Booth 1

Sable Booth

PreMed Core

September 17, 2020

Timeless and Painful

Life is full of complicated topics that everyone has questions about. Kahlil Gibran’s most

famous piece of writing, The Prophet, focuses on four big questions of life; love, family, work,

and death. He writes from his experiences from the crazy life he lived. In the poems: “On Love”

and “On Time” Gibran uses personification, imagery, and analogies to inform his audience about

the importance of time and the pain of love. Although love and time can be very different,

Gibran connects the two with the idea that they are both measureless.

Gibran uses personification and analogies in his poem “On Love” as a way to express the

pain that love can put someone through. Gibran used personification when he described the

emotion of love as a person, early on in the poem it says, “when love beckons to you, follow

him,” (Gibran 15). He did this as a way to show what love does to a person, which is where he

also added analogies into the text. He uses the analogy, “like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto

himself. He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds

you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant,” (Gibran 16). This analogy of corn and

people in love shows that love tears people apart and grinds them down to find out things about

themselves that were never known before and turns people into new versions of themselves.

Gibran also connects “On Love” to “On Time” by explaining how love and time are both

measureless and timeless.

 Booth 2

In the poem “On Time”, Gibran uses imagery to show how time is measureless and

timeless. Gibran uses imagery to create descriptive pictures for the audience about time. The

poem explains how the timeless in people is aware of life’s timelessness and this idea “ is still

dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space,” (Gibran

70). This use of imagery created a picture for the audience about the moment that time started

and hasn’t stopped since. The idea of time can be hard to comprehend so Gibran’s descriptive

language helps the audience use the images when imaging time.

Gibran's writing style is very descriptive and symbolic, he uses imagery, personification,

and analogies to create deeper meanings behind the text. In his poem “On Love” he uses these

techniques to show how much pain love can bring someone and what it does to them. He also

used these techniques in the poem “On Time” to express the importance of time and how it is

limitless but each person’s life comes to an end at some point so time shouldn’t be taken for

granted. The Prophet is full of poems that have advice and deep meanings of the big questions of

life, which includes love and time.