Abstract
The purpose of this study is to compare the lives and literary careers of two great poets from the East and the West to find common grounds in their lives and writings. In comparing the poetic works of these two great poets, the study will focus on love and death as two major images in the poetry of these two great poets. Jaláluddin Moláná Rumi as he is called in the West, was a Persian poet-philosopher, and John Donne was a metaphysical poet-preacher from England. These two poets wrote much about their ideas with lucidity and wit. Love and death were both of supreme concern for these poets and a preoccupation of their hearts. Nothing is possible in “love” without “death”. Life for Donne is love, the love of women in his early life, then of his wife and finally the love of God. Love for Rumi is sweet madness, healing all infirmities and the physician of pride and self-conceit. Death for Donne is nothing but a transitory passage from here to the hereafter and union with God. Death for Rumi is also a wedding; it is a change from one stage to another as a seed planted in the earth dies in one form in order to be born in another. Both believe that we are from Him, and to Him we shall return.Keywords: Rumi, Donne, love, death, metaphysical poetry, Sufism
Highlights
Rumi bridges the gap between the Islamic world and the West, and his works represent a common ground for discarding the differences between the East and the West while taking steps on the path of God or the Divine
Jaláluddin Moláná Rumi as he is called in the West, was a Persian poet-philosopher, and John Donne was a metaphysical poet-preacher from England
People from throughout the world still read Rumi, and the year 2007, the eight hundredth anniversary of his birthday was declared “Rumi Year” by UNESCO (M.Fatih Citlak, 2007) to signify the importance of his call to all humans for unity and ignoring the differences– speaking of himself, he states: “I am neither of the west, nor of the east; nor of the land, nor of the sea; ... for I belong to the soul of the Beloved” who is eternal
Summary
Rumi bridges the gap between the Islamic world and the West, and his works represent a common ground for discarding the differences between the East and the West while taking steps on the path of God or the Divine. The greatest Persian mystical poet, was a major exponent of Sufi teachings as well as a profound philosopher. A Turkish poet and critic, Rumi’s two celebrated works, the Mathnavi and the Divan-i Shams, “represent perhaps the world’s most resourceful synthesis of poetry and philosophy, embracing the lyric, narrative, epic, didactic, epigrammatic, satiric and elegiac forms”(Halman, 1988). According to Halman, Hegel praised him as one of the greatest poets and most important thinkers in world history. Whenever entered into a meeting, Mahatma Gandhi used to quote a couplet from the story of “Moses and the Shepherd” taken from Rumi’s Mathnavi: “To unite – that is why we came; / To divide – that is not our aim”(Zare-Behtash, 1994)
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