A Study of Wordsworth's Romantic Conception of Nature in Gibrabn Khalil Gibran’s poem Munajat Arwah

Abstract

Gibran  Khalil  Gibran   (1883-1931) is  a genius  Lebanese poet   , who spent most of his life in     the Unit States of  America .While living  there, he was exposed  to the ideologies of  English Romanticism , pioneered by  some memorable Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Blake , Shelley and    Keats .Together with his subsequent association with Arrabitah group of AL-Mahjer poets , he contributed to the birth of Arabic Romanticism , which came as a reaction against Arabic neo-classical poetry . Romanticism is described as the return to nature. Nature influences the mind of the poet which in its turn provides a returned response colored by the imagination .Thus, nature becomes a dominant theme in the poems of the literary legend and the founder of English Romanticism William Wordsworth. One of the essential manifestation of Wordsworth's fascination with nature is his insistence on shifting the interest from the city life to countryside, a shift that overwhelms Gibran with similar feelings of nostalgia and regret for the latter's distortion by the factory smokes . In his famous work Munajat Arwah (Communion of Spirits ) published in 1914 , Gibran depicts nature in a typically Wordsworthian mannerism . Therefore, this poem is taken to be a case study for illustrating the English Romantic poet’s impact in molding Gibran’s aesthetic vision of nature’s supremacy over the decadent and polluted existence in cities.

Keywords: English Romanticism, sublime feelings, restorative forces of nature, nature as a manifestation of God’s grandeur, nature verses city.