The
Prophet and The Flame: A Comparative Study
Dr. Sudhir Arora
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
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 fulfil
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 upperhand 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 Prophet100-101). 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 key to a successful life that ultimately makes man spiritual. By
recommending peace in life, he 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. “
*Gibran, Khalil.
The Prophet,
*Gibran, Khalil.
Khalil Gibran Reader,
*Gill, Stephen. The Flame,
******************
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Sudhir
K. Arora teaches English at Maharaja Harishchandra P. G. College, Moradabad
affliated to M. J. P. Rohilkhand
University,