THE EMIGRANT POETS 184'Riddles',^11 which although by no means one of the greatest achievements
of this poet, is certainly one of his most celebrated poems.
But what is the philosophy of Jibran's poem The Processions? In a woid
it is the need to return to nature, or, as he puts it, al-ghab (woods). The poem
is called 'the processions' because it presents in stanza after stanza mankind
engaged in different types of human endeavour in the pursuit of happiness,
but straying far from the right path, which, in the poet's view, is the path to
nature (or the woods). It is ultimately a romantic, primitivistic philosophy,
with an admixture of Blake's mystical respect for life and Nietzsche's glori-
fication of it. The poem opens with a description of corrupt human society,
in which injustice reigns and people are divided into master and slave, leader
and led, and this is followed by an account of nature where all creatures
are equal and the division into master and slave totally absent. The same
juxtaposition between the tragic shortcomings of human society and the
perfect state of nature is found in every stanza. Needless to say, nature here
is not red in tooth and claw, but is highly idealized; in it there is no clash
or opposition between good and evil, love and hatred, soul and body, light
and dark, joy and sorrow, religion and heresy; there is not even the opposition
between death and immortality. There is only life and the celebration of
life in song. Here obviously one sees the quintessence of a romantic attitude
to existence, the yearning for unity where all antinomies are lost, and all
conflicts resolved, the rejection of the complexities of civilized life in favour
of a primitive simplicity, the harking back to a pristine and prelapsarian
state of innocence, to a mythical golden age, the revolt against all human
institutions, motivated largely by a hypersensitivity to human suffering.
No doubt, to some extent, the poet's rejection of the complications and
artificialities of civilized life and his longing for the woods or nature, is a
reflection of the immigrant Arab, bewildered by the mechanized life in New
York, secretly yearning to be back in the much simpler Me of the Lebanon,
the rhythm of which was still close to nature. But only to some extent. For
while not ceasing to stand for the rural life of the Lebanon as well, the woods
are a much larger symbol of nature, in which a more embracing romantic
attitude is crystallized, although it is fair to point out that in the surprising
conclusion to the poem the author is sadly aware of the impossibility of a
complete return to the woods. Jibran's poem would have been more effective
had he used a less discursive and more concrete style, had he resorted to
fewer bare statements and more oblique comments and more imagery.
Moreover, in the discursive parts the poet's mastery of the Arabic language
is not great enough to enable him to write the sort of crisp and pithy style