Of Our Love For Emptiness - Analysis

A hymn that praises what undoes us

The poem’s central claim is blunt and strange: emptiness is not a lack but a force worth praising because it releases us from the heavy project of being someone. Rumi opens by blessing the very thing that seems to threaten life: emptiness that blanks out existence. But he immediately complicates that threat by calling existence itself made from our love for emptiness. In this logic, what we call a world is partly built from longing for what exceeds the world. The tone begins as celebratory and devotional, yet it carries a cool vertigo: praise is offered to something that removes the grounds for praise.

A key tension is already present in the first lines: if emptiness blanks out existence, why love it? The poem answers not with argument but with repeated “happenings,” as if the mind can only circle the paradox: Yet somehow comes emptiness, and this existence goes. The “somehow” is important; it admits that the mechanism can’t be pinned down, only witnessed.

The labor of selfhood, then the sudden canceling

The poem shifts from cosmic statement to personal history: For years I pulled my existence out of emptiness. The verb pulled makes being feel like work, like hauling a body up from a well. Existence here isn’t given; it’s continuously manufactured. That sets up the hinge-moment: Then one swoop, one swing of the arm, and the work is over. The image suggests how quickly the identity-project can be ended—not by careful completion but by a single unmaking gesture, almost like a curtain yanked down. The tone turns from strenuous effort to astonished relief, as if the speaker can’t believe the labor has stopped.

This is not nihilism so much as liberation. The freedom he lists is pointedly psychological: Free of who I was, and even free of presence, as if the demand to be “here” is itself a burden. He names the emotional machinery that keeps a self intact: dangerous fear and hope, plus mountainous wanting. The contradiction is sharp: hope is usually praised, but here it is grouped with fear as a danger—another tether to a future-self that must be protected or achieved.

Mountain becomes straw: scale collapses

One of the poem’s most revealing moves is the way it collapses scale. The here-and-now mountain—the big, solid, urgent fact of the present—shrinks into a tiny piece of straw, and then even that is blown off into emptiness. This doesn’t just say the world is small; it says the mind’s sense of importance is a kind of weather, easily changed. The mountain stands for what feels immovable: identity, problems, desire, the seriousness of being alive. Emptiness turns that seriousness into something weightless, not by arguing with it but by altering perspective so radically that the “mountain” can’t keep its name.

When the words fail, that failure is also praise

After emptying out self and scale, the poem turns on its own speech. These words I’m saying begin to lose meaning: Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw. The speaker notices language thinning, as if repeating the terms exposes them as temporary scaffolding. This is another tension: the poem must use words to praise what exceeds words. Instead of hiding that problem, it stages it. In the end, not only the “things” but Words and what they try are swept away, out a window and down the slant of the roof—an image of language sliding off the house of the mind. The tone becomes airy and a little ruthless: even the poem’s own metaphysical vocabulary is treated as debris.

A sharper question inside the relief

If emptiness frees the speaker from dangerous fear and even from presence, what remains of love itself—especially in a poem titled Of Our Love for emptiness? The title suggests a communal, almost intimate devotion, yet the ending sweeps away the very words that could name that devotion. The poem pushes us to consider whether love, too, must be emptied of its usual grasping, or whether love is precisely the consent to be swept.

Ending as disappearance, not conclusion

The final motion is downward and outward: out the window, down the slant. There’s no triumphant final definition, only the ongoing event the poem praised earlier over and over: appearance and vanishing. What begins as a hymn to emptiness ends as an enactment of emptiness, where even the speaker’s explanatory effort is released. The poem’s last gift is its refusal to let the reader keep a neat concept; it offers instead the experience of having the concept taken away.