Jackeline Salazar
The poem that spoke to my heart and choose to discuss in my blog is “Like This” by Rumi. When I started to read this poem there were lots of emotions and feelings in this poem. There was also some figurative language in this poem that represents love or at least how I interpreted it. This poem symbolize love and other feelings that the author is expressing. Also when I started to scan this poem I wasn’t sure what kind of poem it was due to the lines and the way I read this poem, it was confusing to determine whether it was an iambic or a dactylic. It could also be both as well, an example of it being an iambic was due to the first line where you can separate it into three parts like so, “if any, one asks, you” you can tell that from that first line and so on it could be an iambic poem. Bur, then again at some point of this poem it was also becoming too sound like a dactylic poem. For example in lines 42 and 49 it sounds as a dactylic but I could be wrong since I am no expert on scanning poems, “light the candle, in his hand. When Shams comes, back from Tabriz,”. I thought that these lines and a few others were dactylic so I assumed that it was mixture of iambic and dactylic with a trimeter when it came to figuring out the pattern of this poem.
On the other hand the main reason why I also like this poem was because this poem symbolize a meaning of love. When I read this poem it had some sort of figurative language to represent a meaning on this poem. For example in lines 25-26, “When someone asks what it means to ‘die for love’, point here.” I thought that it was a metaphor due to the fact that you can’t really die because of love or just assume that this one thing dies for love. It was basically just an expression saying that you would give up anything for love or to love someone specifically. In this case the author would give up anything for love and since they said “point here” I assume that he would die for love for someone specifically or maybe just themselves too because I am curious as to say what Rumi meant by “point here”. Also Rumi uses personification to express the love he has for this person, like an example in lines 21-23 “If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead. don’t try to explain the miracle. Kiss me on the lips.” He is using personification to let us imagine or think if Jesus raises the dead or if there are actual miracles out there, because in reality we really don’t know if Jesus exists or if miracles do, so Rumi gives us this idea of Jesus and miracles but at the same time he uses his feelings towards the end because he will say that there is no need to explain this and to just “kiss me on the lips.” This line says it all that he doesn’t really need to know all about it. Rumi just uses this line to express the emotions he has for this special person and he just wants to feel them. Rumi also uses imagery by letting us picture clouds uncovering the moon and loosening a string knot from a robe in lines 17-18. Overall he uses these images to let us picture what he means to be in love and seeing the moon while he is trying to loosen a knot from his lover’s robe before they make love. Overall, there are many more figurative language that Rumi uses to express his love and feelings for this person. He has many feelings with different meanings and they were mostly about love but it was how powerful his love was.
Overall, if this poem was interpreted by someone else other than a Muslim or an Iranian poet, my interpretations would have been the same. I don’t think it should have been different just because of what they are. Even if they are not Muslim or an Iranian poet I would have not have different interpretations because in my opinion I think they we are all humans, so what we say or write or speak all has its own meaning and everyone who would have read this would have their own interpretations about the poem whether it was a non-Muslim or non-Iranian. Overall, I would have had the same interpretations that I wrote for this blog post no matter what because I think its just all about how you feel or what is your way of meaning for this poem.
Introduction to Poetry 