Five Senses - Analysis

Love beyond the body’s map

The poem’s central claim is blunt: real love is not something the ordinary human instrument can measure. When Rumi says love has nothing to do with the five senses and the six directions, he isn’t denying the body so much as refusing to let the body set the terms. Senses and directions are how we navigate the physical world: taste, touch, north, south, and so on. But the poem insists that love’s arena is different—its point is not to gather data, but to undergo a pull that comes from elsewhere.

That pull is named with devotional precision: the attraction exerted by the Beloved. Love here is less a feeling the speaker manufactures than a force the lover submits to. Even the word goal quietly changes what we think love is: not a mood, not a romance, but a destination reached through being drawn.

The Beloved’s gravity, not the lover’s effort

The phrase experience the attraction matters because it makes love an event, almost like stepping into a current. The Beloved (capitalized, unmistakably more-than-human) is active; the lover is responsive. This creates a tension the poem doesn’t smooth over: if love is a kind of irresistible magnetism, what happens to choice, to willpower, to all the careful human ways of approaching meaning? Rumi’s answer seems to be that love begins where control ends. That is why the five senses and six directions—tools of control and orientation—are dismissed as irrelevant to the core encounter.

Permission to speak, and the ache to be understood

Midway, the poem turns from describing love to describing speech about love. Afterwards, perhaps, permission will come from God: the speaker imagines that only after the experience of attraction might there be authorization to translate it into language. The tone shifts here into a careful, almost legal humility. Not only is the secret hard to say; it may be forbidden until allowed. The word permission suggests a boundary: the mystic does not own the secret as private property, and cannot simply broadcast it.

Yet the poem also admits a desire to communicate. It longs for eloquence nearer to the understanding—a speech that could land clearly, not as subtle confusing allusions. That phrase sounds like a self-critique: the poet knows that hints and symbols can fail the listener. So the poem holds a contradiction at its center: it wants to reveal what it also insists can’t be revealed straightforwardly.

The secret’s chosen audience

The final lines narrow the circle further: The secret is partner with none but the knower of the secret. This isn’t mere elitism; it’s an argument about readiness. A secret, in this logic, is not a piece of information you can hand over like a coin. It is a state of knowing that requires a transformation in the knower. That is why, in the skeptic’s ear, the secret is no secret at all. The skeptic doesn’t just disagree; he lacks the organ of reception. What arrives at his ear is only sound, stripped of its depth.

A hard question the poem forces

If the skeptic hears nothing, what is the speaker doing by speaking? The poem’s answer seems to be: speaking can be a form of waiting. The lines gesture toward a future moment when permission and understanding might meet—when the listener becomes, through love’s attraction, a knower rather than a bystander.

From invitation to warning

Overall, the tone moves from expansive instruction to guarded caution. It begins by clearing space—love is not boxed by senses or directions—and ends by locking a door: only the knower can truly share the secret. The poem leaves us with a bracing conclusion: love is both the most intimate experience and the least transferable one. You can point to it as Rumi does, naming the Beloved and the attraction, but the real content remains where it started: beyond the body’s map, and beyond any ear that has not been altered by desire.