The story goes that Emperor Shah Jahan, overwhelmed by the death of his wife, he built in her memory, this unique mausoleum. And the legend (but perhaps not law) that says that the Emperor himself, in his last seven years of life, strongly ill, was imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb in Agra's Red Fort here and spent many hours gazing at the Taj Mahal with his wife's grave.
Emperor Shah Jahan himself described the Taj in these words:
Should guilty seek asylum here,
Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.
Should a sinner make his way to this mansion,
All his past sins are to be washed away.
The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs;
And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.
In this world this edifice has been made;
To display thereby the creator's glory.

Among 17th-century Mughal court poets, the most outstanding is Abū Ṭālib Kalīm (died 1651), who came from Hamadan. Abounding in descriptive passages of great virtuosity, his poignant and often pessimistic verses have become proverbial; wishing to pay homage to the virtuosity of the imperial lapidaries, wrote these verses to glorify their art:
They set stone flowers in the marble
That by their color, if not their perfume,
surpass real flowers.
A more poetic story relates that once a year, during the rainy season, a single drop of water falls on the cenotaph, as inspired by Rabindranath Tagore's description of the tomb as "one tear-drop...upon the cheek of time".