Khalil Gibran
 
 
By Vijay Phanshikar :
“A deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of dictionary”. 
- Khalil Gibran 
on poetry
THAT’s truly poetic ! 
There is everything -- joy and pain and wonder -- and also a little wrestling with meaning !  
 

 

When Khalil Gibran wrote what he would call prose, there was poetry in that. His poetry, possibly, was beyond metre or even verse. So much is credited to Khalil Gibran by way of great expression of human emotion, of human experience, of human peeping into future, of human looking back on time that went by ...! By some standard, Khalil Gibran could not possibly be called a poet.

 

He was a thinker, He was a great writer of prose. He was an expressor of emotion in words that most other humans did not choose to use -- for those words did not occur to them the manner in which those did to Khalil Gibran. In his own words, what he wrote -- and whenever he did -- it was a deal of joy and pain and wonder. For him, his childhood play with a long stick between his legs as a horse, also was an association that usually scaled normal rungs of human experience. That ‘horse’ of his was little Khalil Gibran’s stoutest support to tide over the drudgery a child encounters when there is nothing to play with, to ride over the sameness of life without fun.

 

His -- Gibran’s -- period was deep in the past (when human values were still rustic and expectations did not always assume the tone and tenor of greed.) Even in that simplistic social context, Khalil Gibran’s prose became a tremendously poetic experience to pursue. It is, of course, useless to dwell over the details of Gibran’s expressions -- in literary terms. For him, grammar was only a little assistance, and the dictionary a mine of meanings that emotions fought to assume. So, he played with those meanings -- stated or unstated -- and even created entirely new literary metaphors for his fans to follow. So, when a Khalil Gibran explains poetry as A deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of dictionary, he elevates the human understanding of the process to a height whose measure it is difficult to have in full measure.