The Gambler
- Poet:
- Mowlana (Rumi)
- Era:
- 13th century
- Alt-Blues
Music & vocals AI-generated · poem in the public domain
The poem
خنک آن قماربازی که بباخت آنچه بودش
بنماند هیچش الا هوس قمار دیگر
Blessed Is That Gambler · Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi — ghazal 1085
About the poem
Mowlana's praise of the gambler who stakes and loses everything he owns, left with nothing but the longing to wager again — surrender as the highest bet, losing the self to win the Beloved.
Meaning & background
«خنک آن قماربازی که بباخت آنچه بودش» — “Blessed is the gambler who has lost everything he owned, left with nothing but the craving for one more game.” In this ghazal from the Divan-e Shams, Mowlana turns gambling — ruin by every worldly measure — into the highest spiritual daring: the lover keeps staking the self until nothing of it remains.
In the logic of the poem, losing is winning: whoever loses everything for the Beloved is freed from everything except love, and the only hunger left is to be emptied again. The session reads that reckless, holy wager through alt-blues — a genre that has always known how to sing about losing it all.
The bayt long ago outgrew its ghazal: Sufi biographical works such as Reza-Qoli Khan Hedayat's Riyaz al-ʿArefin quote it when introducing Mowlana himself, and the lover's gamble — قمار عاشقانه — became a fixture of Persian mystical language for staking everything on love. In ghazal 1085 of the Divan-e Shams the stake is the self, and the prize is to be left with nothing but the longing to play again.
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