The Measure of Love: Attar’s Song of the Unhidden Heart

(Reflections on “کیست که از عشق تو پردهٔ او پاره نیست”, “Who is there whose veil has not been torn by love?”)

I. The Cry of the Unveiled Heart

کیست که از عشق تو پردهٔ او پاره نیست
وز قفس قالبش مرغ دل آواره نیست

Who is there whose veil has not been torn by love?
Whose heart-bird has not fled from the cage of the body?

With these opening lines, Attar draws the curtain aside on the essential mystery of being: that love, divine, fierce, and unrelenting, rends every covering that conceals the truth. No soul escapes its touch.
Love, in Attar’s vision, is not a pleasant adornment or poetic ornamentation. It is the primal force of existence, the fire through which every being must pass to return to its Source. It does not simply reveal; it destroys the false so that only the Real remains.

The “veil” (parde) here is everything that separates us from the Beloved, the illusions of self, intellect, social masks, even piety itself. And the “heart-bird” (morgh-e del) is that secret essence of the soul, forever yearning for flight, trapped within the cage of form.

Attar’s first verse is thus not a lament but a statement of universal truth: love wounds everyone. Every heart that beats has already been torn.

II. The Scale of Love

وزن کجا آورد خاصه به میزان عشق
گر زر عشاق را سکهٔ رخساره نیست

How could one bring balance, especially on love’s scale, …