And seeing him the prince’s noble eyes
Flooded with tears that he could not disguise.
He wished to hide them from his army’s sight,
But tears in princes are a sign of might.
They flowed like rain and in that moment he
Increased a hundred times his sovereignty.
Endure in love, be steadfast and sincere –
At last the one you long for will appear;
Act as this beggar did, lament and sigh
Until the glorious prince gives his reply.
lines 4103–19
He saw the prince approach from far away
But could not catch the words he tried to say;
He twisted, struggled, raised his face and there
The prince’s weeping eyes returned his stare.
He trembled, weak as water with desire;
He shuddered, burnt by love’s consuming fire,
And with his last laborious, hoarse breath
Gasped: “Prince, you see me at the point of death –
Your words can kill me now; you did not need
Guards and a gibbet to perform this deed.”
Then as a dying candle flares he cried
The last exultant laugh of death and died;
Made one with his beloved he became
The Nothingness of an extinguished flame.
True pilgrims fathom, even as they fight,
The passion of annihilation’s night –
Your being here is mixed with nothingness,
And no joy comes to you without distress;
If you cannot endure, how will you find
The promised peace that haunts your troubled mind?
You leapt like lightning once, yet now you stand
Like marshy water clogged with desert sand –
Renew your courage, put aside your fear
And in love’s fire let reason disappear.
To be unsure, to pine for liberty,
Is to resist our journey’s alchemy.
How long will caution make you hesitate?
Fly beyond thought before it is too late!
To reach that place where true delight is won,
Accept the dervish path as I have done –
I speak of “I”; in truth there is no “I”
Where logic falters and the mind must die.
I lose myself within myself; I seek
For strength in being poor, despised and weak.
When poverty’s bright sun shines over me,
A window opens on reality;
4120–35
I see both worlds and in that light I seem
Like water lost in water’s moving stream.
All that I ever lost or ever found
Is in the depths of that black deluge drowned.
I too am lost; I leave no trace, no mark;
I am a shadow cast upon the dark,
A drop sunk in the sea, and it is vain
To search the sea for that one drop again.
This Nothingness is not for everyone,
Yet many seek it out as I have done;
And who would reach this far and not aspire
To Nothingness, the pilgrim’s last desire?
Nouri was questioned by one pure in soul:
“How far is it until we reach our goal?”
And said: “We pass through fire and splendour first;
Then seven oceans have to be traversed.
A fish* (now listen carefully to me,
And I will show you how to cross this sea)
Will draw you by its breath – a mighty whale,
Vast but invisible from head to tail,
Who deep in solitude delights to swim
And by his breathing draws the world to him”.’
The journey
The hoopoe paused, and when the group had heard
His discourse, trembling fear filled every bird.
They saw the bow of this great enterprise
Could not be drawn by weakness, sloth or lies,
And some were so cast down that then and there
They turned aside and perished in despair.
With fear and apprehension in each heart,
lines 4136–54
The remnant rose up ready to depart.
They travelled on for years; a lifetime passed
Before the longed-for goal was reached at last.
What happened as they flew I cannot say,
But if you journey on that narrow Way,
Then you will act as they once did and know
The miseries they had to undergo.
Of all the army that set out, how few
Survived the Way; of that great retinue
A handful lived until the voyage was done –
Of every thousand there remained but one.
Of many who set out no trace was found.
Some deep within the ocean’s depths were drowned;
Some died on mountain-tops; some died of heat;
Some flew too near the sun in their conceit,
Their hearts on fire with love – too late they learned
Their folly when their wings and feathers burned;
Some met their death between the lion’s claws,
And some were ripped to death by monsters’ jaws;
Some died of thirst; some hunger sent insane,
Till suicide released them from their pain;
Some became weak and could no longer fly
(They faltered, fainted, and were left to die);
Some paused bewildered and then turned aside
To gaze at marvels as if stupefied;
Some looked for pleasure’s path and soon confessed
They saw no purpose in the pilgrims’ quest;
Not one in every thousand souls arrived –
In every hundred thousand one survived.
The birds arrive and are greeted by a herald
A world of birds set out, and there remained
But thirty when the promised goal was gained,
Thirty exhausted, wretched, broken things,
With hopeless hearts and tattered, trailing wings,
lines 4155–74
Who saw that nameless Glory which the mind
Acknowledges as ever-undefined,
Whose solitary flame each moment turns
A hundred worlds to nothingness and burns
With power a hundred thousand times more bright
Than sun and stars and every natural light.
The awe-struck group, bewildered and amazed,
Like insubstantial, trembling atoms, gazed
And chirmed: ‘How can we live or prosper here,
Where if the sun came it would disappear?
Our hearts were torn from all we loved; we bore
The perils of a path unknown before;
And all for this? It was not this reward
That we expected from our longed-for Lord.’
It seemed their throats were cut, as if they bled
And weakly whimpered until left for dead,
Waiting for splendour to annihilate
Their insubstantial, transitory state.
Time passed; then from the highest court there flew
A herald of the starry retinue,
Who saw the thirty birds, trembling, afraid,
Their bodies broken and their feathers frayed,
And said: ‘What city are you from? What race?
What business brings you to this distant place?
What are your names? You seem destroyed by fear;
What made you leave your homes and travel here?
What were you in the world ? What use are you ?
What can such weak and clumsy creatures do?’
The group replied: ‘We flew here for one thing,
To claim the Simorgh as our rightful king;
We come as suppliants and we have sought
Through grievous paths the threshold of His court –
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How long the Way was to complete our vow;
Of thousands we are only thirty now!
Was that hope false which led us to this place,
Or shall we now behold our sovereign’s face?’
lines 4175–93
The herald tells the birds to turn back
The herald said: ‘This king for whom you grieve
Governs in glory you cannot conceive –
A hundred thousand armies are to Him
An ant that clambers up His threshold’s rim,
And what are you? Grief is your fate–go back;
Retrace your steps along the pilgrims’ track!’
And when they heard the herald’s fearsome words,
A deathly hopelessness assailed the birds;
But they replied: ‘Our king will not repay
With sorrow all the hazards of the Way;
Grief cannot come to us from majesty;
Grief cannot live beside such dignity.
Think of Majnoun, who said: “If all the earth
Should every passing moment praise my worth,
I would prefer abuse from Leili’s heart
To all creation’s eulogizing art –
The world’s praise cannot equal Leili’s blame;
Both worlds are less to me than Leili’s name,”
We told you our desire – if grief must come,
Then we are ready and shall not succumb.’
The herald said: ‘The blaze of Majesty
Reduces souls to unreality,
And if your souls are burnt, then all the pain
That you have suffered will have been in vain.’
They answered him: ‘How can a moth flee fire
When fire contains its ultimate desire?
And if we do not join Him, yet we’ll burn,
And it is this for which our spirits yearn –
It is not union for which we hope;
We know that goal remains beyond our scope.’
The birds narrated then the moth’s brief tale:
‘They told the moth: “You are too slight, too frail
To bear the vivid candle-flame you seek –
lines 4194–4213
This game is for the noble, not the weak;
Why die from ignorance?” The moth replied:
“Within that fire I cannot hope to hide –
I know I could not penetrate the flame;
Simply to reach it is my humble aim”.’
Though grief engulfed the ragged group, love made
The birds impetuous and unafraid;
The herald’s self-possession was unmoved,
But their resilience was not reproved –
Now, gently, he unlocked the guarded door;
A hundred veils drew back, and there before
The birds’ incredulous, bewildered sight
Shone the unveiled, the inmost Light of Light.
He led them to a noble throne, a place
Of intimacy, dignity and grace,
Then gave them all a written page and said
That when its contents had been duly read
The meaning that their journey had concealed,
And of the stage they’d reached, would be revealed.
Joseph’s brothers read of their treachery
When Malek Dar bought Joseph as a slave,
The price agreed (and which he gladly gave)
Seemed far too low – to be quite sure he made
The brothers sign a note for what he’d paid;
And when the wicked purchase was complete
He left with Joseph and the sealed receipt.
At last when Joseph ruled in Egypt’s court
His brothers caine to beg and little thought
To whom it was each bowed his humbled head
And as a suppliant appealed for bread.
Then Joseph held a scroll up in his hand
And said: ‘No courtier here can understand
These Hebrew characters – if you can read
This note I’ll give you all the bread you need.’
lines 4214–31
The brothers could read Hebrew easily
And cried: ‘Give us the note, your majesty!’
(If any of my readers cannot find
Himself in this account, the fool is blind.)
When Joseph gave them that short document
They looked – and trembled with astonishment.
They did not read a line but in dismay
Debated inwardly what they should say.
Their past sins silenced them; they were too weak
To offer an excuse or even speak.
Then Joseph said: ‘Why don’t you read? You seem
Distracted, haunted by some dreadful dream.’
And they replied: ‘Better to hold our breath
Than read and in so doing merit death.’
The birds discover the Simorgh
The thirty birds read through the fateful page
And there discovered, stage by detailed stage,
Their lives, their actions, set out one by one –
All that their souls had ever been or done:
And this was bad enough, but as they read
They understood that it was they who’d led
The lovely Joseph into slavery –
Who had deprived him of his liberty
Deep in a well, then ignorantly sold
Their captive to a passing chief for gold.
(Can you not see that at each breath you sell
The Joseph you imprisoned in that well,
That he will be the king to whom you must
Naked and hungry bow down in the dust?)
The chastened spirits of these birds became
Like crumbled powder, and they shrank with shame.
Then, as by shame their spirits were refined
Of all the world’s weight, they began to find
A new life flow towards them from that bright
Celestial and ever-living Light –
lines 4232–54
Their souls rose free of all they’d been before;
The past and all its actions were no more.
Their life came from that close, insistent sun
And in its vivid rays they shone as one.
There in the Simorgh’s* radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh of the world – with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.
They see the Simorgh – at themselves they stare,
And see a second Simorgh standing there;
They look at both and see the two are one,
That this is that, that this, the goal is won.
They ask (but inwardly; they make no sound)
The meaning of these mysteries that confound
Their puzzled ignorance – how is it true
That ‘we’ is not distinguished here from ‘you’?
And silently their shining Lord replies:
‘I am a mirror set before your eyes,
And all who come before my splendour see
Themselves, their own unique reality;
You came as thirty birds and therefore saw
These selfsame thirty birds, not less nor more;
If you had come as forty, fifty – here
An answering forty, fifty, would appear;
Though you have struggled, wandered, travelled far,
It is yourselves you see and what you are.’
(Who sees the Lord? It is himself each sees;
What ant’s sight could discern the Pleiades?
What anvil could be lifted by an ant?
Or could a fly subdue an elephant?)
‘How much you thought you knew and saw; but you
Now know that all you trusted was untrue.
Though you traversed the Valleys’ depths and fought
lines 4255–71
The journey was in Me, the deeds were Mine –
You slept secure in Being’s inmost shrine.
And since you came as thirty birds, you see
These thirty birds when you discover Me,
The Simorgh, Truth’s last flawless jewel, the light
In which you will be lost to mortal sight,
Dispersed to nothingness until once more
You find in Me the selves you were before.’
Then, as they listened to the Simorgh’s words,
A trembling dissolution filled the birds –
The substance of their being was undone,
And they were lost like shade before the sun;
Neither the pilgrims nor their guide remained.
The Simorgh ceased to speak, and silence reigned.
The ashes of Hallaj
Hallaj’s corpse was burnt and when the flame
Subsided, to the pyre a sufi came
Who stirred the ashes with his staff and said:
‘Where has that cry “lam the Truthhl* now fled?
All that you cried, all that you saw and knew,
Was but the prelude to what now is true.
The essence lives; rise now and have no fear,
Rise up from ruin, rise and disappear –
All shadows are made nothing in the one
Unchanging light of Truth’s eternal sun,’
A hundred thousand centuries went by,
And then those birds, who were content to die,
To vanish in annihilation, saw
Their Selves had been restored to them once more,
That after Nothingness they had attained
lines 4272–90
Eternal Life, and self-hood was regained.
This Nothingness, this Life, are states no tongue
At any time has adequately sung –
Those who can speak still wander far away
From that dark truth they struggle.to convey,
And by analogies they try to show
The forms men’s partial knowledge cannot know.
(But these are not the subject for my rhyme;
They need another book, another time –
And those who merit them will one day see
This Nothingness and this Eternity;
While you still travel in your worldly state,
You cannot pass beyond this glorious gate.)
Why do you waste your life in slothful sleep?
The Conference of the Birds (Penguin) Page 22