Analysis of This We Have Now

What Remains When Feelings Pass

Rumi draws a sharp distinction between temporary states of mind and a deeper, continuous awareness. The poem’s central claim is that the reality available now is not something the mind invents, evaluates, or feels. Imagination, grief, joy, judgment, elation, and sadness all belong to the realm of change. Beneath them is the presence / that doesn’t come and go.

Defining Presence by Refusal

The speaker approaches this presence indirectly, naming what it is not. It is not imagination, so it cannot be dismissed as fantasy. Yet it is also neither grief or joy, which means it cannot be reduced to emotional experience. Even a judging state is excluded: presence exists before the mind sorts experience into good and bad, desirable and painful.

This creates the poem’s main tension. We commonly recognize ourselves through our thoughts and moods, but Rumi treats those familiar experiences as visitors rather than as the deepest self. Joy may seem more valuable than sadness, and elation more spiritual than grief, yet the poem places all of them in the same category: Those come and go. The deeper reality is not the best or happiest passing state. It is what remains available through every state.

The Turn Toward What Is Here

The decisive turn arrives with This is the presence. Until then, the poem clears things away through repeated negation. After the list of exclusions, the word presence feels both plain and expansive: it names immediate existence without trying to describe its qualities. The opening phrase, This we have now, also matters. Presence is not a future reward or a rare mystical achievement; it is already possessed, although changing emotions may obscure it.

An Unfinished Ending

The final phrase, that doesn’t, gains force from what it leaves unstated. Grammatically, it completes the contrast with states that come and go; spiritually, its incompleteness resists turning presence into another fixed concept. The tone is calm, corrective, and quietly certain. Rather than asking the reader to manufacture transcendence, the poem asks for recognition: what is most enduring is not another experience passing through us, but the awareness in which passing happens.