This Is Love - Analysis

A definition of love as disappearance

The poem insists that love is not primarily a feeling but a radical kind of unlearning: a movement away from what can be possessed, named, or even clearly seen. Rumi begins with a bold, almost instructional claim, This is love, then defines it through a chain of actions that all point in the same direction: leaving the ordinary self behind. Love here is a discipline of vanishing, a willingness to be altered so thoroughly that the world you used to rely on becomes invisible and the person you thought you were becomes something you can disregard.

The “secret sky” and the urge to rise

The first image is flight: to fly toward a secret sky. It suggests that love has an upward pull, but not toward a public heaven that everyone agrees on. The sky is secret because it can’t be reached by ordinary knowledge or social approval. This is why the poem immediately adds a startling consequence: love is to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. The pace is relentless. Love is not a single revelation; it is repeated unveiling, as if every moment has its own disguise that must be dropped. The tone is ecstatic but also demanding, like someone describing a beauty that requires courage to endure.

Letting go of life, stepping without feet

The poem’s most severe line arrives early: First, to let go of life. It sounds like a command toward death, but in context it reads more like a demand to surrender the usual definition of living: clinging, defending, insisting on control. The next paradox makes that surrender vivid: a step without feet. Love requires motion, but not the kind supported by the body’s normal guarantees. The contradiction is the point. Rumi frames love as a crossing into a realm where the old tools don’t work, and where you must still move forward anyway. The poem’s confidence makes this paradox feel less like a riddle and more like a description of lived experience: you discover you can walk after you stop relying on what you thought were your feet.

Making the world invisible, making the self smaller

After flight and paradox, the poem shifts to perception: To regard this world as invisible. This is not contempt for the world so much as a reordering of reality. What most people treat as solid becomes thin, like scenery. Then Rumi tightens the demand: disregard what seems to be the self. The key tension is that love is often imagined as self-affirmation, yet here it is self-forgetting. The poem challenges the reader to consider that the self might be one of the “veils,” something that appears central only because we are used to standing behind it.

The turn: from instruction to gratitude

A gentle turn arrives with Heart, I said. The voice becomes more intimate and thankful, as if the speaker has moved from defining love to speaking from inside it. The tone softens into gratitude: what a gift it has been to enter this circle of lovers. The earlier lines sound solitary and severe; now love is a shared space, a community or a ritual circle where surrender is supported. The “circle” also suggests a completeness that contrasts with the earlier images of falling veils and stepping into the unknown: the speaker is no longer only losing; he is being gathered.

Beyond seeing, into the breast

The final lines push past ordinary spiritual “vision” toward something even more inward. The speaker claims he has learned to see beyond seeing itself, implying that even perception can be a veil if it keeps you at a distance. Love’s knowledge is tactile and interior: to reach and feel within the breast. After the poem makes the world “invisible,” it does not leave the speaker in blankness; it gives him a new location for reality. Love relocates truth from the eye to the heart, from observation to contact.

The poem’s sharp demand

If love requires to let go of life and to disregard the self, then the poem quietly asks an unnerving question: what part of you is left to love with? Rumi’s answer seems to be that the very act of surrender reveals a deeper capacity, the one that can join the circle of lovers and feel from within the breast. Love, in this logic, is not what the self does; it is what becomes possible when the self stops insisting on being the center.