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Allegorical Desire, or, the Sufi ‘Phoenix and the Turtle’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2024

Hannah Crawforth
Affiliation:
King's College London
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
Affiliation:
King's College London
Emma Smith
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Two bird poems – William Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ and Farid ud-din Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr – allegorize the Sufi idea of non-possession in desire. Sufism’s absolute goal is desire, and desire’s absolute condition is death: ‘I long for death; what use is “I” to me’, says Attar, as he ventriloquises Shakespeare’s dead lovers.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shakespeare Survey 77
Shakespeare's Poetry
, pp. 79 - 90
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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