— Attributed to Rumi; modern English rendering of an image recurring in his poetry
About this quote
हिन्दी में
अगर पेड़ों के पाँव ज़मीन से बँधे न होते, तो वे मेरे पीछे चल पड़ते। मैं इतना खिल चुका हूँ कि बाग़ मुझसे जलते हैं।
What it means
The line is built on a single piece of reasoning, and it is worth following: the trees are not indifferent, they are detained. Roots are named as the only obstacle, which means the speaker is claiming that everything rooted would move if movement were available to it. The second half raises the stakes again — a garden is the standard by which flowering is judged, so to be the envy of gardens is to have the measuring stick turn jealous of the thing it measures.
Notice the tense: I have blossomed. This is a report of a condition already arrived at, not an ambition. That matters, because the line is usually recirculated as encouragement — bloom so brightly that the world follows you. As written it offers no instruction at all; it is a boast, and its interest lies in being an honest record of what a certain state feels like from inside, before modesty gets applied to it.
What it teaches you
When you meet this line as a caption urging you to bloom, read the verbs again and see that the advice was added by someone else. A useful habit with ecstatic poetry generally: separate the lines that describe a state from the lines that prescribe one. This one describes. Treating a description as a target is how readers end up measuring themselves against a condition nobody was told how to reach — and the envy in the last clause belongs to the gardens, not to the reader.
अर्थ और सीख
कहने वाला कह रहा है कि पेड़ सिर्फ़ इसलिए अपनी जगह खड़े हैं क्योंकि उनकी जड़ें बँधी हैं — वरना वे भी उसके पीछे चल देते। और जो बाग़ ख़ुद सुंदरता का पैमाना है, वही अब उससे ईर्ष्या करता है। ध्यान देने की बात यह है कि यह कोई सलाह नहीं, बल्कि एक अनुभव का बयान है — जो हो चुका है उसका, न कि जो हमें करना चाहिए उसका।
Where it comes from
An ecstatic boast, and meant as one. The claim is that flowering has made him so magnetic that even rooted things would follow if they could — the intoxication that runs through the Divan, where Rumi is rarely modest about what love has done to him.
A modern English rendering of an image that recurs in his poetry. Rumi (1207–1273) wrote in Persian; almost every English line shared online is a modern rendering rather than a literal translation. Sourced passages from the Masnavi, with their selection titles, are collected under Rumi on Love.
