The hoopoe cried, ‘O laggard, busy with the mere shape of things! Leave off the pleasures of seductive form! The love of the face of the Rose has merely driven thorns into your heart. It is your master. However beautiful the Rose, the beauty vanishes in a few days. Love for something so perishable can only cause revulsion in the Perfected Man. If the Rose’s smile awakens your desire, it is only to hold you ceaselessly in sorrow. It is she who laughs at you each Spring, and she does not cry — leave the Rose and the redness.’
Commenting upon this passage, one teacher remarks that Attar refers not only to the ecstatic who does not take his mysticism further than rapture. He also means the ecstatic’s parallel, the person who feels frequent and incomplete love, and who, although deeply affected by it, is not regenerated and altered by it to such an extent that his very being undergoes a change: ‘This is the fire of love which purifies, which is different whenever it occurs, which sears the marrow and makes incandescent the kernel. The ore separates from the matrix, and the Perfected Man emerges, altered in such a way that every aspect of his life is ennobled. He is not changed in the sense of being different; but he is completed, and this makes him considered powerful of men. Every fibre has been purified, raised to a higher state, vibrates to a higher tune, gives out a more direct, more penetrating note, attracts the affinity in man and woman, is loved more and hated more; partakes of a destiny, a portion, infinitely assured and recognised, indifferent to the things which affected him while he pursued the mere shadow of which this is the substance, however sublime that former experience may have been.’