ON TALKING BY KAHLIL GIBRAN – ANALYSIS AND
COMMENTARY
ON TALKING by Kahlil Gibran
And then a scholar said, Speak of Talking.
And he answered, saying:
You
talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And
when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your
lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in
much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought
is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but
cannot fly.
There
are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The
silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And
there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth
which they themselves do not understand.
And
there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the
bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.
When
you meet your friend on the roadside or in the market place, let the spirit in
you move your lips and direct your tongue.
Let the
voice within your voice speak to the ear or his ear;
For his
soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered
When
the colour is forgotten and the vessel is no more.
https://poets.org/poem/talking
—Kahlil
Gibran, “On Talking,” poets.org
In this poem, Gibran speaks prophetically.
Talking, he says, may be a symptom of your own pathology.
Hankering for interminable chatter could be revealing of your inability to be
alone with yourself; to regulate the tide of your own thoughts; to confront
yourself in the mirror, honestly if not brutally; to find your own words,
resonant; to confide in a trusted friend.
It’s a piece is marked by genius turns of phrase—“thinking is
half murdered,” “his soul will keep the truth…as the taste of wine is
remembered.” It broadcasts understanding both active and activist—“you who seek
the talkative through fear of being alone.” It intimates allusion—“there are
those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they
themselves do not understand.”
Caiaphas’s words come to mind. “You know nothing, nor do you
consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the
people, so that the whole nation may not perish.” (John 11:49-50)
The poet reminds us that there are truths about which we are not
always fully conscious. Invoking Arab argot, not drily concise but rather
mysteriously suggestive, transposed into English, he wields his words as a
weapon—a scimitar, perhaps?
Faulted
by critics for sentimentality and didacticism, Gibran locates at the terminus
of Romanticism. We submit that he succeeds precisely because he is a populist,
speaking to everyman, in lyrical language touched by wisdom. He is ineluctably
provocative, lastingly sage.
