
Brother found,
The Younger melting in fondness in his arms.
(LG., 419)

Eastbound, sailing on "the seas of God" toward "the realms of

budding bibles" and "the primal thought," Whitman on this mystic
voyage at last encounters his "Comrade Perfect" - a figure very simi-
lar to Rumi's image of his master, Shamsi Tabrizi, who also stands for
the Divine Beloved. This figure appears in Whitman's other quest po-
ems too, as in "Song of Myself": "The Lord will be there and wait
till I come on perfect terms,/The great Camerado, the lover true for
whom I pine will be there" (LG., 83). In the odes of the Divan Rumi
ritually re-enacts his spiritual union with the God of love by embrac-
ing his ideal friend and master, Shamsi Tabrizi. Therefore Rumi's spiri-
tual relationship to Shams is identical with that of Whitman to the
great Camerado, as Frederik Schyberg also notes:

At the end of the road (in "Song of Myself"), as the

conclusion of all the wandering,, the transformations
and visions, there stands the Great Camerado whom
Whitman mentioned in Section 45. We cannot fail to
recall the Persian Rumi who also described his reunion
with a friend (his real friend Shamsi Tabriz) as sym-
bolic of his union with God. By coincidence in world
literature . . . Whitman used as a conclusion for his
pantheistic vision the very same lyrical imagery as
the Persian poet, that of a friend into whose arms he
falls to be united finally and completely with the In-
finite and Whole.20

To conclude, the God of wrath may have His place in a universe

tainted with sin and evil, but He has no relevance to a universe experi-
enced by the mystic to be teeming with love and unity. Although the
anthropomorphic God is not rejected, all anthropomorphism in Him
is transformed into love and love is seen as a primeval force in the crea-
tion, therefore identical with God. Sometimes Rumi associates life in
love with immortality: "The fount of immortality in love is found,/

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
42 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Then come, and in this boundless sea of love be dr

Whitman "a kelson of the creation is love" (LG., 3
addressed as the original source of love in "Passag
mightier center of the true, the good, the loving,/T
tual fountain - affection's source - thou reservoir
This deep realization of the unity of the Divine in te
radeship, and brotherhood saves the mysticism of Ru
from becoming a dogmatic one. God thus felt in man
spires poetry in the soul, and poetry then becomes t
lation in their mysticism. Perhaps nothing is more p
than to call all men lovers and God the Beloved of
Or to call all men brothers and comrades and God the Elder Brother
and the Great Camerado, as Whitman does. The human image of this
God and His love for His children or brothers fills the world of the
mystic poet with love, ecstasy, and unity.

GHULAM M. FAYEZ • Mashad University, Iran

NOTES

l.Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273), the greatest classical Persian poet, is the author of tw
monumental works in Persian literature: the Mathnavi (a long mystical epic as widely known
in the Islamic world as Dante's Divine Comedy is in the Western world) and the Divani Sha
Tabriz (a huge collection of odes inspired by the poet's encounter with Shamsi Tabrizi, his
friend and master, and his Muse). He is better known to the West as the founder of his Sufi
order the "Whirling Dervishes." In his "Proud Music of the Storms" Whitman has this accu-
rate description of the order: "I hear dervishes monotonously chanting, interspers'd with
frantic shouts, as they spin around turning always toward Mecca,/I see the rapt religious
dances of the Persians and the Arab

Edition, ed. by Blodgett, Harold W. and Sculley [New York: W

p. 444. All references are to this edition and will appear in the
Whitman never mentions Rumi in his works, he did become fam
translated in W.R. Alger's Poetry of the East, a copy of which w
in his career as 1861. Although Whitman's personal copy of Poe
available to me, it has been examined by T.R. Rajasekhariah in
Grass (New York: Fairleigh University Press, 1970). Rajasekhari
ten by the poet on the flyleaf of his copy of Alger's book: "Give
Boston it must have been in 1861 or '2. Have often read (dabbl
tal Poetry pp. 3 to 92 and over and over again . . . two or three o
carried this volume in my trunk - read in it - sometimes to hos
the time" (The Roots of Whitman's Grass, p. 47). Rumi's poem
retranslated from Ruckert's German versions, and Purgstall's, m
later editions of Leaves, particularly his poem "A Persian Lesso
Sufi Lesson" - which appeared in the second annex of 1891 ed
does not mention Rumi in prose and poetry, his inscription on t
testify to his having read the introductory section on Rumi and
the first ninety-two pages. The second source through which Wh
familiar with Rumi and other Persian poets, such as Hafiz and
"Persian Poetry," which Whitman mentions in his Notes and F
dissertation Mystic Ideas and Images in Jalal al-Din Rumi and Wa
Arizona, 1978) I have dealt with the question of Rumi's influen
tail, but I believe that the striking resemblance one encounters i

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 FAYEZ 43

more often results

reached than influen
2.Jalal al-Din Rum
ton 8c Company, 1
3. Selected Poems f
bridge: Cambridge
4.R.A. Nicholson,
p. 150.
5.Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, A Tragedy, trans, by Bayard Taylor (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1965), p. 12.
6. Rumi, Poet and Mystic, p. 152.
7 '. Selected Poems from the Divan, p. 152.
S.Bhagavad-Gita, trans, by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (New York:
The New American Library, Inc., 1951), p. 110.
9. A Tagore Reader, ed. & trans, by Amiya Chakravarty (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p.
305. Tagore was a great admirer of Whitman. In his World of Personality he says that "no
American has caught the Oriental spirit so well as Whitman" (A Tagore Reader, p. 264). In
the same poem quoted in the text of this essay Tagore uses similar kinds of nature and mo-
tion imagery ("blades of grass," "life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death,
in ebb and in flow") which one can notice in the poems of Whitman and Rumi. Like those of
Rumi, Tagore's Gitanjali and other poems teem with flute, dance, bird, and sea imagery.
10. The Masnavi, p. 3.
11. Selected Poems From the Divan, p. 28 (see the Introduction.)
12. Rumi, Poet and Mystic, p. 109.
IS.IbicL, p. 45.
14.Ghulam M. Fayez, "Motion Imagery in Rumi and Whitman," Walt Whitman Review
(June 1979).
15. Rumi, Poet and Mystic, p. 103.
I6.1bid., p. 182.
1 7. The Masnavi, p. 214.
IS. Rumi, Poet and Mystic, p. 37.
\9.The Rubaiyat of Jalal al-Din Rumi, trans, by A.J. Arberry (London: Emery Walker,
1949), p. 25.
20. Frederik Schyberg, Walt Whitman, trans, from the Danish by Evie Allison Allen with
an introduction by Gay Wilson Allen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), p. 93.
2\.The Rubaiyat, p. 15.

This content downloaded from

154.198.123.13 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:56:07 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms