The Influence of Color on Conscious and Unconscious Perception in Rumi’s Poetry

This research studies the use of color in Rumi’s Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Since many colors with different symbolic representations are used in this work, we have used “sama,” which is a Sufi ceremony involving dancing, to refer to the ubiquity of color in it. The article considers three aspects to this ubiquity: composition of color (purity of color, motion in color, harmony of color, and contrast of color), the influence of color on conscious and unconscious perception, and expression of color (psychology of color). Adopting the notions of physics and art, the article analyzes the symbolic representations of the colors white, black, and red, which Rumi sometimes uses to express concrete concepts and sometimes, as they make abstraction more tangible to the reader, to express abstract ones.