Quick Answer
The Divan-i Shams is Rumi's lyric poetry: over three thousand ghazals and forty thousand verses, named for the man who transformed him and signed with that man's name instead of his own. It is the ecstatic Rumi rather than the teaching Rumi, and the English versions most people have read have removed the religion from it.
Key Takeaways
- He signed another man's name in his own place. Persian poets close a ghazal with their pen name. Rumi repeatedly closed his with Shams.
- This is not the Masnavi. That poem teaches in order. This one is lyric, scattered, and composed under pressure over decades.
- The popular English Rumi has been de-Islamicised. Rozina Ali documented it in the New Yorker in 2017, and the case is specific rather than vague.
- Coleman Barks does not read Persian and is open about it, working from Nicholson's and Arberry's literal translations.
- Read Arberry's Mystical Poems for the scholarly English selection from this collection, and Nicholson's bilingual edition if you want the Persian facing you.
🕑 14 min read
What This Book Is
Jalal al-Din Rumi left two enormous bodies of poetry, and English readers routinely conflate them.
The Masnavi is the long one: some twenty-six thousand couplets of narrative and teaching, written in his last years, so revered in Persian that it has been called the Quran in the Persian tongue. Our guide to the Masnavi covers it.
The Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, also called the Divan-e Kabir or Great Divan, is the other one, and it is larger still. More than three thousand ghazals, running past forty thousand verses, together with roughly two thousand quatrains. It is his collected lyric poetry, accumulated across decades.
These are not two parts of one project. They are different in form, in occasion, in mood and in purpose, and a reader who has met one has not met the other.
On the title: a divan simply means a poet's collected works, so the phrase means the collected poems of Shams of Tabriz. Shams wrote none of them. The book is Rumi's, named for someone else, which is the first strange thing about it and the key to everything else.
The Man in the Title
In 1244, Rumi was a respected religious scholar in Konya, in what is now Turkey. He had inherited his father's position, he preached, he issued legal opinions, he had students. He was, by every account, entirely conventional and very good at it.
Then Shams of Tabriz arrived. He was a wandering dervish of no fixed position, older, abrasive, uninterested in scholarly reputation, and the accounts of their meeting differ in detail while agreeing on the effect. Rumi stopped teaching. The two of them withdrew together for long periods. Rumi began to listen to music, to turn, and to compose poetry, none of which he had done before.
His students and his family were not pleased. A settled scholar in his late thirties abandoning his obligations for an unaccountable stranger produced exactly the resentment you would expect, and the sources record it.
Shams left once and was brought back. In 1248 he disappeared, and the strong likelihood is that he was murdered, possibly with the involvement of people close to Rumi. No body and no certainty.
Almost all of this poetry follows from that. Our article on the whirling dervishes covers the order that formed around Rumi afterwards and the ceremony that grew from what he began doing in 1244.
The Signature in the Wrong Place
Here is the fact that a reader should carry into the poems, and it takes a moment of technical explanation to see.
A Persian ghazal closes with the takhallus, the poet's pen name, worked into the final couplet. The convention is old and near-universal. Hafiz addresses Hafiz in his last line. It is how a poem is signed.
Rumi repeatedly puts Shams's name there instead.
The closing couplet, the place reserved by centuries of convention for the poet to name himself, is occupied by someone else. Not as a dedication and not as an address to a patron, which are ordinary. In the signature position, doing the work the signature does.
Nothing else in the Persian tradition does this, and the meaning is not obscure. Rumi is saying that the poems are not his, that what speaks in them arrived with Shams, and that the self who would normally sign is not available to do so. It is a formal decision carrying a metaphysical claim, made thousands of times, and it is invisible in translations that drop the closing couplet or render the name as a common noun.
How It Differs From the Masnavi
The two works divide almost every way two bodies of poetry can.
Form. The Masnavi is in rhyming couplets, the vehicle Persian uses for long narrative. The Divan is in ghazals, the short monorhymed lyric.
Order. The Masnavi has an argument and stories that develop, digress and return. The Divan has no order at all. Manuscripts arrange the ghazals alphabetically by rhyme letter, which is a filing system rather than a sequence, so the collection cannot be read through.
Voice. The Masnavi teaches. There is a speaker who knows things, addressing a reader who needs them. The Divan does not teach. It exclaims, complains, celebrates, addresses an absent person, and repeatedly declares itself unable to say what it is trying to say.
Occasion. The Masnavi was undertaken deliberately, at a disciple's request, as a work. The Divan accumulated.
The practical consequence for a reader is that the Divan is easier to enjoy and harder to understand. A ghazal will move you on first contact and will not tell you what it is about.
Poetry Made for Turning
The tradition holds that many of these ghazals were spoken aloud in states of intense emotion during sama, the practice of listening to music and turning, and were caught and written down by disciples afterwards.
Whether that account is literally true of any given poem cannot be established. What can be said is that the verse behaves as though it were true. The ghazals are built on insistent repetition, with the rhyme and the repeated end-phrase returning at short intervals, and the metres carry a strong physical pulse. Read aloud, they drive.
This is the single largest loss in English. A form whose engine is the return of the same sound at fixed intervals, translated into free verse without rhyme or metre, has had its motor removed. What remains is the imagery, which is why English Rumi is so often praised for its images and almost never for its music.
Persian speakers who encounter English Rumi frequently report the same reaction: recognisable content, and the thing that made it poetry is gone. That reaction is accurate rather than chauvinistic.
What the Poems Are Made Of
A reader opening this collection meets a fairly small set of images used at enormous pressure, and knowing the vocabulary in advance helps.
The reed cut from the reed bed. Famous from the Masnavi's opening and present throughout the Divan. The flute cries because it has been separated from the marsh it grew in, and the sound everyone finds beautiful is the noise of that wound. Separation is the engine of the whole corpus.
The sun. Shams means sun in Arabic, which makes every sunrise in these poems a double reference. When Rumi writes about light arriving and the world becoming visible, he is also writing about a man walking into Konya in 1244. The pun is not decoration; it structures hundreds of ghazals.
Wine and drunkenness. The same vocabulary that runs through Persian poetry generally, including Hafiz a century later. In Rumi the intoxication is less ambiguous than in Hafiz, since he was not writing from a tavern culture and the wine consistently does spiritual work.
The mirror, the ocean and the drop, the moth and the flame. Standard Sufi images for the relation between the individual and what the individual is dissolving into.
Silence. The Divan ends ghazal after ghazal by telling itself to stop. Rumi used the word khamush, meaning silent, as a second pen name, so a great many poems close by naming silence in the signature position. A body of forty thousand verses that repeatedly instructs itself to be quiet is doing something more interesting than modesty.
Practice: read one ghazal five times
Take a single poem and read it once a day for five days rather than reading five poems once. Lyric built on repetition is designed for return, and these were composed by a man who circled the same subject for thirty years without exhausting it. Most readers approach this collection as an anthology to be sampled, and it was made by someone doing the opposite.
The Rumi Most People Have Read
Rumi is regularly described as the best-selling poet in America. The sales belong overwhelmingly to one man's versions, and he is not a translator.
Coleman Barks is an American poet who does not read Persian. He works from the scholarly literal translations of Reynold Nicholson and A. J. Arberry, and produces free English poems from them. He has always been open about this, which is an important difference from some other cases in this genre.
His versions are readable, warm and genuinely well made as English poems. They have brought an enormous number of people to Rumi's name. Nothing in what follows is a claim that they are worthless.
In January 2017 Rozina Ali published a piece in the New Yorker titled "The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi", drawing on Omid Safi among others, and the case it makes is specific.
Readers of our Odes of Hafiz review will recognise the shape and even the scholar, since Safi has made a parallel argument about English versions of Hafez. The two cases differ in one respect that matters. Daniel Ladinsky's Hafiz poems have no Persian originals at all. Barks's Rumi does: every one traces back through Nicholson or Arberry to a real ghazal. The problem with Barks is not invention. It is subtraction.
What Gets Taken Out
The subtraction is consistent and it runs in one direction.
The Quran. Rumi was a Quranic scholar who had taught the text professionally, and his poetry is saturated with quotation and allusion to it. A line that a Persian reader recognises instantly as a scriptural reference becomes, in the popular English, a general remark about the divine.
The Prophet. References to Muhammad and to episodes from his life are frequent in the originals and rare in the popular versions.
The practice. Rumi prayed five times a day, kept the fast, and taught in a mosque. The poems assume a life structured by those obligations, and the versions that reach the widest audience present a mystic with no observance at all.
The vocabulary. Sufi technical terms with precise meanings inside a discipline become general emotional words in English.
The result is the figure Ali describes: a thirteenth century Muslim jurist and preacher, refashioned into a non-denominational voice of universal love who could have come from anywhere.
It is worth being fair about how this happened. Barks was working in the American 1970s and after, for readers with no Islamic reference points, at a period when Rumi's Islam would have been an obstacle to the audience rather than a doorway. The choices are explicable. They are also choices, and readers who have only ever met that Rumi should know one was made.
A Book Built Out of a Disappearance
One thing separates this collection from every other body of mystical poetry, and it is easy to lose behind the ecstasy.
Shams vanished. Rumi did not know what had happened to him. The accounts say he went looking, travelled to Damascus more than once searching, and asked people who had no answers. There was no funeral because there was no body, and the strong possibility that people in his own household were involved sat underneath everything that followed.
So the poems are addressed to someone who is not there and cannot be confirmed dead. That is a specific condition, and anyone who has lost a person without an ending recognises it. The address keeps going because nothing has closed it.
The later development is what makes the collection extraordinary rather than merely sad. Rumi eventually reports finding Shams in himself, stopping the search because the one he was looking for was not elsewhere. The poems shift from calling out to declaring the separation was a misunderstanding of what had actually happened.
Whether that is a mystical realisation, a description of how grief resolves when the lost person becomes part of how you see, or both at once, is left open by the text. The tradition reads it as union. A modern reader can hold the psychological account beside the mystical one without either cancelling the other, and the poetry supports both, which may be why it survives translation into cultures that share none of its assumptions.
Which Translation to Read
A. J. Arberry, Mystical Poems of Rumi. The standard scholarly English selection from this collection, in two volumes originally and now available combined. Arberry translates closely and does not attempt to make English poems. The result is accurate and often flat, and it is what Rumi says.
R. A. Nicholson's bilingual selection prints the Persian alongside the English. If you have any Persian at all, or want to see the shape of the ghazal on the page and hear the rhyme, this is the edition to have.
Annemarie Schimmel on Rumi is the best guide to what the poems are doing, from a scholar who combined technical command with genuine feeling for the material.
Franklin Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West. The essential book on the life, the works, the transmission and the modern reception. If you read one thing about Rumi rather than by him, read this.
Coleman Barks. Read him as Barks. The poems are good and the name on the cover is doing work the contents do not support.
A practical test before you quote: the scholarly literature is keyed to Foruzanfar's critical edition of the Divan, and popular English versions are not numbered to anything. If you cannot trace a line you love back to a ghazal number, you cannot check it. Before attributing a quotation to Rumi in anything that matters, find the number.
Who Should Read It
Read it if the Masnavi felt like instruction and you wanted the man instead.
Read it in short pieces. The collection has no order, cannot be finished, and rewards opening at random more than any other book we have covered except a divination text.
Read at least one ghazal in a bilingual edition, aloud, even without Persian, to hear what the form is doing.
Read Arberry alongside Barks on the same poem once. The comparison takes ten minutes and it will permanently change how you read translated poetry.
Our position: the greatest body of ecstatic lyric poetry in any language, mostly unavailable in English, currently represented in the bestseller lists by versions that removed its religion. The signature convention alone tells you more about what happened to Rumi in 1244 than any biography. Buy Arberry, keep Lewis beside it, enjoy Barks with his name on the spine, and remember that the man who wrote these was a jurist who prayed five times a day.
For the surrounding tradition, see Sufi mysticism for the vocabulary, Attar's Conference of the Birds for the poet Rumi named as his predecessor, and The Sufis by Idries Shah for another chapter in how this material reached the West.
Three thousand poems signed with someone else's name.
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The Scholar's Divan: Arberry's Mystical Poems of Rumi
If the translations question above matters to you, there is one edition that deserves separate treatment, because it is the only complete scholarly English selection from this collection and it is the standard against which the popular versions are measured.
A. J. Arberry was Professor of Arabic at Cambridge and one of the most productive translators of Islamic literature into English in the twentieth century. His Mystical Poems of Rumi renders four hundred ghazals from the Divan, published in two volumes in 1968 and 1979 and now generally issued together.
What it gives you that nothing else does. Arberry worked from the Persian, numbered the poems against the critical edition, and translated what is there. Where a passage is obscure he says so. Where a reference needs explaining he explains it in a note rather than dissolving it into the line. The result is that you can trust the correspondence between what you are reading and what Rumi wrote, which is not true of most Rumi on English shelves.
The annotation is the underrated part. Rumi alludes constantly to the Quran, to hadith, to Persian romance, to Sufi technical vocabulary and to figures his original audience knew. Popular versions strip all of it out, which is exactly why they read so smoothly and exactly what they cost you. Arberry keeps it and tells you what it is.
What it costs the reader. The English is accurate and it is not beautiful. Arberry translates in a slightly formal, faintly archaic register that flattens the music, and Rumi's ghazals are above all musical: they were composed to be heard, often to be sung, with rhyme and refrain doing enormous work. None of that survives. Reading two hundred pages of it is a scholarly exercise rather than a pleasure, and readers who come to Rumi expecting ecstasy will find the ecstasy described rather than transmitted.
There is also the honest point that his selection is a selection. Four hundred out of several thousand poems is generous, and it is still someone else's choice.
How to use it. The productive method is comparative. Read a poem in a popular version, find the same poem in Arberry, and look at what changed. That exercise teaches you more about what translation does than any essay on the subject, and it will make you a considerably more careful reader of every Rumi quotation you meet afterwards. It also tends to be humbling in both directions: some famous lines turn out to be almost entirely the translator's, and some passages the popularisers dropped turn out to be the best things in the poem.
Read it if you want to know what the text says. Read a poet's version alongside it if you want to know why anyone cared.
Four hundred ghazals, translated accurately and annotated properly.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira participates in the Amazon Associates programme and earns a small commission on qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. We recommend this edition for accuracy and say plainly above what it does not give you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi?
Rumi's collected lyric poetry, also called the Divan-e Kabir or Great Divan. It runs to more than three thousand ghazals and over forty thousand verses, along with around two thousand quatrains, and it is entirely separate from his long didactic poem the Masnavi.
Why is it named after Shams and not Rumi?
Because Rumi placed Shams's name in the closing line of many ghazals, in the position a Persian poet reserves for his own pen name. He signed his friend's name where his own belonged. Nothing else in Persian poetry does this, and it is the most direct statement of what the encounter meant to him.
Who was Shams of Tabriz?
A wandering dervish who arrived in Konya in 1244 and transformed Rumi from a respected jurist and preacher into a poet. Their relationship scandalised Rumi's circle. Shams disappeared in 1248 and was probably murdered, and the poetry follows from that loss.
How is it different from the Masnavi?
The Masnavi is long, ordered, narrative and didactic, written late and intended to teach. The Divan is lyric, disordered, ecstatic and personal, composed over decades and often in states of intense emotion. Read the Masnavi to learn and the Divan to hear him.
Was the poetry composed while whirling?
The tradition holds that many ghazals were uttered aloud during sama, the practice of music and turning, and were written down by disciples. The insistent repeated rhyme and strong pulse of the verse are consistent with composition made for and during movement.
Is Coleman Barks a reliable translator?
He is not a translator in the strict sense, and he says so. Barks does not read Persian and works from the scholarly literal translations of Nicholson and Arberry, producing free English versions. They are readable and popular, and they consistently remove the Islamic frame of the originals.
What gets left out of the popular versions?
Quranic quotation and allusion, references to Muhammad and to Islamic practice, the technical Sufi vocabulary, and the specificity of thirteenth century Konya. Rozina Ali documented this in the New Yorker in 2017, drawing on Omid Safi, who has made the same argument about English versions of Hafez.
Which translation should I read?
A. J. Arberry's Mystical Poems of Rumi is the standard scholarly English selection from this collection. R. A. Nicholson's bilingual selection prints the Persian alongside. Annemarie Schimmel's work is the best guide to what the poems are doing. Read Barks as Barks rather than as Rumi.
Is Rumi really the best-selling poet in America?
He is regularly described that way, and the sales belong overwhelmingly to Coleman Barks's versions rather than to any translation from Persian. A thirteenth century Muslim jurist reaching that position through a poet who does not read his language is a fact worth pausing over.
Do I need to know Islam to read it?
Not to be moved by it, and yes to understand it. The poems are saturated with Quranic reference and with the technical vocabulary of Sufi practice. A good annotated edition supplies what you need, and the popular versions supply nothing because they have removed the material that would require explaining.
What is the scholarly edition?
Badiozzaman Foruzanfar's critical edition of the Divan is the standard reference in Persian, and scholarly translations and concordances are keyed to its numbering. Popular English versions are not, which makes tracing a famous line back to an original considerably harder than it should be.
What should I read about Rumi's life?
Franklin Lewis's Rumi: Past and Present, East and West is the essential scholarly account, covering the life, the works, the transmission and the modern reception, including a clear-eyed treatment of the English popularisers.
Find the closing couplet
Take any ghazal from this collection in a translation that keeps the whole poem, and go straight to the last two lines. See whose name is there. Then consider that a man wrote three thousand of these and kept putting someone else's name where his own was supposed to go. Whatever you believe about mystical union, that is a decision made in ink, thousands of times, by a person who knew exactly what the convention was.
Sources & References
- Rumi. Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, critical edition by B. Foruzanfar. The standard Persian reference.
- Arberry, A. J. Mystical Poems of Rumi. University of Chicago Press.
- Nicholson, R. A. Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, bilingual edition. Cambridge University Press, later reprints.
- Lewis, F. D. (2000). Rumi: Past and Present, East and West. Oneworld.
- Schimmel, A. The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi. SUNY Press.
- Ali, R. (2017). "The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi." The New Yorker, 5 January 2017.
- Barks, C. The Essential Rumi and related volumes. HarperOne.
- Safi, O. Commentary on the reception of Persian mystical poetry in English.