The words have their magic. While critics disregarded Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese poet, for his archaic approach in poetry, the readers embraced him like their messiah who had the magic to infuse a life of its own through words. Like critics I’d serious misgivings about his works until I read one. One day I picked up the collected works from a shop. I took the collection home and pushed it into the books in the shelf without reading a line for a year. But suddenly I decided to give it a glance–a deserving consideration for the money I’d spent. I flipped pages and tried to read through stanzas randomly. They were pleasant. Excited, I flipped more. I was glued to the pages all of a sudden and got into reading poems after poems. They were soul-stirring, indeed. But it was until I read ‘The Prophet’ that my heart was truly filled with feelings of praise for the poet. It is a masterpiece, a brilliant read, full of sense, evocative and causing a kind of catharsis.
“Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship.”
Every single word has a sense, a meaning that one can interpret in many ways, though it being clear in a direct way. It is not exaggeration if he is credited for infusing a fresh life into the archaic.
To stand apart the critics, his works have a soothing impact and very much befriend a reader. However, I find some of his poems way too lengthy and winding in thoughts, for which I’ll come back again with a thorough critical analysis.
O S scribbles... 