Analysis of On Prayer

Kahlil Gibran 1883 (Bsharri, Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate) – 1931 ( New York City)



Then the priestess said, Speak to us of Prayer.
     And he answered, saying:
     You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?
     And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.
     And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.
     When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.
     Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion.
     For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking you shall not receive:
     And if you should enter into it to humble yourself you shall not be lifted:
     Or even if you should enter into it to beg for the good of others you shall not be heard.
     It is enough that you enter the temple invisible.

I cannot teach you how to pray in words.
     God listens not to your words save when He Himself utters them through your lips.
     And I cannot teach you the prayer of the seas and the forests and the mountains.
     But you who are born of the mountains and the forests and the seas can find their prayer in your heart,
     And if you but listen in the stillness of the night your shall hear them saying in silence,
     “Our God, who are our winged self, it is thy will in us that willeth.
     It is thy desire in us that desireth.
     It is thy urge in us that would turn our nights, which are thine, into days which are thine also.
     We cannot ask thee for aught, for thou knowest our needs before they are born in us:
     Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all.”


Scheme XAB XCAXXXXXX XXXCBDDXXX
Poetic Form
Metre 1010111111 011010 11010100111111110001011100111010 1111100101010101010 011111101111001111101101111010111 01110111111011111110101011100111110 111111100111110111010011011111 1111011100100111110001010 11111001011101011011101 01111001111001111110 110111100111110111011111 110111100100100 1101111101 110111111101101111 0110110110100100010 11111101000100011111011 0111100010101111110010 10111101111110111 1110100111 11110111110111101111110 11011111111010111101 11101001011111111
Characters 1,951
Words 367
Sentences 17
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 3, 9, 10
Lines Amount 22
Letters per line (avg) 66
Words per line (avg) 17
Letters per stanza (avg) 485
Words per stanza (avg) 122
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Submitted by halel on July 13, 2020

Modified on March 22, 2023

1:50 min read
110

Kahlil Gibran

Gibran Khalil Gibran (Arabic: جبران خليل جبران‎, ALA-LC: Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān, pronounced [ʒʊˈbraːn xaˈliːl ʒʊˈbraːn], or Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān, pronounced [ʒɪˈbraːn xaˈliːl ʒɪˈbraːn]; January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran (pronounced kah-LEEL ji-BRAHN), was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages. Born in a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite family, the young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895. As his mother worked as a seamstress, he was enrolled at a school in Boston, where his creative abilities were quickly noticed by a teacher who presented him to photographer and publisher F. Holland Day. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fifteen to enroll at the Collège de la Sagesse in Beirut. Returning to Boston upon his youngest sister's death in 1902, he lost his older half-brother and his mother the following year, seemingly relying afterwards on his remaining sister's income from her work at a dressmaker's shop for some time. In 1904, Gibran's drawings were displayed for the first time at Day's studio in Boston, and his first book in Arabic was published in 1905 in New York City. With the financial help of a newly met benefactress, Mary Haskell, Gibran studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910. While there, he came in contact with Syrian political thinkers promoting rebellion in the Ottoman Empire after the Young Turk Revolution; some of Gibran's writings, voicing the same ideas as well as anti-clericalism, would eventually be banned by the Ottoman authorities. In 1911, Gibran settled in New York, where his first book in English, The Madman, would be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1918, with writing of The Prophet or The Earth Gods also underway. His visual artwork was shown at Montross Gallery in 1914, and at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co. in 1917. He had also been corresponding remarkably with May Ziadeh since 1912. In 1920, Gibran re-founded the Pen League with fellow Mahjari poets. By the time of his death at the age of 48 from cirrhosis and incipient tuberculosis in one lung, he had achieved literary fame on "both sides of the Atlantic Ocean," and The Prophet had already been translated into German and French. His body was transferred to his birth village of Bsharri (in present-day Lebanon), to which he had bequeathed all future royalties on his books, and where a museum dedicated to his works now stands. As worded by Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins, Gibran's life has been described as one "often caught between Nietzschean rebellion, Blakean pantheism and Sufi mysticism." Gibran discussed different themes in his writings, and explored diverse literary forms. Salma Khadra Jayyusi has called him "the single most important influence on Arabic poetry and literature during the first half of [the twentieth] century," and he is still celebrated as a literary hero in Lebanon. At the same time, "most of Gibran's paintings expressed his personal vision, incorporating spiritual and mythological symbolism," with art critic Alice Raphael recognizing in the painter a classicist, whose work owed "more to the findings of Da Vinci than it [did] to any modern insurgent." His "prodigious body of work" has been described as "an artistic legacy to people of all nations."  more…

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