Content
The poem itself is designed to demonstrate a pluralistic and mystical connection to God, or Allah. Initially, the poem likens the pursuit of God's love to the pursuit of a female, written from the man's perspective. The narrator becomes increasingly humbled throughout the poem, and, after much desperation and awe, the link to the narrator's lover, or God, becomes obscured to the point of total cohesion. This felt harmony and connection on an equal level with God is characteristically Sufi, yet it is also an area of critique from Muslim orthodoxies who label such possibility of equality with God as heresy.
Read more about this topic: Sufi Way
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“First it must be known that only a spoken word or a conventional sign is an equivocal or univocal term; therefore a mental content or concept is, strictly speaking, neither equivocal nor univocal.”
—William of Occam (c. 1285–1349)
“Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune’s slaves,
Nor shall not be the last, like silly beggars
Who, sitting in the stocks, refuge their shame
That many have and others must sit there,
And in this thought they find a kind of ease.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)