A Poetry of Mysticism: Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, and Rainer Maria Rilke

Abstract

Ibn Gabirol (c.1021–c.1058), Rumi (1207–1273), and Rilke (1875–1926) each produced poetry that reflected what might be called mysticism. Some of the poetry of Ibn Gabirol and Rumi has in fact been incorporated for liturgical and devotional purposes. Rilke’s poetry, reflecting the challenges of the modern world, has been interpreted and alluded to by many artists, writers, and musicians. Ibn Gabirol sums up the provenance of these three poets in his philosophic work The Fountain of Light: “sometimes [you feel] that you are only part of them [spiritual substance], because of the bond between you and between physical being; and sometimes it will seem to you that you are the sum total of these [spiritual] substances and that there is no difference between you and them.” As he declares in “And Don’t Be Astonished”: “he’s soul encircling the physique,/and a sphere in which all is held.” Rumi expresses this experience in “Suddenly A Moon Appeared”: “For in the moon, my body, by grace had become soul./And when I traveled in this soul, I saw nothing but moon,/Until the mystery of eternal theophany lay open to me.” He puts it succinctly in “Ode 2721”: “For the fire within us/There is no translator.” Whereas Ibn Gabirol’s poetry as an approach toward the spiritual and a state of “blessedness” and Rumi’s poetry as a return to the spiritual through love are expressed with confidence, infused as they are by neo-Platonism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Islam, and Sufism, Rilke’s poetry affected according to Arthur S. Wensinger, “the transmutation (by the poet) of the world into spirit through feeling … because we (and he) are mortal and remembering.” Rilke expresses in the Duino Elegies this transmutation as a necessity in a complicated time: “Nowhere, beloved, can world exist but within./Our life is spent in changing./And ever lessening,/the outer world disappears.../The spirit of the times makes vast storehouses of power,/formless as the stretched tension it gathers from everything.” This chapter examines how through poeticized acts of remembering and communion these three poets explore the extraordinary nature of internal mystical experience.