Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
There are three reasons why I ended up reading ‘The Prophet’ by Kahlil Gibran:
1. I wanted to explore some new poetry, and every time I tried a more contemporary voice (someone born post-1980), the book would inevitably turn out to be a collection of three- or four-line sentences being passed off as “poetry.” You have no idea how many poetry books I’ve stopped midway and then decided not to review anywhere out of the kindness of my heart.
2. Once upon a time, a friend mentioned that they had a tough time understanding the poetry of Rumi and Kahlil Gibran, and that memory somehow came back to me.
3. The Penguin edition of The Prophet looked very pretty and was dirt cheap thanks to some sale. I got it for 90 rupees, which is less than one dollar, at least according to the exchange rate when this was written.
Of course, reason 3, the shallowest reason of all, was the primary driving force behind me finally buying a copy of The Prophet. So it’s not like I had any expectations as such. In fact, it took me two attempts just to get through the first poem, ‘The Coming of the Ship’, which is about a completely fictional prophet called Almustafa, preparing to leave the town of Orphalese and is a little over six pages long.
While the first three or four pages didn’t exactly reel me in, on my second attempt, I buckled at this line: “And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
It comes towards the end of page five. Famous words, words I’m pretty sure I’ve come across somewhere on the internet before, and yet, this time, they hit me like a sudden, harsh downpour. As someone who has always been moving between homes, cities and towns, goodbyes are still as hard as ever. And with that one simple line, ‘The Prophet’ won me over. After that, I read a poem or two every day, while strolling on my terrace, reading each line aloud. I might not have agreed with everything, but it was a delightful experience to read poetry that did not sound like hastily scribbled notes in a journal.
Kahlil Gibran’s poetry unfolds almost like a story, with the Prophet surrounded by the men and women of Orphalese before his departure, as they seek his wisdom on different themes before bidding him farewell. Home, marriage, children, crime and punishment, freedom: they ask the man to speak on a whole bunch of topics and are answered with philosophical words of wisdom.
The poet does speak of a “God” now and then, but is rarely religious or dogmatic in what he says. Take, for instance, what he writes about clothes: “Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful. And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain… Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean. And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind? And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and winds long to play with your hair.”
To find these lines in a poetry book called The Prophet, written by a man in the 1920s, delighted me to no end. Here’s a man essentially saying that clothes are unnatural, that they’re shackles we’ve created partly to protect a manufactured sense of “modesty.” And then he casually ends by reminding us that the earth would rather feel our bare feet and the wind would rather play with our hair. I loved it.
Obviously, reading The Prophet a century later, when we’re already exposed to such a wide range of progressive ideas and philosophical “wisdom” on just about every issue imaginable, some of Gibran’s musings might feel extremely familiar. But well, for me, it was a great little break from contemporary poetry.
If you’re up for some old school philosophical musings, just pick this up.
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