Kahlil Gibran
(1883-1931)
Contents
The Life and Poetry of Kahlil Gibran
BRIEF INTRODUCTION: KAHLIL GIBRAN
THE MADMAN (1918)
THE FORERUNNER (1920)
THE PROPHET (1923)
SAND AND FOAM (1926)
JESUS, THE SON OF MAN (1928)
THE EARTH GODS (1931)
THE WANDERER (1932)
THE GARDEN OF THE PROPHET (1933)
The Poems and Stories
LIST OF WORKS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF WORKS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
The Play
LAZARUS AND HIS BELOVED
The Paintings
LIST OF PAINTINGS
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
© Delphi Classics 2017
Version 1
Kahlil Gibran
By Delphi Classics, 2017
COPYRIGHT
Kahlil Gibran - Delphi Poets Series
First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.
© Delphi Classics, 2017.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.
ISBN: 978 1 78656 214 2
Delphi Classics
is an imprint of
Delphi Publishing Ltd
Hastings, East Sussex
United Kingdom
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NOTE
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The Life and Poetry of Kahlil Gibran
Gibran was born in the town of Bsharri in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, one of the Ottoman Empire's subdivisions, north of modern-day Lebanon.
View of Bsharri during winter
Gibran as a child, c. 1900
BRIEF INTRODUCTION: KAHLIL GIBRAN
Kahlil Gibran, the renowned Lebanese-American poet, was born into a Maronite Catholic family from the historical town of Bsharri in northern Mount Lebanon, then a semi-autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire. His mother, Kamila, daughter of a priest, was thirty when he was born; his father, Khalil, was her third husband. As a result of his family’s poverty, Gibran received no formal schooling during his youth; however, priests regularly visited him and taught him about the Bible and the Arabic language. His father initially worked as an apothecary, but with gambling debts he was unable to pay, he went to work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator. In 1891 Gibran’s father was imprisoned for embezzlement and his family’s property was confiscated by the authorities. With mounting debts and difficulties surrounding her, Kamila decided to follow her brother to America. Although the father was released in 1894, Kamila held fast and left for New York on 25 June 1895, taking Khalil, his younger sisters Mariana and Sultana, and his elder half-brother Peter.
The family settled in Boston’s South End, at the time the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese-American community in the United States. Due to a mistake at school, he was registered as “Kahlil Gibran”. His mother found work as a seamstress peddler, selling lace and linens that she carried from door to door. Gibran started school in September 1895 and was placed in a special class for immigrants to learn English. He also enrolled in an art school at Denison House, a nearby settlement house, where his teachers introduced him to the avant-garde Boston artist, photographer and publisher Fred Holland Day, who encouraged and supported Gibran in his artistic endeavours.
Gibran’s mother, along with his elder brother Peter, wanted him to absorb more of his own heritage rather than the Western aesthetic culture he was attracted to. Therefore, aged fifteen, Gibran returned to his homeland to study at a Maronite-run preparatory school and higher-education institute in Beirut, called “al-Hikma” (The Wisdom). There he established a student literary magazine with a classmate and was elected college poet. He remained there for several years before returning to Boston in 1902. Tragically, two weeks before he returned to Boston, his sister Sultana died of tuberculosis at the age of fourteen; the following year, Peter died of the same disease and his mother died of cancer. During this very difficult time, his sister Mariana supported Gibran and herself by working at a dressmaker’s shop.
Gibran was an accomplished artist, especially in drawing and watercolour, having attended the Académie Julian art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910. Adopting a symbolist and romantic style, he held his first art exhibition in 1904 at Day’s studio in Boston. During the exhibition, he met Mary Elizabeth Haskell, a respected headmistress ten years his senior. The two formed an important friendship that lasted the rest of the poet’s life. The nature of their relationship remains unclear; though some biographers believe they were lovers, yet never married as Haskell’s family objected; others believe their relationship was only platonic. Haskell later married Jacob Florance Minis, yet she continued to support Gibran financially and helped advance his career. She became his editor and introduced him to Charlotte Teller, a journalist, and Emilie Michel (Micheline), a French teacher, who accepted to pose for him as a model and became close friends.
Though most of Gibran’s early poetry was composed in Arabic, his work published after 1918 was chiefly written in English. His first book for the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, in 1918, was The Madman, a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical cadence, somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran also took part in the New York Pen League, also known as the “immigrant poets”, alongside important Lebanese-American authors such as Ameen Rihani, Elia Abu Madi and Mikhail Naimy, a close friend and distinguished master of Arabic literature.
Gibran’s most celebrated work is a book composed of twenty-six poetic essays, entitled The Prophet. It concerns the prophet, Almustafa, who has lived in the foreign city of Orphalese for twelve years and is about to board a ship that will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses topics such as life and the human condition. The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, religion and death.
From an ambitious first printing of 2,000 copies in 1923, Knopf sold 1,159 books. The demand for The Prophet doubled the following year — and doubled again the year after that. Since then, annual sales have risen steadily: from 12,000 in 1935 to 111,000 in 1961 to 240,000 in 1965. The book sold its one millionth copy in 1957. Its popularity grew markedly during the 1960’s with the American counterculture and subsequently with the flowering of New Age movements. It has remained popular with this readership and with the wider population to this day. Since its first publication in 1923, The Prophet has never been out of print. Having been translated into more than forty languages, it is one of the bestselling books of the twentieth century in the United States.
Though born a Maronite, Gibran was influenced not only by his own religion but also by Islam, and especially by the mysticism of the Sufis. His knowledge of Lebanon’s bloody history, with its destructive factional struggles, strengthened his belief in the fundamental unity of religions, which his parents exemplified by welcoming people of various religions in their home. Connections and parallels have also been made to William Blake’s poetry, as well as the theological ideas of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerso
n.
Gibran was a great admirer of Francis Marrash, a Syrian writer and poet of the Nahda movement, whose works he had studied at the al-Hikma school in Beirut. Commentators have remarked how Gibran’s own poetical works resemble Marrash’s subject matter, use of structure and style. Marrash is noted for his concept of universal love, which would have a profound influence on the writings of the later poet. Gibran’s poetry often employs formal language and spiritual terms, heightening the sense of the divine. Many of Gibran’s poems deal with Christianity, especially on the theme of spiritual love. But his mysticism is a convergence of several different influences, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism and theosophy. He famously wrote: “You are my brother and I love you. I love you when you prostrate yourself in your mosque, and kneel in your church and pray in your synagogue. You and I are sons of one faith — the Spirit.”
Gibran died of cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis in New York on 10 April 1931, aged forty-eight. He had expressed a wish to be buried in Lebanon, which was fulfilled in 1932, when Haskell and his sister Mariana purchased the Mar Sarkis Monastery, which has since become the Gibran Museum. Written next to Gibran’s grave are the words “a word I want to see written on my grave: I am alive like you, and I am standing beside you. Close your eyes and look around, you will see me in front of you.”
Gibran willed the contents of his studio to Haskell, where she discovered her letters to him spanning twenty-three years. She initially agreed to burn them due to their intimacy, but recognising their historical value she later decided to preserve them. Today they are held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library. Haskell also donated her personal collection of nearly one hundred original works of art by Gibran to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. Her gift to the Telfair is the largest public collection of Gibran’s visual art in the country, consisting of five oils and numerous works on paper rendered in the artist’s lyrical style, reflecting the influence of symbolism. The future American royalties to his books were willed to his hometown of Bsharri, to be “used for good causes”.
Kahlil Gibran, photograph by Fred Holland Day, c. 1898
Mary Elizabeth Haskell
The first edition of ‘The Prophet’
Portrait of Kahlil Gibran by Lilla Cabot Perry, 1899
Gibran in later years
THE MADMAN (1918)
CONTENTS
The Madman. His Parables and Poems
God
My Friend
The Scarecrow
The Sleep-Walkers
The Wise Dog
The Two Hermits
On Giving and Taking
The Seven Selves
War
The Fox
The Wise King
Ambition
The New Pleasure
The Other Language
The Pomegranate
The Two Cages
The Three Ants
The Grave-Digger
On the Steps of the Temple
The Blessed City
The Good God and the Evil God
Defeat
Night and the Madman
Faces
The Greater Sea
Crucified
The Astronomer
The Great Longing
Said a Blade of Grass
The Eye
The Two Learned Men
When My Sorrow Was Born
And When my Joy was Born
The Perfect World
The Madman. His Parables and Poems
You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen, — the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, — I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”
Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.
And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”
Thus I became a madman.
And I have found both freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.
God
In the ancient days, when the first quiver of speech came to my lips, I ascended the holy mountain and spoke unto God, saying, “Master, I am thy slave. Thy hidden will is my law and I shall obey thee for ever more.”
But God made no answer, and like a mighty tempest passed away.
And after a thousand years I ascended the holy mountain and again spoke unto God, saying, “Creator, I am thy creation. Out of clay hast thou fashioned me and to thee I owe mine all.”
And God made no answer, but like a thousand swift wings passed away.
And after a thousand years I climbed the holy mountain and spoke unto God again, saying, “Father, I am thy son. In pity and love thou hast given me birth, and through love and worship I shall inherit thy kingdom.”
And God made no answer, and like the mist that veils the distant hills he passed away.
And after a thousand years I climbed the sacred mountain and again spoke unto God, saying, “My God, my aim and my fulfillment; I am thy yesterday and thou are my tomorrow. I am thy root in the earth and thou art my flower in the sky, and together we grow before the face of the sun.”
Then God leaned over me, and in my ears whispered words of sweetness, and even as the sea that enfoldeth a brook that runneth down to her, he enfolded me.
And when I descended to the valleys and the plains God was there also.
My Friend
My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence.
The “I” in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.
I would not have thee believe in what I say nor trust in what I do — for my words are naught but thy own thoughts in sound and my deeds thy own hopes in action.
When thou sayest, “The wind bloweth eastward,” I say, “Aye it doth blow eastward”; for I would not have thee know that my mind doth not dwell upon the wind but upon the sea.
Thou canst not understand my seafaring thoughts, nor would I have thee understand. I would be at sea alone.
When it is day with thee, my friend, it is night with me; yet even then I speak of the noontide that dances upon the hills and of the purple shadow that steals its way across the valley; for thou canst not hear the songs of my darkness nor see my wings beating against the stars — and I fain would not have thee hear or see. I would be with night alone.
When thou ascendest to thy Heaven I descend to my Hell — even then thou callest to me across the unbridgeable gulf, “My companion, my comrade,” and I call back to thee, “My comrade, my companion” — for I would not have thee see my Hell. The flame would burn thy eyesight and the smoke would crowd thy nostrils. And I love my Hell too well to have thee visit it. I would be in Hell alone.
Thou lovest Truth and Beauty and Righteousness; and I for thy sake say it is well and seemly to love these things. But in my heart I laught at thy love. Yet I would not have thee see my laughter. I would laugh alone.
My friend, thou art good and cautious and wise; nay, thou art perfect — and I, too, speak with thee wisely and cautiously. And yet I am mad. But I mask my madness. I would be mad alone.
My friend, thou art not my friend, but how shall I make thee understand? My path is not thy path, yet together we walk, hand in hand.
The Scarecrow
Once
I said to a scarecrow, “You must be tired of standing in this lonely field.”
And he said, “The joy of scaring is a deep and lasting one, and I never tire of it.”
Said I, after a minute of thought, “It is true; for I too have known that joy.”
Said he, “Only those who are stuffed with straw can know it.”
Then I left him, not knowing whether he had complimented or belittled me.
A year passed, during which the scarecrow turned philosopher.
And when I passed by him again I saw two crows building a nest under his hat.
The Sleep-Walkers
In the town where I was born lived a woman and her daughter, who walked in their sleep.
One night, while silence enfolded the world, the woman and her daughter, walking, yet asleep, met in their mist-veiled garden.
And the mother spoke, and she said: “At last, at last, my enemy! You by whom my youth was destroyed — who have built up your life upon the ruins of mine! Would I could kill you!”
And the daughter spoke, and she said: “O hateful woman, selfish and old! Who stand between my freer self and me! Who would have my life an echo of your own faded life! Would you were dead!”
At that moment a cock crew, and both women awoke. The mother said gently, “Is that you, darling?” And the daughter answered gently, “Yes, dear.”
The Wise Dog
One day there passed by a company of cats a wise dog.
And as he came near and saw that they were very intent and heeded him not, he stopped.
Then there arose in the midst of the company a large, grave cat and looked upon them and said, “Brethren, pray ye; and when ye have prayed again and yet again, nothing doubting, verily then it shall rain mice.”
Collected Poetical Works of Kahlil Gibran Page 1
