Styles, figurative imagery and music

09Styles, figurative imagery and music

Styles

• Interrogation abounds and closes the first three passages. Its chief instrument is aina ("where") asking about place; hal ("do you know") comes once; and one question has no instrument at all: "all of this in the dust?"
• Its purpose is wonder, denial and the showing of the shock of loss — not asking for an answer.
• Command: "ask the elite" comes joined to interrogation, and its purpose is direction and the confirming of the bereavement.
• Vocative: "O companions" shares the grief with his friends; and "her two planets" is an elegiac call with the particle of vocative dropped.
• The words of pain and wonder, "ahi" and "waih", express suffering and defiance.

Figurative imagery

• "Her throne is the pulpit": a concise simile making the pulpit her throne, marking her rank and her command of speech.
• "Her two planets": a metaphor — she is likened to a planet in height and fame; the thing likened to is dropped and its attribute kept.
• "A shining face", "sweet speech", "a moving melody": sensory images embodying her virtues.
• "All of this in the dust": an image that personifies the dust and sets the greatness of her qualities against the narrowness of the grave.
• "Approved and painless" and "sacred beauty": images carrying her station without strain.
• The images come in their right places, unforced, reflecting the poet's regret and pain.

Music

• Al-Aqqad varied the rhyme — one of the marks of development in music — and his rhyme suits the psychological state.
• The opening verses end on a near-identical rhyme series (companions · decisive word · dignity · answered) producing a continuous sad cadence suited to the bereavement.