Week 23: Common Reed, Rumi, A.R. Harwood

Cover Image. “Reed Swamp at the Margin of a Norfolk Broad,” from A.R. Horwood, A New British Flora: British Wild Flowers in Their Natural Haunts, Vol. IV (London: The Gresham Publishing Company, Ltd., 1919), p. 63.

Waning Gibbous Moon; 16 Day to Summer Solstice (Northern Hemisphere).

Headnote

Are you looking for Rumi-related AI slop? Well, YouTube has it! (No links provided here.) Perhaps this is not surprising. Since his introduction into English and Western European languages during the nineteenth century, Rumi went on to become a bestseller in the 1990s and early 2000s, featured prominently across Oprah’s multimedia empire and even recited on a Coldplay album. Of course, making him the most popular poet in the U.S. required some translators/adapters and publishers to excise many of his cultural, historical, and linguistic particularities, including most traces of Islam. As a good student of literature, I know that these missing elements could expand and nuance, rather than hinder, appreciation of this important poet and Sufi, even for so-called Western readers. That being said, his writing evokes many spheres of nature and human experience in addition to mystical ecstasy and religious devotion. Consider the reed.

Traditional end-blown flutes such as the nay are made primarily from the giant reed (Arundo donax), a tall perennial cane with a moderate circumference, or from varieties of bamboo, yucca, or… grass (?). But the common reed (Phragmites australis) still has some claim to musical history, as uber-niche archaeologists, musicologists, and wind-instrument enthusiasts are wont to argue. Long live the ancient aulos revival! In reminding us of the reed’s relationship to its “source” and to “fire” (many flutes require heat to achieve their necessary form and durability), Rumi transforms a soggy plant into a symbol of what is most human, most divine, most primordial in us: the “pain of love-desire,” borne of our “separations” and calling us back to our source. When he also compares the reed to wine, I can’t help but think that he is imagining its maroon-burgundy tassel, or panicle—one of my favorite sights in the blowing summer wind.

The common reed (Phragmites australis) is a flowering wetland grass in a subfamily of the Poaceae, or true grasses, family, along with the bamboos and cereal grains. In other words, it is a littoral relative of the corn, rice, wheat, oats, millet, barley, and sugarcane that feed most of the world, not to mention the turf in your backyard. The common reed can be found at the water’s edge around the world and has often been considered a single species. However, taxonomies for the plant were a bit muddled until 1968, when a British botanist reviewed the history of classifications and revived the now-current designation from an eighteenth century Spanish botanist.

And now, morphological studies and genetic sequencing indicate significant variations within Phragmites australis, which likely will be differentiated into multiple species, including a North American genotype that has largely been replaced across that continent by a rival Eurasian haplotype. This Eurasian variety, currently considered a subspecies, has been aggressively spreading since its “cryptic invasion” at some point in the last 150 years: a bed of “phrag” can expand through underground rhizomatic growth and above-ground stolons up to several inches per day, and 20 feet per year. Its pressure on other species and destruction of prior ecosystems can be immense. Yet the durability and sheer mass of such thickets can be beneficial for purifying polluted ecosystems, stabilizing coastal and riparian zones, and absorbing atmospheric carbon. Death and life are not always a zero-sum game. Again—consider the cut, burned, empty, beautiful reed.

Fig. 2. Habitat illustration and range map for Phragmites communis [sic], from Alex C. Martin, Ray C. Erickson, and John H. Steenis, Improving Duck Marshes by Weed Control (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service, 1957), p. 35.

Readings

1. Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations—Saying, “Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament hath caused man and woman to moan.
   
   I want a bosom torn by severance, that I may unfold (to such a one) the pain of love-desire.
   
   Every one who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united with it.
   
   In every company I uttered my wailful notes, I consorted with the unhappy and with them that rejoice.
   
   Every one became my friend from his own opinion; none sought out my secrets from within me.
   
   My secret is not far from my plaint, but ear and eye lack the light (whereby it should be apprehended).
   
   Body is not veiled from soul, nor soul from body, yet none is permitted to see the soul.
   
   This noise of the reed is fire, it is not wind: whoso hath not this fire, may he be naught
   
   ‘Tis the fire of Love that is in the reed, ‘tis the fervour of Love that is in the wine.
   
   The reed is the comrade of every one who has been parted from a friend: its strains pierced our hearts.
   
   Who ever saw a poison and antidote like the reed? Who ever saw a sympathiser and a longing lover like the reed?

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, from “Proem to Book 1,” The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi, Volume II. Trans. Reynold A. Nicholson. (London: E.J.W. Gibb Memorial, 1960 [1926]), p. 5.

2. The Reed may be said to be ubiquitous in both time and space, for it is found in Britain alone in Preglacial beds everywhere, Interglacial beds in Hants, Sussex, Lincs, Neolithic beds in the Thames Valley, Yorks, Glamorgan. It is found in the N. Temperate and Arctic regions in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and in Australia. This common aquatic plant is found throughout Great Britain, except in East Sutherland, as far north as the Shetlands, and in the Channel Islands.
   
   The common Reed is one of those familiar aquatic plants which has a place in the popular mind on account of its very universality, and because it forms in itself a characteristic botanical formation, a reed-swamp association. It grows in still water as well as running water, in lakes and rivers, nowhere more luxuriantly than in the meres of the E. counties or the tarns and lochs of Scotland, at two very different elevations.
   
   The stem is round, tall, graceful, erect, arising from a jointed creeping rhizome, and stoloniferous, with creeping shoots. The leaves are long, flat, broad, rigid, with the margins hairy, and bluish-green below. The leaf-sheath is round, turned one way, and smooth. In a wind the leaf turns partly round like a flag.
   
   The panicle is nodding, purple, soft and silky, branched, large, and dense, with smooth branches. The spikelets are 5-flowered, the flowers longer than the glumes, and glossy. The empty ones are the flowering glumes, awl-shaped, and longer. The florets in the spikelet are distant, with long silky hairs which form a parachute.
   
   The Reed is 3—10 ft. high. It flowers in July and August. The plant is a herbaceous perennial, propagated by soboles or creeping runners. The lower flowers are male, the others are bisexual, the panicles containing 3—6 flowers, being densely crowded. As in most other grasses the stamens are 3, the styles short, and the stigmas feathery. The lowest glumes are 1—3-androus, the others 3-androus. The flowers are anemophilous, proterogynous.
   
   The fruit is enveloped in the glume, and this in long silky hairs, and is light, and adapted to dispersal by the wind.
   
   The Reed is a peat-loving plant, luxuriating in peat soil or clay soil, and it is then a clay-loving plant.
   
   […]
   
   Phragmites, Trinius, is from the Greek phragma, fence, with reference to a spurious dissepiment at the nodes; and the second name indicates its universal character.
   
   This graceful grass is called Bennels, Bog Reed, Ditch Reed, Doudle, Pole Reed, Pull Reed, Pull Spear, Reed, Speargrass, Spire, Streeds, Windlestraws. The name Bennels is applied to a kind of mat, made of reeds woven together, used for forming partitions in cottages, or laid across the rafters to form an inner roof. The name Doudle is “the root of the common reed grass found partially decayed in morasses, of which the children in the south of Scotland make a sort of musical instrument similar to the oaten pipe of the ancients.”
   
   The Reed was used traditionally by witches to fly upon. It is used for thatching, and a specimen thus used a hundred years ago is as fresh as if recently gathered. It is used for protecting sea embankments, for ceilings to cottages, verandas, rustic buildings, for plaster floors, for screens, and for hot-beds in kitchen gardens. Wool is dyed green by the flowers. The roots have been used for liver complaints. Mats are made of it, and formerly it was used for pens for black-letter type.

A.R. Horwood, “Reed (Phragmites communis, Trin.),” *A New British Flora:\

British Wild Flowers in Their Natural Haunts, Vol. IV* (London: The Gresham Publishing Company, Ltd., 1919), pp. 161-164.

Supplementum

• “Translations and Versions of “The Song of the Reed” (Masnavi, Book 1: LInes 1-34).” The American Institute of Masnavi Studies (n.d.).

• Kat Thornton, “Rumi for the New-Age Soul: Coleman Barks and the Problems of Popular Translations.” Ajam Media Collective (March 9, 2015).

• Barnaby Brown, “Phragmites australis vs Arundo donax.” The Workshop of Dionysus (September 16, 2019).

• “Where is Phragmites Found?,” The Great Lakes Phragmites Collaborative (2026).

• "Common Reed,” from “Ethnobotany of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands,” Texas Beyond History (2008).

• “Common reed,” Invasive Plant Atlas of the United States (2018).

Fig. 3. Calligraphed and illuminated Persian manuscript edition of “Mas̲navī-i Ma‘navī, Book 1” (1487), p. 2b. Persian MS 72, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester, England.