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Form and style

Most of the poems in the Divan follow the form of a ghazal, a type of lyric poem often used to express themes of love and friendship as well as more mystical Sufi theological subjects. By convention, poets writing ghazals often adopted poetic personas which they then invoked as pen names at the end of their poems, in what are called takhallos. Rumi signed off most of his own ghazals as either Khâmush (Silence) or Shams-i Tabrizi.

Although he had belonged to a long tradition of Sufi poetry, Rumi developed his own unique style. Notably, due to the extemporaneous manner in which Rumi composed his poems, much of Rumi’s poetry has an ecstatic, almost trance-like style that differs from the works of other professional Islamic poets. Rumi evidently found the traditional metrical constraints of ghazals to be constraining, lamenting in one ghazal that fitting his poems into the traditional “dum-ta-ta-dum” ghazal metre was a process so dreadful that it nearly killed him.