The Masnavi, Book One (Oxford World's Classics)

The remainder of the story of the old harpist and
the explanation of it
That man through whom the world was 
filled with sound,
From whose voice grew such visions that astound,
So bird-like hearts would 
fly in ecstasy
While souls, perplexed, would lose stability,
As time passed, aged –– his falcon soul grown weak,
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More like a 
finch that scrapes dirt with its beak,
His back became as hunched as jugs of wine,
His eyebrows hung down like a trailing vine,
His lovely, soul-expanding voice had turned
Into an ugly, worthless noise men shunned:
What once made Venus green with jealousy
Resembled now a mule’s bray tragically!
The Old Harpist
128

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Has any 
fine thing not turned foul before?
Has any rooftop not become a 
floor?
Only the voices of saints from the past
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Whose breath provides the Last Day’s trumpet blast,
*
A soul which makes our hearts drunk in an instant,
A non-existent which makes us existent,
The loveliness in every voice and thought,
The joy which inner revelation brought.
When he grew old and weak that man looked dead,
He needed loans just for a loaf of bread:
‘You’ve granted me long life, Lord, whom I serve,
And countless blessings which I don’t deserve,
For seventy years although I sinned each day
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You never would withhold grace from my way,
Without means I’m your guest, so hear my song:
I play for God’s sake, to whom I belong.’
He picked his harp up, sought God on his own,
Crying inside the graveyard all alone:
‘I seek from God the cost of just one string,
He’ll kindly take the counterfeits I bring!’
When he had played a long time and thus wept,
With harp as pillow, grave as bed, he slept;
His spirit 
fled the prison of his breast,
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Abandoning the harp now for its quest:
Free from the body and this world of pain
Into the simple world, the soul’s domain;
His soul sang of what he’d now come upon:
‘If I could only stay here from now on!
I’d love to stay in vernal realms instead,
Inside this mystic plain and tulip bed ––
I’d crawl there now without a head or feet,
Without a lip or teeth its sweets I’d eat,
With thoughts free of a
ffliction from the brain
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I’d joke with those up there in heaven’s plain,
Up there, with eyes closed, a whole world I’d view,
Without a hand I’d pick some roses too;
Like birds which in a sea of honey sink,
Job’s fount 
which cleanses and serves as a drink:
*
The Old Harpist
129

---

It cleansed Job from his head down to his toes,
Like dawn’s
first light, from all his earthly woes.’
If this book matched the sky’s expansiveness
It still could not contain a drop of this!
The earth and sky’s vast space has sliced my heart
2110
With feelings of con
finement, locked apart;
That dream world which I’ve seen with my own eye,
Through its expansiveness spurs me to 
fly––
If that world and its gate were manifest
Then few would stay here for a moment’s rest.
Then the command came: ‘Don’t be greedy –– no!
Now that the thorn’s come out, step forward –– go!’
The harpist’s spirit lingered, reticent,
Clung tightly to the Most Bene
ficent.
While he was asleep a voice told Omar: ‘Give this much gold from
the treasury to that man who is sleeping in the graveyard’
Omar was then made drowsy for God’s sake
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Until he could no longer stay awake,
He felt amazed, and said, ‘This is no game ––
It comes from the unseen, it serves an aim.’
He lay down, slept and had a dream so clear
That God’s own voice Omar’s soul then could hear;
That voice is the sole source of every sound,
All noise is just its echo going round,
Each Nubian, Persian, Arab, Turk, and Kurd
Without their ears this wondrous voice has heard ––
So what if Turks and Tajiks understood ––
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That voice is heard as well by stone and wood!
Each moment ‘