(Reflections on “کیست که از عشق تو پردهٔ او پاره نیست”, “Who is there whose veil has not been torn by love?”)
I. The Cry of the Unveiled Heart
کیست که از عشق تو پردهٔ او پاره نیست
وز قفس قالبش مرغ دل آواره نیست
Who is there whose veil has not been torn by love?
Whose heart-bird has not fled from the cage of the body?
With these opening lines, Attar draws the curtain aside on the essential mystery of being: that love, divine, fierce, and unrelenting, rends every covering that conceals the truth. No soul escapes its touch.
Love, in Attar’s vision, is not a pleasant adornment or poetic ornamentation. It is the primal force of existence, the fire through which every being must pass to return to its Source. It does not simply reveal; it destroys the false so that only the Real remains.
The “veil” (parde) here is everything that separates us from the Beloved, the illusions of self, intellect, social masks, even piety itself. And the “heart-bird” (morgh-e del) is that secret essence of the soul, forever yearning for flight, trapped within the cage of form.
Attar’s first verse is thus not a lament but a statement of universal truth: love wounds everyone. Every heart that beats has already been torn.
II. The Scale of Love
وزن کجا آورد خاصه به میزان عشق
گر زر عشاق را سکهٔ رخساره نیست
How could one bring balance, especially on love’s scale,
if the lovers’ gold bears not the stamp of the Beloved’s face?
Love has its own currency, Attar tells us, and it cannot be weighed on the scales of reason. The true measure of worth is the imprint of the Beloved, the divine visage stamped upon the heart like a coin marked by the royal face.
If love does not leave its seal upon your being, then your gold is false, your devotion untested. For in the marketplace of divine longing, nothing counts except what has been touched by the Beloved’s image.
In mystical symbolism, the “coin” or “seal” refers to the transformation of the lover through union. The self is melted down, purified by fire, and then struck with the face of the Divine. The result is not the lover’s annihilation but their authentication.
Attar’s alchemy is spiritual: melt your ego in the furnace of longing until the only face remaining is God’s.
III. The Fire of Self-Offering
هر نفسم همچو شمع زاربکش پیش خویش
گر دل پر خون من کشتهٔ صد پاره نیست
Every breath I burn like a lamenting candle before Him,
unless my blood-filled heart has already been slain a hundred times.
Here, Attar becomes the candle of self-sacrifice. The lover burns, cries, and melts, not out of despair, but out of devotion. To love God is to be consumed.
The sham‘, the candle, is one of Persian poetry’s most potent metaphors for the lover: giving light while perishing, weeping as it illuminates. The candle’s tears are its joy, its annihilation its purpose.
Attar declares that if his heart has not been slain a hundred times, it is not yet worthy of this fire. Love demands continual dying, a shedding of selfhood with every breath. What the world calls suffering, the lover calls worship.
IV. The Powerless Lover
گر تو ز من فارغی من ز تو فارغ نیم
چارهٔ کارم بکن کز تو مرا چاره نیست
If You are free of me, I am not free of You.
Do something for me, for without You, there is no remedy.
This is one of Attar’s most human verses, the cry of a soul that knows it is powerless before love.
The lover cannot stop loving, even if the Beloved is indifferent. Divine love is not reciprocal affection; it is a cosmic magnetism that does not depend on consent.
Here, Attar reveals the paradox of love: the lover prays for release from what he cannot and would not escape. To be cured of love is to be severed from life itself.
The word chāreh (remedy) is ironic, there is no medicine for this illness except more of the disease. Love is both the wound and the balm.
V. The Eternal Drunkenness
هر که درین راه یافت بوی می عشق تو
مست شود تا ابد گر دلش از خاره نیست
Whoever once smells the wine of Your love
becomes drunk forever, unless his heart is made of stone.
One sip, one scent, one glimpse, that is enough. The “wine of love” is the divine intoxication that overwhelms consciousness and leaves no return to sobriety.
Attar insists that this intoxication is eternal. True love does not fade or cool; it transforms the lover into one who drinks from the cup of infinity.
The only ones who remain untouched are those whose hearts are stone, impervious to beauty, closed to longing.
Love here is a mystical contagion. To even inhale its fragrance is to be lost forever, or found forever, depending on your point of view.
VI. The Silence Beyond Speech
هست همه گفتگو با می عشقش چه کار
هرکه درین میکده مفلس و این کاره نیست
All this talk and reasoning, what use are they beside the wine of love?
Whoever has not gone bankrupt in this tavern knows nothing of it.
Once again, Attar disarms the intellect. In the tavern of divine love, reason is currency without value. To enter, one must go bankrupt, to surrender all possessions of thought, creed, and self.
Only the poor in spirit can drink here. The tavern (meykhāneh) is not a physical place but a state of being where all conceptual wealth is stripped away.
To “go bankrupt” (mofles shodan) is to be emptied, purified, and undone, not through moral failure, but through spiritual realization. For the mystic, bankruptcy is abundance: when nothing remains but the Beloved, everything is present.
VII. The Measure of Manhood
درد ره و درد دیر هست محک مرد را
دلق بیفکن که زرق لایق میخواره نیست
The pain of the road and the pain of the monastery are the test of manhood.
Cast away the monk’s cloak, hypocrisy befits not a drinker of love’s wine.
Attar attacks pretension and self-righteousness with characteristic ferocity. The robe (dalq) of false piety, worn for reputation, is worthless before love.
The mi-khāreh, the wine-drinker, is his archetype of the true seeker, one who dares, risks, and suffers. The pain of the road (dard-e rah) and the pain of the cloister (dard-e deyr) are not contradictions but necessary tests: one burns in the desert of separation, the other in the silence of devotion.
To be a “man” (mard) here is to endure the fire without deceit. Attar’s spirituality is not gentle, it demands authenticity at any cost.
VIII. The Dust of the Monastery
در بن این دیر اگر هست میت آرزو
درد خور اینجا که دیر موضع نظاره نیست
If in the depths of this monastery you desire wine,
then suffer here, for this is no place for idle spectators.
The mystic’s path is not a spectacle to be watched from afar. The deyr (monastery) is the inner sanctum of the heart, and wine symbolizes divine ecstasy.
If you long for even a sip of that sacred wine, Attar warns, you must be willing to suffer. This is not a stage for curiosity or aesthetic enjoyment. The way of love is a furnace, it refines, it does not entertain.
IX. The Untrustworthy Ones
گشت هویدا چو روز بر دل عطار از آنک
عهد ندارد درست هر که درین پاره نیست
It became clear to Attar’s heart, as the day itself:
none can be true who is not broken in this fragment of existence.
The final verse is both confession and revelation. Through his long journey, through the Conference of the Birds, through asceticism and mystical vision, Attar has learned that integrity arises from brokenness.
“هر که درین پاره نیست”, whoever is not shattered, whoever is still whole and secure in themselves, cannot be trusted on the path of love.
Brokenness is not weakness but truth. The vessel must crack for the light to shine through.
This is the culmination of his teaching: the wholeness of the soul is found only after it has been undone.
X. The Unbroken Song
Across this ghazal, Attar builds a ladder of transformation:
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The veil torn by love.
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The heart stamped with the Beloved’s face.
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The candle burning in self-sacrifice.
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The helpless lover who cannot escape.
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The eternal intoxication of love.
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The silence beyond reasoning.
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The stripping away of pretense.
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The endurance of suffering.
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The acceptance of brokenness.
Every stage is a descent deeper into truth. What seems like destruction, the tearing, burning, dying, and losing, is in fact purification. The lover who is annihilated in love becomes the mirror through which God beholds Himself.
XI. The Alchemy of Annihilation
Attar’s poetry belongs to the lineage of fanāʾ, the mystical annihilation of the self in the Beloved. Yet, unlike the cool serenity of philosophical Sufism, Attar’s tone burns with personal urgency.
His ghazal is not a metaphysical argument; it is a confession sung through tears. Each couplet is a station on the road from selfhood to nothingness, from longing to realization.
To read Attar is to be reminded that spirituality is not a comfort; it is a fire. The lover does not seek peace but truth, and truth is a sword that severs illusion.
XII. The Endless Return
Even as Attar speaks of annihilation, his voice remains tender, human, filled with yearning. Love may destroy, but it also creates, it burns to reveal, it kills to awaken.
When he says, “گر تو ز من فارغی من ز تو فارغ نیم”, “If You are free of me, I am not free of You”, he is describing the eternal motion of love itself: the soul’s orbit around the divine center.
The path does not end in death but in awakening, where being and non-being fuse. In that space, words vanish, and only silence remains, luminous and alive.
XIII. The Mirror of Saraye Sokhan
In the quiet of night, reading Attar is like holding up a mirror to the soul. His verses do not instruct, they reveal. His fire touches all who have ever loved deeply, whether humanly or divinely.
For Attar, the difference between the two is only in degree: every true love, if pursued to its end, becomes a mirror of the Infinite.
Each reader must find themselves in one of his images: the torn veil, the burning candle, the drunk in the tavern, or the broken-hearted seeker praying for a glimpse.
In the end, Attar leaves us not with answers but with a wound, a sacred, luminous wound that keeps us alive to love.
XIV. The Last Word
The ghazal closes, but its fire continues to smolder across centuries. It calls not for belief, but for experience, not for piety, but for sincerity.
Attar’s message, whispered from the ruins of self:
“Do not seek safety from love. Seek truth within the burning.
For every soul must one day know, there is no remedy but the Beloved.”
