In the Dead of night



In the dead of night, a Sufi began to weep.
He said, 'This world is like a closed coffin, in which
We are shut and in which, through our ignorance,
We spend our lives in folly and desolation.
When Death comes to open the lid of the coffin,
Each one who has wings will fly off to Eternity,
But those without will remain locked in the coffin.
So, my friends, before the lid of this coffin is taken off,
Do all you can to become a bird of the Way to God;
Do all you can to develop your wings and your feathers.'

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

31 sec read
36

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCDEFEGHI
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 507
Words 106
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 10

Farid ud-Din Attar Abu Hamid bin Abu Bakr Ibrahim

Abū Ḥamīd bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm, better known by his pen-names Farīd ud-Dīn (فرید الدین) and ʿAṭṭār (عطار, Attar means apothecary), was a Persian poet, theoretician of Sufism, and hagiographer from Nishapur who had an immense and lasting influence on Persian poetry and Sufism. He wrote a collection of lyrical poems and number of long poems in the philosophical tradition of Islamic mysticism, as well as a prose work with biographies and sayings of famous Muslim mystics. Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr [The Conference of the Birds] and Ilāhī-Nāma [The Book of Divine] are among his most famous works. more…

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