Dschalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī Illustration of Rūmī’s passage from stone to plant

From stone to plant

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207–1273), a Persian-language poet and Sufi, gives a speaker in the Masnawī a memory of earlier forms of existence. Friedrich Rückert recast the passage in eight lines for German readers. The heading in the Viennese almanac Aglaja introduces Rūmī as the speaker. That small gesture gives the passage from stone to plant a voice. What was once a silent stone can now look back and tell its own story.

What the word “as” makes possible

Look! I died as stone and sprang up as a plant;
died as a plant and then ran my course as a beast;
died as a beast and became a human being. What do I fear,
since in dying I cannot become less?
Again, when as a human being I have died,
I shall have gained an angel’s wing.
And as an angel too I must be offered up,
becoming what I cannot grasp, a breath of God.

– Dschalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī, Masnawī, 1826, p. 156.[1]

In the opening line someone dies “as stone.” Heard in isolation, the phrase might sound like the end of a story. Before the first rhyme has come round, a plant has sprung up. Rückert’s German verb catches precisely the movement visible above a bed in which seeds have been sown. The animal in the next line has another movement of its own. It runs. There is little need for an explanation of the differences between mineral, plant and animal when the verbs can do so much of the work.

A question in the middle of the poem

Only when the sequence reaches the human being does a question interrupt its progress. The speaker knows all the earlier transitions yet fears the one ahead. What looked intelligible in retrospect now requires trust. Even an angel’s wing offers no final resting place. By the end, imagination can no longer supply a picture of what is to come. Where one might expect a further body, there is a breath. Reading the compact lines aloud gives a sense of the distance travelled from the weight of the stone.