LV

The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, by Ibn al-Arabi, tr. Reynold A. Nicholson, [1911], at sacred-texts.com

LV

1. I am absent, and desire makes my soul die; and I meet him and am not cured, so ’tis desire whether I am absent or present.

2. And meeting with him creates in me what I never

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imagined; and the remedy is a second disease of passion,

3. Because I behold a form whose beauty, as often as we meet, grows in splendour and majesty.

4. Hence there is no escape from a passion that increases in correspondence with every increase in his loveliness according to a predestined scale.

COMMENTARY

1-4. He is continually tormented, for in the anguish of absence he hopes to be cured by meeting his Beloved, but the meeting only adds to his pain, because he is always moving from a lower state to a higher, and the latter inevitably produces in him a more intense passion than the former did.