The Prophet and The Flame: A Comparative
Study
Dr. Sudhir K Arora
*Appeared in Bharat
Times (
April/May 2009
He is an
angel, sent by the goddess to
Preach the
Deity’s gospel;
he is a
brilliant lamp, unconquered by darkness
And inextinguishable
by the wind. It is filled with
Oil by
Ishtar of Love, and lighted by Apollon of Music
(Khalil Gibran Reader, 321)
What Khalil Gibran
said about the poet applies not only to himself but also to Stephen Gill. Both
the poets—Khalil Gibran and Stephen Gill are the brilliant lamps filled with
oil by Ishtar of Love and lighted by Apollon of Music. While going through
Stephen Gill’s The Flame, Gibran’s The Prophet strikes the mind of a reader or critic. It is a natural
tendency of a critic to make a comparative study of the text that he studies
with the other text that he has already studied because such a study offers him
a choice though, sometimes, confuses him as it unearths some points that make
him indecisive to the extent that he hesitates in stating any final word about
them. But, out of this comparative study, he explores the unexplored spaces
with the critical tools—comparison and analysis—which help him in evaluating
the texts. “These critical tools attract the critics who use them to justify
the points arising somewhere in the mind
that provides the unlimited space for the explorations of the critical insight.
They, sometimes, help in providing a better perspective for the text that is to
be studied and, sometimes, disappoint by offering a weak scenario on being
compared.
Hence, there may be
a chance for a prejudiced assessment as it is generally believed that a text
differs and must differ from the other text and no comparison should be
motivated as different texts come from different environment” (Contemporary Vibes 52). But, it does not
mean the technique of comparison is not worth applying. It opens the fresh
portals for the interpretations which are helpful in making an assessment of
the text.
Khalil Gibran, who came
to be noted as “the Bard of Washington Street”, wrote his masterpiece The Prophet which took him more than
eleven years to write and perfect. The Prophet is “widely acclaimed as one
of the most spiritual books ever written” (Cover). Besides its spiritual
undertones, its twelve illustrations by the author himself add the beauty of
the text. Stephen Gill, who is better known as “the Bard of Peace” for
promoting the values of tolerance, understanding and co-existence in the world
where there will be justice, love, harmony and brotherhood, has penned The Flame which is the result of the
eight years labour. The Flame is
heralded as Stephen Gill’s masterpiece on terrorism, a contemporary problem
which has taken the world in its embrace. It is a long poem about the
destruction caused by maniac messiahs. Like The
Prophet, it has devotional and spiritual touches. Gill has not inserted
illustrations like Gibran but he has created the picturesque landscapes through
his words. He invokes the Flame, depicts the havoc and destructive scenes,
calculates the loss, studies the maniac messiahs psychologically peeping into
their hearts and finally offers his stand of pursuing his odyssey. His tone is
inbuilt didactic. Gibran’s The Prophet
is didactic as Almitra asks Almustafa for some moral precepts: “Yet this
we ask ere you leave us, that
you speak to us and give us of
your truth. / And we will give it unto our children, and they unto their
children, and it shall not perish” (The
Prophet 16).
Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet is teemed with teachings
concerned with different aspects of life. Love, marriage, children, work, joy
and sorrow, laws, freedom, time, prayer, beauty, religion, etc. are such
aspects which are preached by Almustafa before the people of Orphalese. It
opens the window for peace which lies in soul and it can be traced through
spiritualism. Though Almustafa speaks to the people, he is not sure whether he
spoke or listened what was spoken.
“Was it I who
spoke? Was I not also a listener?” (The
Prophet 114) Gill’s The Flame is also replete with moral and
spiritual lessons though implicit in nature. It is clothed in the contemporary
realism. Very clearly it reflects the relations of men to men who possess the
Flame in them. Gill has employed the pronoun ‘You’ mostly for the Flame—the
eternal flame that knows “no occupation, faith nor complexion and cannot be
imprisoned within human bonds” (The Flame
28) while Gibran has used ‘You’ to address the people of Orphalese.
When a priestess
asks Almustafa to speak of Prayer, he satisfies her query saying: “You pray in
your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness
of your joy and in your days of abundance. / For what is prayer but the
expression of yourself into the living ether? (The Prophet 92) Prayer is just the expression of a man’s self into
the living ether. Gibran thinks that God does not listen to man’s words until
or unless He himself utters them through man’s lips. It is God who utters
through the lips of man. Almustafa states: “God listens not to your words save
when He Himself utters them through your lips” (The Prophet 94). It is He who knows well what a man wants. It is He
who knows man’s needs before hand. He is man’s needs and when he gives more of
Himself, He gives His all. Gibran’s God is omniscient and also caretaker
while Gill’s God is
omnipresent through the Flame. For him, the Flame is the manifestation of God.
He considers the Flame as “the driving force that lifts / spirits from the
ditches” (The Flame 36). The Flame is
the creation and its meaning can be sensed only through “the glasses of
peace”. It is not merely “a notable
flavoured path” which begins from home but also “the adoring destiny” (The Flame 36) that is being trailed by
men. He seems to have complete faith in God through the Flame and considers it
nirvana, a stage every man aspires to attain. Hence, both Gibran and Gill have
shown their unflinching faith in God who, besides being omniscient and
omnipresent, knows what is best for human beings. A question arises: Does God
wish destruction? Certainly not. God leaves man free to do work in certain
spheres. Gibran does not feel the need of going to temple. For him, daily life
is the temple as well as religion. Mark the excerpt: “Your daily life is your
temple and your religion. / Whenever you enter into it take with you your all”
(The Prophet 107).
What a man does
daily is not less than his prayer and to perform it in a proper manner is his
religion. For Gibran, God is ubiquitous as man can see Him “walking in the
cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain/ …smiling
in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees” (The Prophet 108) while, for Gill, the Flame is “the quietness over
the meadows / where / the lush vegetation sprawl / in the gulf of the spring” (The Flame
43).
The poet in Gill is
stunned not to find the Flame in his deep meditation and, hence, opens his eyes
and stops counting of beads. He feels himself a lamb that needs a good
shepherd. He is a seeker who seeks peace not in meditation but in humanity. His
soul is bruised when he sees destruction caused by the maniac messiahs. To
remove the pain and suffering of the humanity is his pious prayer. He seeks the
blessings of the Flame for this work. He
prays to the Flame to give him the
softness of her light
“to weed out the spite / the Dark / the frowning evil / the war / the
misery / the hard days / and for dialogue to guide / the good to lead” (The Flame 110). Service to humanity is
his prayer to the Flame or God.
For Gibran, man
cannot direct the course of love but it is love that directs the course of man
if it finds him worthy. It never comes out of selfish motive as “Love gives
naught but itself and takes naught but from itself” (The Prophet 21) and it neither possesses nor is possessed. For him,
God is supreme authority and to love Him is the desired goal. He makes man
proud of him in declaring that he is in the heart of God rather than God is in
his heart. It is love that has “no desire but to fulfill itself” (The Prophet 21). For Gill, love is core
subject of his poetry. It is the love for God that inspires him to embrace the
whole humanity. His love for the Flame i.e. God possesses sufiana colour. He praises the Flame for her eyes which seem to be
“a seaside retreat / where mystic flames reign / and / nature courts the
night’s favor / for a feast of peace” (The
Flame 37). He considers himself as “the restlessness of the cloud” and the
Flame as “the lightning of thunder / that kindles / the fires of trust” (The Flame 42). Unlike Gibran who
believes himself in God, Gill feels God i.e. the Flame in him. Mark the
excerpt: “you dwell in the mysteries / of my veins / to sweep away the cobwebs
/ of despair” (The Flame 42). Gibran also
believes in the flame and has regards for it. No doubt, wise men come and give
moral lesson through wisdom.
He does not believe
in wisdom rather he wishes to take wisdom out of man as he has found the thing
which is greater than wisdom. It is the flame in spirit. Mark the excerpt when
Almustafa speaks to the people of Orphalese: “Wise men have come to you to give
you of their wisdom. I came to take of your wisdom: / And behold I have found
that which is greater than wisdom. / It is a flame spirit in you ever gathering
more of itself, / While you, heedless of its expansion, bewail the withering of
your days” (The Prophet 122). For
Gill, the Flame is everything and without it,
he cannot think
of his existence. He calls the Flame a balance in
creation. It is “the binding force / for families, planets / every atom / and
every part of every individual” (The
Flame 135). To think of life without the Flame is impossible for him. It is
he who states: “Life disintegrates / where the rays of flame / do not reach” (The Flame 135). On the matter of ‘the
flame spirit as greater than wisdom’, both Gibran and Gill seem to be shaking
hands with each other.
Man is himself
responsible for good and evil. It is his conscience that makes evil suppress
when it tries to get upper hand. If evil gets upper hand crushing conscience,
man succumbs to evil. Gibran observes that nothing happens unknowingly rather
seeds are already present in man. He illustrates it through the example of leaf
and tree. He states: “And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent
knowledge of the whole tree, / so the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the
hidden will of you all” (The Prophet 60). Gill also thinks in the
line of Gibran when he realizes that men are responsible for strengthening the
destruction. He agrees to Gibran’s excerpt: “And if it is a despot you would
dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed” (The Prophet
69). Maniac messiahs are powerful because of the weaknesses of the masses. They
tempt men with “knowledge, / easy money and weight” in order to become their
messiahs while in truth they enjoy in stilling “the nightingale of freedoms /
uprooting the tree where the bird sings” (The
Flame 102). They are monsters in the guise of messiahs who are interested
only in destruction. Mark the excerpt for their intentions: “They crush buds /
with bulldozers / wearing the gown of sanctimony / to cover the nakedness / of
their disease / that eats away / the flesh of peace” (The Flame 134). These
so-called messiahs befool the masses on the name of religion, race and caste.
To make the masses
aware of these so-called messiahs through his poetry has become his goal and he
will pursue it throughout his life. As he confides in Gibran’s excerpt:
“Surely there is
no greater gift to man than that
which turn all his aims into parching lips and all life into a fountain” (The Prophet 123), he will pursue his
“odyssey through the barren regions of the moor” (The Flame 152).
Going through The Prophet makes the reader forget his
cares. He forgets himself and is lost in the moral precepts of Almustafa and
learns the secrets of a good life. He feels joy and sorrow inseparable. Joy is
the unmasked sorrows. The line “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,
the more joy you can contain” (The
Prophet 45) strengthens him enough to tolerate the sorrow. He begins to
believe with Almustafa that joy and sorrow come together and “when one sits
alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed”
(The Prophet 45). Gibran’s text is
rich in symbols. But, the symbols that he uses are not complex. Mark the
excerpt that reveals the secret of a good life through the symbols of flowers
and bees:
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn
that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its
honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the
receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.
People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the
flowers and the bees. (The Prophet, 100-101)
His diction is
simple though rich in meanings and interpretations. He is communicative but
sometimes his teachings become ambiguous as different interpretations come out
of them. For instance:
How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you
come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream. (The Prophet 9)
For when my wings were spread in the sun their shadow
upon earth was a turtle.
And I the believer was also the doubter; (The Prophet
126)
….
And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes
itself the fetters of a greater freedom. (The Prophet 69)
Stephen Gill also sometimes
echoes the tone of Gibran. For instance:
A pleasant wind
carries us away
freed from chains
hair rumpled
we are attuned to the stars.
Along the self-composed clouds
we trail. (The Flame 116)
Gibran speaks in a
compact and concise way that leads further to other ways. What makes his lines
appealing is their soothing effect. They have a rhythm that runs throughout the
text making it memorable. Who can forget such lines: “Shall the day of parting
be the day of gathering?” (Prophet
10), “You give but little when you give of your possession. / It is when you
give of yourself that truly give” (Prophet
31) and “A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman
shall bear me” (Prophet 133). Gill is
not as simple as Gibran is. He is more poetic and picturesque than Gibran.
Gibran makes the reader reflect while Gill makes the reader think. Gill has
created the illustrations through words. Mark the excerpt for the
picturesqueness of his imagery:
My feet rest in the waters
but the mouth is parched.
Near ripples I lie
both solitary sides
stare at the banks tearfully
to kiss each other’s dry lips
while the waters flow by. (The Flame 115)
The comparative
study between The Prophet and The Flame reveals similarities and
dissimilarities as the two texts are written in different environments. The
present dismal scenario has forced Gill to pen against the terrorism, the
monster that has swallowed the lives of the countless children, women and men.
He talks of the welfare of the masses. His aim is to awaken the people who are
being cheated by the maniac messiahs. He makes them think so that they may be
united to face the monster. Gibran talks of the secrets that make life
meaningful and worth living. His teachings console the people who are inspired
and enchanted by the way they are uttered. For him “to love life through labour
is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret” (The Prophet 41).
Gill is optimistic
in life and, hence, believes that one day the world will become free from the
clutches of terrorism and there will be peace and prosperity all around. This
peace will ultimately lead to spiritual peace, the ever desired goal. Mark the
excerpt for such affirmative attitude of the poet in Gill who will continue his
fight against the destructive forces: “Poetry / has not flown to distant
fields. / Snow still falls / outside the window / and the sun melts away /
coldness from homes” (The Flame 97).
Both the poets are quite relevant in their domains. If Khalil Gibran had been
alive today, he would have certainly written on terrorism. If Gill had not
experienced the pain and misery out of destructive forces, he would have
certainly written on the secrets that might open the door to a most successful
life that ultimately makes human spiritual. By recommending peace, Gill hints for
such a life. Without peace no life can be successful. It
is peace which is the fundamental requirement of life in this global
era. Both the poets are nightingales that sing the songs to soothe the
depressed and oppressed hearts so that they may get encouragement to continue
their struggle for peace through labour. The Prophet in Gill speaks about the
Flame that restrains inexorable savageries and the prophet in Gibran has traced
in man “a flame spirit” that is greater than wisdom. What Gibran writes about
the duties and the difficult tasks that a poet has to perform is quite
applicable to him and Stephen Gill.
Poet, you will one day rule the hearts, and
Therefore, your kingdom has no ending.
Poet, examine your crown of thorns; you will
Find concealed in it a budding wreath of laurel.
(Khalil Gibran Reader 322)
Works Cited:
Arora, Sudhir K.
“Krishna and Candida: A Comparative Study”, Contemporary
Vibes. Volume No.: 4. Issue No.: 13 Oct.-Dec. 2008.
Gibran, Khalil. The Prophet, New Delhi: Hind Pocket
Books Pvt. Ltd., 2002.
Gibran, Khalil. Khalil Gibran Reader, Bombay: Jaico,
1981 (second combined Jaico impression).
Gill, Stephen. The Flame, Canada: Vesta Publication, 2008.