SOURCE: Keshavarz, Fatemah. “‘How Sweetly with a Kiss Is the Speech Interrupted’: Rumi's Poetics of Silence.” In Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi, pp. 49-71. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Keshavarz notes that Rumi produced “over 35,000 verses celebrating the absence of speech,” analyzes the varieties of silence in Rumi's Divan, and compares the silences of Rumi with the silences of Beckett and Kierkegaard, among others.

Rumi's lyric is occupied with the thought of silence. In the Dīvān, speech is not worthless, but silence is infinitely more powerful. Words draw strength from the “realm of silence” (D, 124:10); mysteries are transformed because “they are untellable” (D, 183:7); whereas words may be counted silence is “immeasurable” (D, 569:12). One may see the Dīvān as an intense expression of the desire to abandon the spoken word and embrace silence.¹

To produce over...