The Semiotics of Bird Imagery in Abbas M. Aqqad’s Poems

Abstract

Symbols and traits help readers understand the intentions of writers, poets, and artists. These devices are often literary or figurative symbols, objects, metaphors, or similes that are used by creators of literary works. Symbolism itself is a form of expression that is intended to create imagery where words act as pictures. As writers and poets are affected by surrounding conditions, circumstances, and events, so they reflect on such circumstances in great literary images. Aqqad, a contemporary Egyptian poet, writer, journalist, and thinker, has been labeled as the pioneer of modern Arab romanticism. Aqqad’s works are full of literary images, symbols, and metaphors which all suggest sadness, happiness, joy, bereavement, nature, and all-human catastrophes. Of the symbols detected in most of Aqqad’s works are birds. Aqqad has been able to use birds to picture many things and objects. In these images, birds are not only non-human flying creatures, but they are personifications of many human feelings and emotions. The paper finds that Aqqad has used pigeons, parrots, crows, nightingales, curlews, and eagles to personify joy, sadness, pessimism, optimism, injustice, power, love, migration, salvage, as well as the poet persona. This paper, thus, attempts an in-depth critique of these symbols drawing on Jakobson’s and Jung’s models of semiotic analysis.