Gibran on Beauty, Art, Music and Poetry

As Gibran himself is an artist, poet and writer who writes beautifully on whatever it is that touches his mind and his heart, I think it might be interesting to hear what he has to say on those subjects. So I combed my Saturday addition to my Gibran collection, "The Eye of the Prophet". I was not disappointed. I shall set out below his thoughts on the various subjects in the following order: Beauty, Art, Music and Poetry.

                                            Beauty

Beauty is not in the face. Beauty is a light in the heart.

Have we then never heard it said, or seen it ourselves, that superficial beauty is sometimes responsible for many unknown but terrible calamities, and for so many profound and painful afflicitons? Is that moon which inspires poets not the same that breaks up the calm of the waters with ebb and flow?

The most subtle beauties of our life are invisible and inaudible.

Believe in the divinity of Beauty which inspires your cult of Life and your aspiration to Happiness.

                                          Art

Art is a step taken from the visible known to the secret unknown, from nature towards the infinite.

                                         Music

Music is the quivering of a string, charged with waves from the upper air, it penetrates your hearing, its echos emerges from your eyes in a burning tear, and from your lips as they sigh for a beloved one being far away, or it utters a moan caused by the sting of history and the fangs of destiny.

And it can happen that the notes of music are reflected on your lips as a smile of fulfilment.

Music is a houri in the paradise of the gods, who was in love with the sons of Adam, Then she came down to earth and told them of her love. The gods, in a fury, ordered a terrible wind to rush after her in pursuit.

In this way, she was scattered through the air and disseminated to all the corners of the earth. She did not die, she still lives in the ears of humans.

Music is the echo of the first kiss bestowed by Adam on the lips of Eve. And ever since then this echo has caused pleausre to rebound onto fingers as they play and ears as they listen.

Through the eyes of hearing I was able to see the heart of love.

Music is the language of the spirit. Its melody is like a playful breeze which makes the strings vibrate with love.

When the fairy fingers of music touch the doorway of feelings they awake memories enclosed in the depths of the past.

O divine music!

We lay our hearts and our souls closely within you.

You teach us to see with our ears, and to listen with our hearts.

                                            Poetry

Poetry ist he sacred incarnation of a smile and a sigh which dries tears. It is a spirit which settled in the soul whose heart is nourishment and whose wine is affection, Poetry which does not appear in this form is a false Messiah.

Poet, examine your crown of thorns and you will see that within it is concealed a living crown of laurel.

O true poets, forgive us. We belong to the new world where men pursue material possessions. Poetry, today, is a consumer product and not a breath of immortality.

If the spirits of Homer, Virgil, A-Maary and Milton had known that poetry would become the lap-dog of the rich, they would have left the world, their tongues and and their ears would have been cut off, their pens and their writings burned

From the above, it is obvious that to Gibran, beauty is something more than skin deep. The kind of beauty that concerns him resides in the human heart and may be invisible and inaudible and there is beauty not only about man's joys but also his sorrows, his "smiles and sighs" as well as his hopes for Life and Happiness.

Art is the way the artist brings something from the visible world of our senses (vision, hearing etc) to fashion something of far greater value, something invisible, man's yearning for eternity and transcendence.

For Gibran, music too teaches us how to see with our ears and speaks to us of Love in the language of the vibration of the heart and is thus a language of our spirit and our soul and help us recall the happy and sad moments of our lives.

Poetry, too, is for Gibran also the vessel of human emotions a medium in which the poet distills from his suffering something of beauty for the enjoyment of his readers but nowadays, it has become a toy, a plaything, in his words, a "lap-dog" of the rich and a consumer product!