One day in your wineshop, I drank a little wine,
And threw off this robe of my body,
And knew, drunk on you, the world is harmony.
Creation, destruction, I am dancing for them both.

-Rumi (Translated by Coleman Barks)

Notes & Analysis

This poem is dripping with divine reality. If you read it carefully and without any preconceived notions, you can feel something of Rumi’s state of consciousness emanating from these four short lines.

Rumi is not writing idly sitting under a tree. In fact, Rumi did not write his poems down – he spoke them while overtaken by divine rapture while dancing. He would stop spinning, lean heavily against a pillar, and belt out new poems in a booming voice. Some of his disciples wrote down what he said. He then reviewed the poems, but made few changes.

So the first thing to remember is this: Rumi isn’t trying to convey a concept to us or a nice idea. He is speaking straight out of an experience of divine reality. This experience is as soul-shattering and utterly overwhelming as it is sublime.

One day in your wineshop, I drank a little wine,

Rumi is not talking about wine. The “wineshop” is the house of God, and to drink wine is to experience the nectar of divine love. Rumi uses the metaphor of wine to describe the abandoned state of ecstasy that is divine union.

When we ask about the nature of wine, we must remember that for the Sufi poets, the world and everything within it are loci of theophany for the Divine Reality. But by the very nature of things, certain loci display that Reality more clearly than others. Among its more direct manifestations are “wine, women and song”. Each is an image and symbol of higher realities, and eventually of the Highest Reality. Each can be a bridge from the visible world to the Unseen.

But even if things are “symbols”, this does not mean that they are no longer things. Each image symbolizes the Divine Reality, but at the same time a woman is a woman and wine is wine. Each thing maintains its individual identity because ultimately it derives from certain Names and Attributes of God, which in turn determine its archetype or “immutable entity” (‘ayn-i thabitah). 

originally published in Studies in Mystical Literature, 1/3 (1981), pp. 193-209. Retrieved via Ibn Arabi Society.

And threw off this robe of my body,

Nor is he talking about a robe. The robe symbolizes the personality, and the entirety of the personal ego. It is not only the day-to-day personality that others perceive at the market. It is also the inner sense of himself as a person separate from the divine. This is what we must give up if we are to experience what he describes in the last two lines.

And knew, drunk on you, the world is harmony.

He is “drunk,” in an altered state of consciousness. “Drunk on you,” filled with the presence of the divine so completely that he has lost his sense of himself as separate.

“…the world is harmony.” This is an astonishing statement when taken with the final line.

Creation, destruction, I am dancing for them both.

Creation and destruction are both part of the “harmony” he describes as the fundamental truth of existence. He doesn’t think, he doesn’t believe, he “knows.” Anyone who has had a taste of this experience understands that it is a knowing beyond all comprehension. It is more real than anything we have ever experienced.

And somehow, creation and destruction – from the birth of a star to the birth of a baby, from the death of a dandelion to the destruction of a planet – somehow all of these things are part of that underlying harmony.

This is the central mystery of life. It cannot be understood, exactly. But it can be known. When we allow ourselves to become “drunk” on the divine, we are graced with an experience of reality that changes everything.