this poem . has made me better [10]
reinforces this view. Naimy recalls Gibran’s reference to himself as ‘a false alarm,’ [11] claiming that he could not have considered himself as a prophet, and Gibran’s words to Mary Haskell draw a clear distinction:
The difference between a prophet and a poet is that the prophet lives what he teaches – and the poet does not. He may write wonderfully of love, and yet not be loving. [12]
The prophetic figures in Gibran’s works (Almustafa, Jesus Son of Man, the Madman, etc.) are all isolated, loved, yet set apart from their fellows. This is a traditional perception of such figures, just as it is of an artist. Gibran told May Ziadah,
I am also a stranger among men, entirely on my own, just like those other men who are entirely on their own despite possessing seventy thousand friends of both sexes. [13]
The striking likeness between the form of The Prophet and that of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra has been much noted, and Gibran himself admitted his debt. Yet if Gibran’s mouthpiece is shrouded in symbol like Nietzsche’s, and his discourse on human existence takes the same shape (the presentation of the seer, the imminent departure, the sermons and the final farewell), there the resemblance ends. Almustafa’s passionate belief in the healing power of universal love and unity and the certainty of spiritual growth poses a transcendentalism which descends from both the Medieval Christian mystics and the Oriental Sufis, and is a far cry from the self-centered philosophy of independence advocated by Zarathustra. Zarathustra’s ideal differs radically from that of Gibran, who presents Almustafa as solitary but loving, insistent upon the bonds between all men, the links between all forms of life, and the absolute necessity of continuity.
Gibran has affinities with many Romantic poets and symbolist painters, but perhaps the greatest influence on both his painting and his writing was William Blake. To Gibran he was a hero:
Blake is the God-man. His drawings are so far the profoundest things done in English – and his vision, putting aside his drawings and his poems, is the most godly. [14]
Blake’s voice can be detected throughout The Prophet. Suheil Bushrui notes that Almustafa’s sermon on joy and sorrow conveys the same ideas as Blake’s poem The Mental Traveller, and shades of The Tyger are evident in his personification of nature and symbolic presentation of the forest as a refuge for the enlightened when he talks of clothes:
Some of you say, ‘It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.’
And I say, Ay, it was the north wind,
But shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.
When Almustafa says
oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store up the desire in the recesses of your being,
he is virtually quoting Blake’s celebrated aphorism,
He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. [15]
The principle of universal love pervades The Prophet. Love is the first facet of existence that Almustafa is asked to speak about, and referring to this part of the book, Mary Haskell said that there was ‘none more beautiful’. [16] Gibran’s preoccupation with sorrow and pain as inseparable from the joy of love is central to The Prophet. Almustafa tells the people:
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
The imagery here immediately recalls Christ, and the incantatory rhythm of his speech suggests the Psalms or the Song of Solomon. Repetition throughout the book of biblical forms such as the frequent opening of sentences with ‘And’, or the use of expressions such as ‘and verily’ or ‘I say unto you’ evoke the Gospels and Christian teaching. More overtones of the Psalms and a pantheism that smacks of Blake, the Romantics and Sufis resound in Almustafa’s affirmation of an all-abiding divine presence:
And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.
Though Almustafa is evidently a Christ-figure, his words also echo those of the prophet Mohammed, and his philosophy is truly eclectic. When he speaks of good and evil he seems to refute traditional notions of righteousness, suggesting that both are a part of all of us, and refusing to admit to absolute right or wrong.
What is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Almustafa sees the guilty as members of the whole:
the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in the twilight between the night of his pigmy-self and the day of his god-self.
He uses a lucid image to assure all men that spiritual advancement can be theirs:
You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.
Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.
Even those who limp go not backward.
This organic vision characterises the work where ‘your joy is your sorrow unmasked’, and ‘life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one’. Gibran’s statements are a re-interpretation rather than a denial. They serve to underline the limitations of conventional Christian views, and look forward to his next major work in English, Jesus Son of Man, which continues to challenge orthodox doctrine.
Compassion is the presiding emotion in The Prophet, which surely owes its wide appeal to the author’s pacific humanitarianism. This presents some contrast to the overt didacticism and critical tone of Gibran’s earlier Arabic works, and even to the irony of The Madman. Gibran’s writings ( The Forerunner and various Arabic works) during the period when he was revising The Prophet all contain some trenchant criticisms, but tend to be more gentle, conveying a positive affirmation of the reality of inner illumination, and of its accessibility to all men. In The Prophet, Almustafa’s only complaint as he talks of prayer is tinged with regret so that any implicit rebuke is softened:
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.
As Almustafa finally takes his leave of the people, his last words assert Gibran’s firm belief in reincarnation:
A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.
This seems to imply a deeper symbolic level in the poem, where ‘the isle of his birth’ to which Almustafa is returning is a pre-natal condition, Orphalese is the earth itself, and Almustafa’s residence there represents the necessary separation of the individual spirit from God.