The majesty of Rumi’s poetry makes it, at last, into a handsome Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series hardcover, with a gold tassel ribbon marker.

The poetry of the medieval Persian sage Rumi (1207–1273) combines lyrical beauty with spiritual profundity, a sense of rapture, and acute awareness of human suffering in ways that speak to the heart of contemporary readers.

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the world’s harp

should burn up, there will still be

hidden instruments playing…

This singing art is sea foam.

The graceful movements come from a pearl somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive

from a slow and powerful root

that we can’t see.

Stop the words now.

Open the window in the center of your chest,

and let the spirits fly in and out.

Trained in Sufism—a mystic tradition within Islam—Rumi founded the Sufi order known to us as the Whirling Dervishes, who use dance and music as part of their spiritual devotion. Many of Rumi’s poems speak of a yearning for ecstatic union with the divine Beloved. But his images bring the sacred and the earthy together in startling ways, describing divine love in vividly human terms.

This volume draws on a wide variety of translations—from the early twentieth- century versions of A.J. Arberry and R.A. Nicholson to more recent works of Coleman Barks, Andrew Harvey, Kabir Helminski, and others—to convey Rumi’s deeply moving, sensually vibrant poetry.

He is nearer to you than yourself. Why look outside?

Become like melting snow; wash yourself of yourself.

With love your inner voice will find a tongue

growing like a silent white lily in the heart.