Ninth: imagery and styles

09Ninth: imagery and styles

Rhetorical images

• "What the lip of love tells satisfies me (fatni)" — a borrowed image: love is likened to a living being with a lip that quenches the poet's thirst and his yearnings.
• "Every melody in the bird's palate I play, and it plays me" — a reciprocal image: he plays the melody and the melody plays him, expressing his merger with the homeland.
• "The clap between the river's waves I hear answering me in song" — personification of the wave as though it sang in harmony with the poet and delighted him.
• "The sound of the shepherds' footsteps… enchants me" — the sound of footsteps becomes a warble that intoxicates him.
• "O rock that the winds of time weakened" — the homeland is likened to a rock against which the winds break, and the challenges are likened to storm winds.
• The crescent and the cross: two symbols of Islam and Christianity.
• "He seeks magic (al-sihr) from its magic" — asking enchantment of the land that is itself enchantment.
• The night: a borrowed image for ordeal and challenge, described as tyrannical and insolent, and as something that is torn and burned as if it were material.
• The resolve of the nation's children is likened to a fire that lays bare the darkness of the night.
• "Its melody makes me fragrant (u'attiruni)" — an interchange of the senses: what delights hearing is expressed by what delights smell.
• The homeland as a living being that sets its own steps on the road of progress; and hopes as plants set along the road by a hand that plants them.
• The night "goes too far", "we reap it", "we scatter it" — a thing that is reaped; then the dawn of the homeland is taken back from the hand of ordeal.

Styles

• Repeated invocation: "O my homeland", "O all…", "O rock".
• Interrogation: "To whom is the crescent's mosque, and to whom the cross's temple, and to whom the beauty?" — purpose: assertion and pride, not asking.
• Repetition of "I love you, my homeland", of "kull (all)" and "bi-kull (by every)" to confirm love and make it general.
• Verbal sentences that express action: we scatter it, we reap it, we tear it, we burn it, we bring back your dawn.
• The conditional structure: "however tyrannical the night becomes… we will scatter it".