IN THE UNITBD STATES 183small output, partly because of what some regard as excessive sentimentality,
but chiefly in the opinion of most Arab critics because of his rather weak
Arabic style. Nevertheless, because of his great influence on Mahjar poetry,
it is necessary to pause for a while and examine his poetry. His fame as a poet
rests chiefly on his long poem The Processions,^10 which was first published in
New York in 1918. It consists of over 200 lines arranged in a rather irregular
stanzaic form, the regular stanza consisting of a quatrain of one metre (al-Basit)
followed by another quatrain and a couplet of another metre (Majzu'
al-Ramal). The first quatrains in all the stanzas have the same rhyme through-
out, while the rhyme in the second quatrain as well as in the couplet varies
from one stanza to another. The rhyme scheme therefore is: aaaa bbbb ccl
aaaa dddd ee. But the poet does not follow this scheme rigidly throughout,
and the conclusion of the work is not a stanza at all, but simply three rhyming
lines, although here it is clear that the author designed it to be different
in order to set it off from the rest of the poem. Thematically there is such a
pronounced parallelism in all the stanzas that after a while the reader cannot
help feeling a certain monotony.
Although structurally the poem is interesting, in that it rejects the mono-
rhyme qasida form, a feature which is to be found in the work of most of
the Mahjar poets, it is mainly in its ideas and themes that The Processions
occupies such a crucial position in the poetry of Mahjar. In it, in fact, we find
most of the themes with which the Mahjar poets dealt, some of them more
successfully than Jibran. The Processions is a philosophical poem treating
metaphysical and moral questions, like the problem of good and evil, the
relation between the soul and the body, the problem of happiness, of social
and political institutions, of what man has made of man. In introducing
philosophical meditations on ultimate human questions in his poetry,
Jibran was doing in North America what in Egypt, at about the same time,
' Aqqad, Mazini and Shukri were insisting that a poet should do, namely think
deeply and develop a philosophy of life, instead of writing a primarily social
type of poetry designed to flatter a patron and please a literary coterie. This
tendency, which aimed at enriching the content of the Arabic poem by
metaphysical or philosophical speculation, is common to the major figures
in the Mahjar literary world. And one manifestation of it is the great interest
which they showed in those Abbasid poets who were noted for their pre-
dilection for philosophic meditations, more specifically al-Ma'arri, whose
poetry was translated into English by the well-known Mahjar writer: Amin
Rihani (1876-1940) in 1903. TJmar al-Khayyam's poems became popular
reading, and no less popular was Avicenna's Ode on the Soul. A very good
example of this philosophizing tendency is Iliya Abu Madi's long poem