“A drop
Melting into the sea,
Everyone can see.
But the sea
Absorped
In a drop —
A rare one
can follow!”
Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet
Azfar Hussain translations
As quoted in The Sun at Midnight : The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis (2003) by Laurence Galian
“A drop
Melting into the sea,
Everyone can see.
But the sea
Absorped
In a drop —
A rare one
can follow!”
Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet
Azfar Hussain translations
“Have hung
My dank and dropping weeds
To the stern god of sea.”
John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet
Translation of Horace. Book i. Ode 5
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Epigraph to Friendship
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series
Variant: A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
“A spark without its fire, a drop without its sea,
Without rebirth what more, pray, wouldst thou be?”
Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer
The Cherubinic Wanderer
“The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!”
Bryan Procter (1787–1874) English poet
The Sea, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).