God by Kahlil Gibran – Analysis and Commentary

   

GOD BY KAHLIL GIBRAN – ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY  

“God” by Kahlil Gibran caught my attention because it invokes a literary motif of abiding interest—the mountain. 

GOD by Kahlil Gibran

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 [art] 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.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58692/god-56d23d4c8970

—Kahlil Gibran, “God,” Poetry Magazine

Not surprisingly, in the poem the motif of the mountain is joined with the subject of the quest for God. 

God dwells in the heavens, above and beyond humanity, and the mountain is the symbol of the pathway of the ascent toward God. Again and again, this particular meaning of the motif is recapitulated by world culture and by various religious traditions.

The poem illustrates well the defining features of Gibran’s poetry set forth by Poetry magazine:

“His Arabic works are read, admired, and taught, and they are published and sold among the classics of Arabic literature. In English, on the other hand, a chasm remains between his popularity and the lack of critical respect for his work. Although in the 1910s his writings were published by Knopf alongside those of such authors as Eliot and Frost, he quickly ceased to be considered an important writer by critics. He has generally been dismissed as sentimental and mawkishly mystical. Nevertheless, his works are widely read and are regarded as serious literature by people who do not often read such literature. The unconventional beauty of his language and the moral earnestness of his ideas allow him to speak to a broad audience as only a handful of other twentieth-century American poets have. Virtually all of his English works have been in print since they were first published. His literary and artistic models were the Romantics of the late nineteenth century to whom he was introduced as a teenager by his avant-garde friends in Boston, and Gibran’s continuing popularity as a writer testifies to the lasting power of the Romantic tradition.” [boldface mine]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kahlil-gibran

—“Kahlil Gibran: 1883-1931,” Poetry Magazine

Interestingly, Khalil Gibran has not been favored by the literary critics (same source as above):

“His English books—most notably, The Prophet (1923), with its earnest didactic romanticism—found no favor with critics whose models were the cool intellectualism of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot or the gritty realism of Ernest Hemingway. As a result, Gibran has been dismissed as a popular sentimentalist by American critics and historians of art and of literature.”

Yet he is the third most popular poet of all time:

“Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time following Shakespeare and Laozi. The Prophet (1923) has been translated into 110 languages. Such was the acclaim that Gibran was catapulted on to the global stage. His passing at age 48 April 10, 1931 in New York was front-page news around the globe.”

https://thevoice.us/late-khalil-gibran-third-best-selling-poet-of-all-time/?fbclid=IwAR3eGFILlELciXymSQRAcVkYeMDoqz9DsZscw1DoylWYpAMjjSVZzVvqWys

—Jo Fredell Higgins, “Late Khalil Gibran Third Best-Selling Poet of All Time,” The Voice (October 22, 2019)

Social media has quipped that despite the fact that critics will most assuredly criticize, Gibran won the popular vote.   

Evidently, Gibran’s idiom speaks eloquently and movingly to the hearts of a very large and enduring audience of appreciative readers. That professional literary critics do not hold him in the same sympathetic regard suggests their disdainful intellectualism and agnostic cynicism according to a very long tradition of Western skepticism. We might conclude that the majority of the public who read and appreciate Gibran’s poetry are touched by his romantic sensibility and at the very least curious about his mystical impulse if not actually drawn by it. 

Kahlil Gibran