Elegy in Al-Jawahiri’s Poems: A Study of Modern Literature

Abstract

Arab poets have been very familiar with elegies ever since pre-Islamic times and up to modern-day poetry, where elegy was one of the basic purposes of poetry across Arabic lines and poems. Elegiac poems have been easy to compose as they feature an in-depth, emotional description of social relations. Additionally, elegiac poems touch on the very soul of human sufferings, and therefore, they spring from honest feelings and senses. Drawing on this, this paper examines elegies as a theme in poems by Al-Jawahiri, a contemporary Iraqi revolutionary poet. In these poems, Al-Jawahiri did express a profound sorrow and sadness that is suggestive of death, missing, separation, and alienation. The poet not only proved to be an elegist, but he also worked well the articulation of sad intentions and ideas out of his background political and social concerns. Al-Jawahiri re-introduced elegy in modern Arabic poetry as seen in his sadness over the death of some political thinkers, and thus, revolutionizing political themes in a neo-Classical elegiac poetry.