After Being In Love The Next Responsibility - Analysis

Love as a Force That Turns You

The poem’s central claim is that love is not just a feeling but a kind of cosmic power that moves things into their proper work, and that humans are asked to accept an added burden: to become conscious of what the rest of creation enacts without speaking. The opening command, Turn me like a waterwheel, imagines the speaker as a machine meant to be driven by something larger than personal will. Love is the current: Plenty of water, a Living River. Right away, the poem frames devotion as being put to use—turned, ground, made productive—rather than “expressed.”

There’s also a paradox inside the plea: Keep me in one place and yet scatter the love. The speaker wants stability and surrender at the same time: to be held still like a wheel fixed on its axle, while love radiates outward through the turning. The responsibility of love, in this sense, is not constant novelty; it is reliable motion, the daily revolving that transforms raw grain into sustenance.

A Universe Full of Lovers Who Won’t Confess

Rumi then widens the lens until love becomes the secret engine of the whole world. He gives a chain of quick, tactile examples: Leaf-moves in wind, straw drawn toward amber (a precise image of attraction), and then the startling line: all parts of the world are in love, but they do not tell. That contrast—universal love paired with universal silence—sets up the poem’s main tension. Nature participates; it does not testify.

The “in love” world Rumi draws is also strangely reverent. Cows graze on a sacramental table, turning an ordinary field into altar space. Ants whisper in Solomon’s ear, pulling in sacred story to suggest that even the smallest creatures carry messages, though they deliver them privately. Mountains mumbling an echo and the Sky, calm deepen the sense that creation is full of half-heard devotion: a murmured worship that refuses to become explicit doctrine.

What Happens If the Sun Stops Loving

Midway through, the poem makes a blunt, almost physical argument: love is what keeps the world from going inert. If the sun were not in love, it would have no brightness; without that love, the hillside would have no grass. The final consequence is even larger: The ocean would come to rest. Rumi is not describing love as decoration or romance; he is describing it as the world’s motion itself—light, growth, tides. The tone here is urgent in its calmness, as though the speaker is stating obvious facts we keep forgetting: take love away and the universe stops.

The Next Responsibility: Not Just to Love, but to Know

The poem’s turn comes when it stops speaking about everything else and speaks directly to the reader: Be a lover as they are. The instruction isn’t to feel differently, but to align with what the sun and ocean already do—so that a further knowledge becomes possible: that you come to know the Beloved. Love is presented as a way of knowing, a kind of inspired knowing that springs from being in love. Similarly, Be faithful is not moral advice for its own sake; it is a method: faithfulness leads to knowing Faith itself.

Here the tension sharpens. Earlier, the world was “in love” but silent; now humans are told they can do what the rest of the universe did not: accept the next responsibility of love. Rumi even imagines the other parts of creation refusing: They were afraid they might make a mistake with it. That fear suggests that the human task is riskier. Leaves and oceans can enact love without self-consciousness; humans must bear love with awareness, which includes the possibility of error, self-deception, and failure.

A Harder Reading: Are We Less Innocent Than the Mountains?

If everything already participates in love, why is the next responsibility reserved for you? The poem implies that human consciousness is both privilege and liability: we can name the Beloved, but we can also distort what we name. The universe is steady in its wordless devotion; we, alone, must become a waterwheel on purpose—choosing to be turned, choosing to be faithful—without the guarantee that we will not misuse the very power that makes the sun bright.