Recently, a reader reached out to Cool Wisdom Books about one of Neville Goddard’s literary references.

At the very end of his lecture “Good Friday – Easter,” Neville recites a beautiful poem titled “After Death in Arabia.”

“So, remember, Easter is the art of dying that you may live, and this reminds me of that wonderful poem of the death of Abdula and what he said at the end of it all. He appeared among all the mortals and they were weeping and kissing his worn-out body and he turned to them and said, “I am not the thing you kiss, cease your tears and let it lie. It was mine, it is not I.”

Our reader, M.L., found a 1919 song “After Death in Arabia” in the In Memoriam Song Collection composed by James H. Rogers, mentioning the quote.

Knowing how important Neville’s mentor Abdullah was during their years together in New York City, M.L. wondered whether Abdullah might have encountered this music in 1919.

There is an interesting discovery here, the site M.L. sent us to, appeared at first to have the lyrics of the song.  But after finding James H. Rogers score (see Appendix 1), we see the lyrics omit the stanza Neville quoted (“I am not the thing you kiss, cease your tears and let it lie…”). What’s on that site is the poem behind the 1919 song which was written by the Victorian poet Sir Edwin Arnold. ₁

But, if we follow Arnold’s poem still further back, we find an even older mystical poem whose language expresses Neville’s own point even more directly.

Sir Edwin Arnold, the English poet and journalist is best remembered for another work Neville readers will immediately recognize: The Light of Asia.

Arnold didn’t invent the central imagery of “After Death in Arabia.” In a newspaper article in the Deleware Herald in January 1880 (see Appendix 2), he described the poem as a paraphrase of Arabic verses found in William Gifford Palgrave’s nineteenth-century Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia.

There is another reason, though, why Arnold is important in Neville’s story.

Neville tells us he was first introduced to Arnold’s work in London in 1925, years before meeting Abdullah in 1929–1931.

In his lecture “The Maker and the Maker of Things,” Neville remembered:

“Then I realized when I came here that something else had to happen, and I wasn’t aroused until I went to England. In 1925 I met an old Scotchman who was interested in certain mystical subjects and he read the Bhagavad-Gita and The Light of Asia and these lovely things to me, and then he gave them to me. Well, he inflamed… he touched a little wick within me so when I came back to America four months later, I was so moved by all that I had heard and read in the interval that I went wild. Every penny that I had that I could afford outside of my rent I bought books on related subjects.”

In another lecture, “God’s Purpose” Neville identifies the Scottish gentleman as the father of his young friend Matt:

“As a friend of mine said to me back in 1925 in London—I said, ‘Matt’—his name was Matthew—‘I said, Matt, why don’t you become more interested in things of this nature?’ For his father had introduced me to The Light of Asia and the Bhagavad Gita and things of that sort. He said, ‘No, I’m only 21, and when I get old enough like my father’—father was then 50—‘when I get an old man like my father, then I become interested, if then. But I want to live first.’”

(Sadly, Neville adds that Matt later went to India as a tea taster and died of fever only months afterward.)

And that takes us to the poem behind Arnold’s poem.

As we mentioned earlier, the bridge between this older version and Arnold was William Gifford Palgrave.

In his Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, Palgrave tells of meeting a learned man named Mogheeth, who related a traditional story concerning “Ahmed-el-Ghazalee.”

Palgrave records the verses in a somewhat different English translation:

Tell my friends, who behold me dead,
Weeping and mourning my loss awhile,
Think not this corpse before you myself:
That corpse is mine, but it is not I.

I am an undying life, and this is but my body,
Many years my house and my garment of change;
I am the bird, and this body was my cage,
I have wing’d my flight elsewhere, and left it for a token.

I am the pearl, and this my shell,
Broken open and abandon’d to worthlessness;
I am the treasure, and this was a spell
Thrown over me, till the treasure was released in truth.

So finally, Sir Edwin Arnold took this and transformed it into the rhyming poem Neville would later quote as “I am not the thing you kiss, cease your tears and let it lie. It was mine, it is not I.”

That may be the most beautiful part of tracing Neville’s quote back to its source. The further back we go, the closer the poem seems to come to the very idea Neville was using it to express.

₁”After Death in Arabia” predates Rogers’s 1919 musical setting by several decades. The poem was already circulating in the late 1870s under Sir Edwin Arnold’s name, and an 1880 newspaper account reported that Arnold described it as a paraphrase of Arabic verses found in W. G. Palgrave’s Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia. Intriguingly, a 1923 A. L. Burt edition of Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia included “After Death in Arabia” in the same volume, on p. 299. Neville recalled being given The Light of Asia by his Scottish friend’s father in London in 1925. We do not know which edition Neville received, but editions containing the very poem he later recited were already in circulation by that time.

Appendix 1 

Song Lyrics: After Death in Arabia (James H. Rogers)

As a song, it truncates the poem. It omits the middle stanzas (the metaphors of the tent, the sword, the pearls, and the earthen jar). It bookends the song with the Azan couplet. It opens with an altered version: “He who died at Azan sends / This to comfort all his friends:” and concludes with the traditional ending: “He who died at Azan gave / This to those who made his grave.” James H. Rogers inserts an ecstatic chant directly before the final couplet that does not exist in the source poem: La Allah il-la Allah! La Allah il-la Allah! Allah, Yea! Thou love divine! Thou love alway.

Song Lyrics

After Death in Arabia (James H. Rogers)

He who died at Azan sends
This to comfort all his friends:
Allah glorious! Allah good!
Now thy world is understood;
Now the long, long wonder ends,
Yet ye weep, my erring friends,
While the man whom ye call dead
In unspoken bliss instead
Lives and loves you; lost, ’tis true,
By such light as shines for you;
But in light ye cannot see,
Of unfulfill’d felicity,
In enlarging paradise
Lives a life that never dies.
Be ye certain, all seems love,
View’d from Allah’s throne above;
Be ye stout of heart and come
Bravely onward to your home!
La Allah illa Allah!
La Allah illa Allah!
Allah,
Yea! Thou love divine!
Thou love alway!
He who died at Azan gave
This to those who made his grave.

Appendix 2

A REMARKABLE POEM.
From the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, formerly edited by S. Bowles, deceased.

“HE WHO DIED AT AZAN.”

The beautiful poem, called then “Not Dead, but Risen,” which was read at the memorial service or Mr. Bowles, attracted wide attention, and its publication was followed by inquiry and discussion as to its authorship. This was finally rightfully attributed to Edwin Arnold an English barrister (we believe) who has written but little but that little of singular beauty and perfectness. Mr. Arnold describes the lines as a paraphrase from certain Arabic verses quoted in Palgrave’s travels in Arabia. Mr. Arnold is an authority in Sanskrit literature, and has made occasional essays in other Oriental fields. A lady of this city sojourning in London, Mrs. Louisa Andrews, has recently sent us a corrected copy of the poem obtained from the author himself, accompanying it with these words: “In a note to me Mr. Arnold says of these lines and of those very striking and touching verses, ‘She is dead,’ they said to him, ‘come away’—both are reproduced in American publications, generally with some other name attached, and, what is worse, gross misprints and mistakes. For example, ‘Azim’ in the line you quote should be ‘Azan,’ the hour of afternoon prayers in Moslem communities. This I think is the only mistake of importance in the lines as they appeared in the Republican, but I feel you will perhaps be pleased to have every word of this beautiful poem as it came from the brain and hand of the author, and therefore send you this perfectly accurate copy.” Knowing that the readers of the Republican will be glad to share in this satisfaction, we reprint the poem in its authentic form:

AFTER DEATH IN ARABIA.
He who died at Azan sends
This to comfort all his friends.

Faithful friends! It lies, I know,
Pale and white and cold as snow;
And ye say “Abdallah’s dead!”
Weeping at the feet and head.
I can see your falling tears,
I can hear your sighs and prayers;
Yet I smile and whisper this—
“I am not the thing you kiss:
Cease your tears and let it lie;
It was mine, it is not ‘I.'”

Sweet friends! what the women lave,
For its last bed of the grave,
Is a hut which I am quitting,
Is a garment no more fitting,
Is a cage from which at last,
Like a hawk, my soul hath passed.
Love the inmate, not the room—
The wearer, not the garb—the plume
Of the falcon, not the bars
Which kept him from the splendid stars!

Loving friends! Be wise, and dry
Straightway every weeping eye;
What ye lift upon the bier
Is not worth a wistful tear.
‘Tis an empty sea shell—one
Out of which pearl has gone,
The pearl, the all, the soul, is here.
‘Tis and earthen jar whose lid
Allah sealed, the while it hid
That treasurer of his treasury,
A mind that loved him; let it lie!
Let the shard be earth’s once more,
Since the gold shines in his store!

Allah glorious! Allah good!
Now thy world is understood;
Now the long, long wonder ends!
Yet ye weep, my erring friends,
While the man whom ye call dead,
In unspoken bliss, instead,
Lives and loves you; lost ’tis true
By such light as shines for you;
But in the light ye cannot see
Of unfulfilled felicity—
In enlarging paradise
Lives a life that never dies.

Farewell friends! Yet not farewell;
Where I am, ye too shall dwell.
I am gone before your face,
A moment’s time, a little space;
When ye come where I have stepped,
Ye will wonder why ye wept;
Ye will know, by wise love taught,
That here is all, and there is naught.
Weep awhile, if ye are fain—
Sunshine still must follow rain;
Only not at death—for death,
Now I know, is that first breath
Which our souls draw when we enter
Life, which is of all life center.

Be ye certain all seems love,
Viewed from Allah’s throne above;
Be ye stout of heart, and come
Bravely on to your home!
La Allah illa Allah! yea!
Thou love divine! Thou love alway!

He that died at Azan gave
This to those that made his grave.