Without Love

Without Love - context Summary

After Meeting Shams

This short lyric, included in the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, reflects Rumi’s central mystical teaching that divine love reshapes identity and value. The speaker presents the beloved-state as essential: without love life is reduced to grief, while in love everything else loses importance. Its terse lines convey the poet’s recurring theme of spiritual intoxication and the madness of the lover, a stance that crystallized after his encounter with Shams of Tabriz. Read in the context of Rumi’s work, the poem asserts that love is both existential necessity and the path to union with the divine.