Jami (d. 1492), the towering fifteen-century Persian Sufi poet, in his commentary on Ibn al-Farid’s wine ode, entitled Lavami', presents the reader with two distinct ways of analyzing the poem’s anacreontic imagery. Most of his work reads as a traditional Sufi interlinear commentary “on the words, phrases, unveiling[s], symbols, and allusions [of the poem]” with the clear goal of revealing for the reader the elaborate supra-literal network of allusions to myriad Quranic passages, hadith, and Sufi metaphysical concepts that are contained in each of these poetic “symbols.” This “symbolist” method of hermeneutic analysis, as one of its modern scholarly proponents has termed it, became one of—if not the—primary lens through which both premodern and modern readers have read Sufi poetry. But Jami—in this same commentary—advances another theory of poetic imagery as well, which he terms “expressing meanings in the clothing of forms.” Analyzing the “complete similitude” of earthly wine and love, Jami presents a radically different and deeply embodied perspective on the poetic function of metaphoric imagery. Sufi poets, he argues, “employ” “words and phrases” drawn from “sensorial perceptions/tangible objects” (mahsusat), such as “earthly (ṣūrī) wine,” as metaphors for higher spiritual realities because they reproduce for the uninitiated reader an imaginary experience that simulates (metaphorically) the ineffable experience of divine love and union. Jami’s theory of metaphoric imagery is what contemporary linguists would refer to as “embodied”: it sees linguistic meaning produced in and through embodied experience. The “meaning” of Sufi poetry, in short, is located as much (or more) in the movement of the imaginal bodies that populate its poetic world as in the sum of the dictionary/lexicon equivalents of each word, phrase, or symbol. Pushing the conversation about embodiment in the Islamic world beyond the physical body proper, this paper will show the significant implications this “embodied poetics” has for how we read, analyze, and even translate Sufi poetry. Through an analysis of a famous ghazal of Rumi and its numerous translations, I will demonstrate how the “disembodied” theory of language implicitly followed by many scholars of Persian poetry has caused them to mistranslate the mystical “meaning events” embedded in this poem’s image schemas.