A Critical Discourse Analysis of Love and Grief in Rumi’s Selected Poems

Abstract

This study tackles the concepts of love and grief within the framework of Sufi and Islamic contexts to identify how figures of speech are deployed to explore the themes of love and grief and their interconnectivity in Rumi’s selected poems. The study also aims to unlock the ideological implications in relation to these two themes and their relationship in the poems. Consequently, Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) is adopted in this study to conduct a critical discourse analysis of two selected poems from Jalalluddin Rumi’s translated poetic collection entitled The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing, using three levels of analysis; textual, discursive and social. The results reveal that Rumi deploys a preponderant and diverse range of figures of speech which include metaphor, personification, contrast, hyperbole, rhetorical question, symbol, simile, allusion and repetition. This is in order to intensify the crucial interconnectivity of love and grief during the individual’s spiritual experience of divine love that can only thrive on sacrifice, hardships and tribulations that cultivate and motivate lovers to gain self-maturity in seeking for spiritual union. Therefore, grief is figuratively represented by Rumi as a motivational and transformative element that accompanies love on its indescribable, experiential and spiritual path. Similarly, the three-dimensional analysis of this interconnectivity unveils a set of implied Islamic ideologies and some universal teachings as well which calls for reconsidering the common Western idea of classifying Rumi’s works as love poetry.