Manifestations of Nature and Politics in Mahmoud Darwish’s Metaphors

Abstract

This paper is an analytical study investigating metaphors, the most aesthetic device, in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. In this study, the researcher categorized metaphors into three main groups: metaphors of plants and  trees like wheat, metaphors of birds and animals as the hoopoe, butterfly, and dove, and metaphors of abstract and concrete elements of nature. The researcher concluded that metaphors employed in the Darwishian poetry are linguistic and cultural phenomena. Darwish focuses on the use of metaphors connected with nature with the help of which he turns the sign into the signified, the subject into the object, and nothingness into something, thus transferring the land of Palestine into a poem and making this poem one with Palestine. More importantly, metaphor is a sort of manifestation of identity, a paradoxical and illogical one since it is ‘this’ and ‘that’ at the same time. It combines two entities together that are similar and dissimilar. The poet resorts to metaphor as to the most unrestrained method of thinking in order not to prove anything through reasoning, but rather to reveal a concealed and subtle truth which paradoxically affirms that “poem and land are one.”

Keywords: metaphor, aesthetic device, metaphors of plants, metaphors of animals, metaphors of nature.

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/66-08

Publication date:March 31^st 2020