Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
The line locates the seeker's confinement in habit and self-perception rather than in any external circumstance, since the exit is described as already open.
From the Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, this rhetorical question assumes the door was never locked from the outside — the prison Rumi describes is built and maintained by the person inside it, out of fear or attachment to suffering as a known quantity. It belongs to a recurring Rumi trope in which liberation is available immediately rather than earned through years of distant effort; what changes is not the door but the person's willingness to see it as open and walk through. This connects to Rumi's larger insistence, voiced throughout his lyric poetry to Shams, that separation from God is experienced rather than actual — the Beloved is already near, and it is the seeker's own habitual posture that manufactures the sense of exile. The line works as both rebuke and invitation, asking why anyone would choose confinement once shown it isn't required.
Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi