On Talking by Kahlil Gibran – Analysis and Commentary

 

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.

 

African Grey Parrot