Come See What Love Has Done to Me

The Poem

Come, see what love has done to me, it made me a road from head to foot. I walk on, burning, burning, love has made me a stranger to myself.

I am burning in love’s fire, day by day my life runs out. I have no concern for what remains, come, see what love has done to me.

They say that Mansur spoke the truth, they hung him on the gallows for love. It is love that gives and love that takes, come, see what love has done to me.

Yunus Emre, Divan (c. 1300)

Original Turkish:

Gel gör beni aşk neyledi, baştan ayağa yol eyledi. Ben yürürüm yane yane, aşk ettiğim el eyledi.

Context

This poem stands alongside Love Took Me From Myself as one of Yunus Emre’s most recognized works. Where the earlier poem is a declaration of singular desire (“I need only You”), this one is an invitation. The poet turns to the world and says: look at me. Look at what this has done.

The difference in posture is significant. “Love Took Me From Myself” is addressed to God. “Come See What Love Has Done” is addressed to other human beings. The poet has passed through the fire and now stands before his community as living evidence of what divine love does to a person. He is not boasting. He is testifying.

Yunus Emre composed in the simple Turkish of the Anatolian countryside during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. While Persian was the language of the court and Arabic the language of the scholars, Yunus chose the tongue of shepherds, farmers, and wandering dervishes. This choice was not accidental. It reflects the Sufi conviction that the deepest truths require the plainest language.

The Body as Road

The poem’s central image is startling: love has made the poet into a road (yol) from head to foot. Others walk upon him. This is not self-pity but a precise description of what happens when the ego is dissolved. The person who has undergone fana no longer exists for himself. He exists for others to pass through, a bridge between the human and the divine.

In Sufi psychology, the stages of the soul describe a progressive emptying. The commanding self (nafs al-ammara) is full of its own desires and demands. As it is purified through stages of self-reproach, inspiration, and contentment, what falls away is the insistence on being a destination. The purified soul becomes a passage, not a stopping point.

This is what Yunus means when he says love made him a road. The ego wants to be a fortress, a monument, a place where others stop and pay tribute. Love turns the fortress into a highway. Everyone passes through, and the road does not complain.

Burning and Estrangement

Two conditions define the poet’s state: he burns, and he has become a stranger to himself.

The burning (yanmak) is a constant in Sufi love poetry. It appears in Rumi’s Song of the Reed, where the ney burns with longing for the reed-bed from which it was cut. It appears in the moth-and-flame imagery that runs through Persian and Turkish verse. But Yunus’s burning is not metaphorical display. He says it plainly: “I walk on, burning, burning.” The present tense is important. This is not a past event recalled in tranquility. It is an ongoing condition.

The estrangement (el eyledi, literally “made me a stranger”) is equally precise. The word el in old Anatolian Turkish means “stranger” or “outsider.” Love has made the poet foreign to his own former self. He no longer recognizes the person he was before love arrived. This is another way of describing fana, the passing away of the constructed identity that most people mistake for their true self.

The Reference to Hallaj

The poem’s mention of Mansur al-Hallaj is not decoration. Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in 922 CE for his ecstatic utterance Ana al-Haqq (“I am the Truth”), which was understood by some as a claim to divinity. For the Sufi tradition, Hallaj’s statement was not blasphemy but the ultimate testimony of fana: the ego had been so thoroughly consumed that only God’s voice remained.

By invoking Hallaj, Yunus places himself in a lineage of those who have been destroyed by love and found it to be a gift rather than a punishment. The gallows (dar) becomes a symbol not of death but of total surrender. “It is love that gives and love that takes” summarizes the paradox: the same force that strips everything away is the force that grants everything worth having.

A Theology of Witness

The repeated refrain, “come, see what love has done to me,” transforms the poem into an act of witness (shahada in its broadest sense). The poet does not explain love theoretically. He presents himself as evidence. His burning body, his estrangement from his former self, his transformation into a road for others: these are not arguments but exhibits.

This approach is characteristic of Yunus Emre and of the Anatolian Sufi tradition more broadly. Where Ibn Arabi builds philosophical systems and Rumi constructs elaborate narrative parables, Yunus simply stands in front of you and says: look. The theology is in the looking, not in the explanation.

This is also why Yunus’s poetry has endured for seven centuries in ways that more sophisticated verse has not. A Turkish villager who has never heard of wahdat al-wujud or the maqamat can hear “come, see what love has done to me” and understand it immediately. The directness is not a limitation. It is the point.

Connection to the Path

The poem describes what happens after the theoretical framework has been left behind. The stages of the soul provide a map. The practices of dhikr and sohbet provide methods. But the actual experience of transformation is something else entirely. It is fire, estrangement, and the strange gift of becoming a road.

This is why Yunus’s poem remains essential reading for anyone interested in Sufi thought. It is not about ideas. It is about what happens when the ideas become real in a human life.

Sources

• Yunus Emre, Divan (c. 1300)
• Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975)
• Talat Halman, Yunus Emre and His Mystical Poetry (1972)