Analysis of Only Breath

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi 1207 (Balkh) – 1273 (Konya )



Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.


Scheme AX XX XX XX XX AX XX
Poetic Form
Metre 1101111011 10111110010 110010111101 10111101011 1011100101001 0111001111101 1111000111001 110111001110 10010111101 101101011 10110011101 1110111101 111010101 1101010
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 579
Words 117
Sentences 8
Stanzas 7
Stanza Lengths 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 32
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 64
Words per stanza (avg) 16
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 03, 2023

35 sec read
473

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, and more popularly simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, faqih, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran. more…

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