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DOI: https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2024.76.04.28
How to Cite:
Almohawes, M. (2024). Language analysis of free verse; The reasons behind free verse adoption. Amazonia Investiga, 13(76),
348-355. https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2024.76.04.28
Language analysis of free verse; The reasons behind free verse
adoption
Received: March 1, 2024 Accepted: April 21, 2024
Written by:
Monera Almohawes1
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0536-4148
Abstract
This paper presents an overview of free verse and how it emerged and evolved in Arabic literature and
examines the differences between free verse and standard poetry. It presents language analysis of using free
verse in Arabic literature and discusses the reasons behind free verse adoption. The researcher analyzed
pieces of free verse to study the reasons behind using it instead of standard poetry. The analysis includes
pieces of free verse to understand the meaning of the texts and its different layers. Not like standard poetry,
regular rhythm or meter is not required in free verse. The movement of using free verse started by
simplifying poetry rules by producing poems with a single foot or simple meter and rhyme. The analysis
shows that poets used free verse because it gives them more freedom to express their thoughts , to use their
personal style of musical rhythms, to use different rhythms and meters that go with their emotions and
themes and to best express their poetic experiences. It also shows that free verse enables poets to use
descriptive language, metaphors, historical depths elements, signs of cultural effects, new meanings without
chains and to adopt words repetition as a rhetorical device meaningfully.
Keywords: Language analysis, Free verse, Text analysis, Arabic literature, Rhetorical device.
Introduction
Sarumi (2015) stated, “Poetry is a literary art
exploited by poets to depict life experiences as
they perceive them, and to register and convey
their feelings, sensations, and sentiments. It relies
mostly on melody, emotion, imagery, and
imagination. Poetry is one of the prehistoric arts
in all nations. Among the Arabs, it particularly
enjoys a prime of place among other literary
arts.” People use poetry to express their feelings
and to present their life experiences. Poetry
elements, forms, and genres differ from language
to language and from period to period. (Kappeler,
2020) According to Sarumi (2015), stylistics and
music are the main features that distinguish
poetry from other literary genres. For example,
literature researchers consider music to be the
main feature to differentiate between poetry and
prose. In poetry, there are external and internal
melodies. The external melody, meter, and
rhyme, which are the most important features of
1
Department of English, University of Hai’l, Saudi Arabia.
traditional Arabic poetry, were first introduced
by Khalil Ahmad Al-Farahidi. He introduced 16
meters with their corresponding feet that poets
should follow in writing poems (Sarumi, 2015).
In the standard form of Arabic poetry, every line
in any poem consists of two rhymed metric
hemistiches. Poets have license to slightly
change some of the strict grammar rules or the
sound rules for consonants and vowels to follow
any of the sixteen meters. This change came
about as a result of the exigencies of meter and
rhyme as poetic necessities (Wright, 1977). In
other words, language can be flexible enough to
meet any poetic necessity. Hence, as Sarumi
(2015) said, “classical Arab poets recognize
meter and rhyme as the salient ingredients of
traditional Arabic poetry.”. Huisman (2016)
point out: ‘poetry is the art shaped through
language; to talk about a poem we need to talk
about its language’. She examined how poetic
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language could be described and studied through
linguistic theories and methods. Using language
analysis during reading any poem would help us
to interpret which kind of poetry we have and to
what extent it could have an effect on people and
society. As Shpresa, (2015) stated: ‘Pragmatics
allows us to investigate how this “meaning
beyond the words’’ can be understood without
ambiguity. The extra meaning is there, not
because of the semantic aspects of the words
themselves, but because we share certain
contextual knowledge with the writer or speaker
of the text’. In any language analysis,
understanding meanings behind the words and
cultural references help researchers a lot.
Furthermore, to understand the meaning of the
text correctly and its different layers, we have to
look at intertextuality in the text as Ahmadian &
Yazdani, (2013) suggested. Intertextuality is a
framework that is used to examine the inter-
connection amongst texts, it studies the text
historical depth and cultural context. (Sami,
Nisreen & Imad, 2017). Intertextuality is used a
lot in Arabic texts and literature, so people
understand it from the context. It plays a very
important role in any text meanings and gives the
writer more space to express their ideas referring
to others. Sami et al. (2017) stated: “Investigating
intertextuality especially in Arabic poetry is
needed as it intensely invests metaphoric and
intertextual implicates so as to preserve the
original poetic aspects contributing to the
aesthetics of the original texts”. This article
presents different free verse analysis and how it
would play important role in helping writers to
express their thoughts and readers to understand
effectively. It is trying to show and study the
reasons that make writers and poets choose to
move from standard meters to free verse.
Theoretical framework or literature review
Free Verse and Arabic Literature
Free verse is a type or style of poetry with verses
without regular set meter or rhyme scheme. It is
reflection of everyday speech that could be
rhyme or unrhyme in an informal way not like
the traditional poetry. (Abbs & Richardson,
1990). According to them, this term could be
back in history to Walt Whitman’s poetry and
sometimes earlier and that it was originally
translated from a French movement in the 1880s
vers libre. Then it became popular in English
literature in the early twentieth century. The
famous English poets who used this form are
T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Ezra
Pound, and T.S. Eliot. (Abbs & Richardson,
1990). The most obvious characteristics of free
verse is to be free from traditional poetry chains.
Allen (1948) stated "The only freedom cadenced
verse obtains is a limited freedom from the tight
demands of the metered line”.
In Arabic poetry, a new revolutionary period in
the history emerged at the beginning of the
twentieth century. As a result of Western
literature’s influence, new genres emerged in
Arabic literature in the nineteenth century;
however, the strong and official recognition of
these genres took place in the twentieth century
(Moreh, 1968). In fact, there were early attempts
to gradually free poems from the traditional
constraints, as Karim (1985) stated: “there is
perhaps a precedent for the use of a freer form of
verse even as early as the end of the 8th century.
Some poems were composed at that time based
on one single foot.” He mentioned many
examples of early attempts by Arabic poets to
simplify poetry rules by producing poems with a
single foot or simple meter and rhyme.
At that time, poets started to reject the forms that
had once used to write poetry; in other words, the
role of meter and rhyme was no longer as strong
as it had been in standard traditional Arabic
poetry. Poets started to write freely without
sticking to the 16-meter rules, and accordingly,
as Sarumi (2015) said, “the annals of Arabic
poetry have witnessed at different epochs efforts
on the part of literary critics and poets to break
free from the shackles and constraints of
traditional poetry, all in the name of creativity,
innovation, and modernity. All the attempts have
thus resulted in the evolution of free verse in
modern Arabic poetry.” The Arabic term that is
used for free verse is “Shir hurr,” which is a
literal translation of “vers libre” in French and
“free verse” in English (Karim, 1985).
There are signs of innovations in almost all
stages of Arabic poetry, both classical and
modern. In the Abbasid period (750–1258), poets
worked on new forms of meter and rhyme
schemes. For example, Bashar Ibn Burd
(714–783) was one of the poets who started using
a new form of meter and rhyme; he was the first
poet to use binary meters and rhymes (Sarumi,
2015). The ballad was used in the Andalusian
period, which is considered, as Sarumi (2015)
pointed out, a revolution in Arabic poetry
structure, in which poets used new arrangements
in terms of meter and rhyme. In modern Arabic
literature, we could find many attempts to write
free verse; one of the famous attempts was done
by Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi (1892–1955).
(Moreh, 1968) Moreh described him as one of the
daring Arabic poets who tried to change poetic
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forms. Shadi was influenced by English literature
and then by contemporary English and American
poetry, as Moreh (1968) pointed out. However,
Nazik Almalaika is considered the first Arabic
poet to use free verse as it is today after she wrote
her famous free verse poem titled “Cholera” in
1947 (Sarumi, 2015). The free verse movement
worked to libertate poetry in many ways directly
and indirectly. (Fomeshi, 2022; Sleiman &
Gonçalves, 2021).
Moreh (1968) mentioned many reasons that
caused Arabic poets adopt free verse. First, poets
wanted musical rhythm that was not limited to
what he called “sonorous conventional forms’;
therefore, they needed a simple, free, and
personal style in poetry. Second, free verse gives
poets more freedom to express their thoughts and
feelings with new rhythm. Third, free verse is
more flexible than traditional poetry and allows
poets to choose the rhyme and meter that will
best express their poetic experience. Fourth, free
verse is found to be better for drama, epic, and
narrative poetry since it allows poets to use
different rhythms and meters that go with poets’
emotions and thoughts and enables them to use
any expression to convey their themes. In short,
traditional forms enslave the poet, as Moreh
(1968) stated, which led poets to get rid of what
he called “unnecessary chains” by using free
verse.
Methodology
In the present study the researcher employed
textual analysis focusing on a text linguistic
analysis to examine the reasons behind using free
verse instead of standard poetry based on
Moreh’s (1968) suggested reasons. The analysis
includes pieces of free verse to understand the
meaning of the texts and its different layers. The
selected poems include Nazik Almalaika’s
“Cholera,” and Ghazi AlGosaibi’s “Oh Desert”
and “When I Am Without You”, and “When the
Eyes Speak”, “Our Soul” and others By
Mohammed Almoqrn. The analysis focused on
text analysis to examine poets’ personal styles,
musical rhythms, meters, emotions, themes,
poetic experiences. It also studied using
descriptive language, metaphors, historical
depths elements, signs of cultural effects,
intertextuality, words repetition and any
rhetorical device. The researcher used textual
discourse analysis as a way of text interpretation
of the selected texts. Theses selected texts
interpreted in terms of the social and culture
elements. To be specific textual analysis deals
with the text through sense making practices.
Mckee (2003) argues that “texts are the material
traces that are left of the practice of sense making
the only empirical evidence we have of how
other people make sense of the world”. He stated:
“Performing textual analysis, then, is an attempt
to gather information about sense making
practices not only in cultures radically different
from our own, but also within our own nations. It
allows us to see how similar or different the
sense-making practices that different people use
can be. And it is also possible that this can allow
us to better understand the sense-making cultures
in which we ourselves live by seeing their
limitations, and possible alternatives to them.”
The researcher tries to select free verse poems
that represent Arabic culture in different times
some are old like Nazik Almalaika (Aziza, 2015)
and Ghazi AlGosaibi (The Guardian, 2010)
others are new by Mohammed Almoqrn. The
textual analysis focused on personal styles,
descriptive language, musical rhythms, meters,
emotions, themes, poetic experiences to examine
sense-making practices.
Results and Discussion
This section presents pieces of Arabic free verse
to show how they support the reasons that Moreh
(1968) mentioned as being behind free verse
adoption in Arabic poetry. Some of the poems are
old free verses, such as Nazik Almalaika’s
“Cholera,” and the others are “Oh Desert” and
“When I Am Without You” by Ghazi AlGosaibi
(Poemhunter, n/d). “When the Eyes Speak”,
“Our Soul” and others By Mohammed Almoqrn.
All translations are adopted from online
websites.
Cholera
By Nazik Almalaika
It is night.
Listen to the echoing wails
rising above the silence in the dark
the agonized, overflowing grief
clashing with the wails.
In every heart there is fire,
in every silent hut, sorrow,
and everywhere, a soul crying in the dark.
It is dawn.
Listen to the footsteps of the passerby,
in the silence of the dawn.
Listen, look at the mourning processions,
ten, twenty, no… countless.
Everywhere lies a corpse, mourned
without a eulogy or a moment of silence.
Humanity protests against the crimes of death.
Cholera is the vengeance of death.
Even the gravedigger has succumbed,
the muezzin is dead,
and who will eulogize the dead?
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O Egypt, my heart is torn by the ravages of death.
This abridged version of “Cholera” shows how
using free verse helped the poet convey her
message by using simple words that describe her
feelings. In contrast to free verse, words cannot
stand alone meaningfully in one line in standard
poetry forms. For example, in this poem, we can
see words stand alone in a single line carrying
different meanings, such as, “it is dawn, cholera,
silence, it is night.” This could emphasize the
importance of the word, which could not be used
in the standard metric form. Further, the poem’s
theme, “cholera,” would be difficult to present in
traditional metric poem form since it is
describing a daily life concern—therefore, it is
more expressive to use easy-to-understand
descriptive language without focusing on meters
and rhythm. In her poem, Almalaika describes in
detail how people have died because of cholera
in her time, and she describes her feelings. Using
free verse has helped her to end up with a good
poem that expresses her feelings in words
without affecting the meaning or style. As an
example, she repeated the words “death” and
“dead” more than thirty times in her poem, and
that did not make the poem boring as it would
have if she were repeating them in standard
traditional Arabic poetry forms.
In one of her books, Nazik Almalaika said that
after she heard on the radio that the death rate has
increased as a result of cholera, she tried twice to
write poems in traditional ways to express her
feelings; however, she said that these poems
could not fully express her emotions and
feelings. Then she gave up and wrote her poem
in free verse, which, as Moreh (1968) suggested,
gives poets more freedom to express their
feelings. Nazik Almalaika stated in her book that
after she wrote her poem in free verse, she felt
that she had done something great and that the
poem did fully express her feelings. (Moreh,
1968)
Oh Desert
By Ghazi AlGosaibi
I've searched the world without finding
land more barren,
love more pure,
or rage more fierce than yours.
I came back to you, oh desert,
sea-spray on my face;
in my mind, a mirage of tears,
a shadow moving in the sea before dawn
and a golden flash of braided hair.
On my lips, two lines of poetry
a song without echo.
I came back to you, disenchanted.
I've found there's
no trust between human beings.
I came back to you deprived;
the world's like a rib cage
without a heart.
Love is a word
devoid of love.
I came back to you defeated;
I've been fighting life's battles
with a sword forged from feeling.
I came back to you…and laid my anchor
on the sand.
As I washed my face with dew
it seemed you were calling me.
Then you whispered:
'Have you come back to me, my child?'
Yes…mother…I came back to you.
A child, forever grieving,
flew to God's countries;
unable to find his nest,
he came back to search for his life in you.
I came back to you, oh desert.
I've thrown away my quiver and ceased
wandering,
I dally in your night-web
of mystery,
breathing on the soft winds of the Najd
the fragrance of Araar.
In you I live for poetry and moons.
Ghazi AlGosaibi (The Guardian, 2010) is a
famous Saudi novelist, poet, politician and
diplomat. The Guardian described him as a
“Saudi politician and poet known for his
modernizing spirit.” He published nearly sixty
books of poems, novels, and some volumes on
politics and leadership. The Guardian suggested
that one of his best-known 60 books was his
novel Freedom Apartment. He expresses
everyday issues in smooth and easy-to-
understand language. He wrote many love and
descriptive poems. The BBC described his
writing thus: “Despite his privileged background
his poems reveled in images of a simpler, desert
culture.” He is a liberal writer who worked hard
and fought for women’s rights. All this
background could tell us that he would be likely
to use free verse in his poems, which he did use
in some of them, although he also wrote in a
standard, traditional form of poetry. All his
writing was standard, not colloquial Arabic
language.
In his poem ‘Oh Desert,’ he expresses his
feelings and thoughts easily in a free-verse poem
with no meter. He described how much he loved
his home country after he traveled and lived in
many countries to study and work as an
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ambassador. Getting rid of unnecessary chains,
as Moreh (1968) called them, has helped him to
describe his feelings in words that are hard to use
in metric and rhythmic poems. For instance,
when he said, “the world's like a rib cage…
without a heart…Love is a word …devoid of
love,” in Arabic, the words “rib cage, heart,
word, and love” are hard to use on one line in
metrical poems. They vary in stressed and
unstressed syllables, and they have different
arrangements of consonant and vowel sounds.
Repeating some words and expressions such as
“came back” and “oh desert” could not have
happened easily and meaningfully in a standard
form of Arabic poetry. Furthermore, the poet
used a descriptive metaphor: “It seemed you
were calling me…Then you whispered: Have
you come back to me, my child?
Yes…mother…I came back to you…A child,
forever grieving.” This kind of descriptive
language is hard to depict in detail in the
traditional standard Arabic form of poetry while
keeping standard meter and rhyme.
When I Am Without You
By Ghazi AlGosaibi
I set sail
(although there's nothing more beautiful
than your eyes' sea where stars meet
where they shine with love
and their lighthouse beacon smiles
beaming home the voyager
ports have denied entry
because he tried to land passportless)
I set sail
searching for beautiful women
wearing perfume, kohl, and smiles
women who've never known joy
But like a child's
your face, loveliest of faces
has never been defaced with makeup
it still shows sorrow, hunger, fear
smiling one moment, frowning another
1 spread my sails and wandered
grappling with life's mysteries
I crossed the sea of riddles and enigmas
however you in your mind
never wrestled with philosophy
or searched beyond nature's bounds
asking questions
never pretending to knowledge
yet knowing right from wrong
penetrating through the fog
of hypocrisy
I set sail
changed my clothes and the color of my eyes
honed my tongue so others could understand
me
danced to their tunes
donned eloquence, fine manners
shedding my old face
But when I am with you
I'm still the one you always knew
as I know myself
I show the sun my warts
the winds my faults
I accept myself as I am
as your generous love accepts me.
In this poem, the poet uses a starting expression
as an opening statement: “I set sail.” Each time
he finishes describing his current emotional state,
he uses the opening statement again. This style
makes the meaning of the poem very deep and
touching, which is hard to achieve in the
traditional form of Arabic poetry. In addition, in
this poem, the poet used new rhythm that Moreh
(1968) mentioned in using free verse as opposed
to conventional poetry. Using new music in his
poem makes the meaning close to the reader, so
when anyone reads or listens to the poem, they
will feel as if they are experiencing the same
situation of sailing and searching. Further, I think
free verse helped AlGosaibi in choosing a variety
of words, expressions, and vocabulary to convey
his meaning effectively. For instance, some
important words in the poem could not be used
together to create metric and rhythmic poems,
such as the words used at the beginning of the
poem: “voyager, love, smile, meet, beautiful,
land.” They have totally different stress
syllables, which are hard to use in metric poems
while expressing such deep meaning. In addition,
free verse has enabled the poet to come up with
new meanings as a result of his freedom from
metric rule; as Moreh (1968) stated, free verse
would make it possible to avoid what he called
“the similarity in words and meaning.” I believe
AlGosaibi used new meaning when he said,
“However you in your mind…never wrestled
with philosophy…or searched beyond nature’s
bounds,” and in “I show the sun my warts…the
winds my faults.” Describing inner emotions was
not the way that poets usually described their
curiosity, excitement, interest, love,
contentment, or gratitude. I believe using free
verse helped AlGosaibi come up with new
meanings and thoughts.
When the Eyes Speak
By Mohammed Almoqrn
Oh, my eye! you showed some of their love.
But the most love is the one you did not show
Ask them how they live in our hearts and in our
eyes
I thought that our hearts met before one year of
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their actual meeting
because of our affinity.
Do you remember us setting together before the
dawn!
The stars were like a necklace between our
hands.
We were speaking to the night about our story
secrets.
The poet is Mohammed Almoqrn. He is a judge,
and he works as a visiting university professor in
different universities in Saudi Arabia. Although
he is not studying or teaching literature, in 2014
his poetry book titled ‘I speak to the night’ was
one of the best seller books in Saudi Arabia. The
following analysis is based on selected poems
from this book. In the above poem, the poet
speaks about his beloved. He described how he
missed her, and that life means nothing without
her. What is important is that how he used
language and different figure of speech which
helped him to come up with very emotional love
poem that people like. He used time and place
reference to make strong connection between
him and his memory with his beloved. The poet
developed his poem around the chronotope of
‘the poet’s eyes and heart’ as a place where his
lover stays even if she is not with him, and ‘the
night’ specifically ‘before the dawn’ as a time for
their talking.
Using time and space references makes people
feel that they are living the action and using free
verse help him to convey this massage. In his
poem, the poet used plural pronouns instead of
singular pronouns to refer to singular person such
as ‘their’ in the first line, ‘them’ and ‘they’ in the
third line; he is refereeing to his lover. And ‘our’
in the third line is refereeing to himself. This kind
of pronouns reverse is common in Arabic
language to show respect and to highlight the
importance of the one that speakers or writers are
talking about or addressing. It is usually used in
addressing important people like kings,
presidents, minsters, chairmen etc. It is also used
in poetry to show how important or how much
you love the one you are talking about. The poet
in his poem used this kind of singular plural
pronouns change to highlight the importance of
the relationship between him and his beloved.
This choice makes the poem’s language softer
and it makes the poem carries respectfulness
meaning, which is the meaning that most people
like in any relationship. The poet chose his words
and language in a very good and clever way that
hooked the readers.
The poet also used a very good strong rhythm
which certainly has a strong influence on readers
as Hebron (2004) said: ‘The anticipation of a
rhyme word creates a sense of suspense in the
reader or listener, thus adding a psychological
drama to the act of reading’. He used metaphors
a lot in his poems and in this poem the basic
theme based on a metaphoric meaning which is
‘the lover living in the poet’s eyes and heart’ to
show how much he loves his lover and that he
cannot forget her since she lives inside his eyes
and heart. In other poem, he described ‘pain’ as
if it is something growing inside us. He
metaphorically describes pain as something that
will continue and will never end since it grows
and is still growing.
In another part, he said ‘she used to end up my
thirsty by love’ he used metaphor to describe
love as water who keeps people live. In his poem,
he also said: ‘I tried to collect my ‘emotional’
injuries, yet they spread around’, this metaphor is
showing how much pain he had. In one of his
poems, the poet used a general metaphor ‘life is
a mirage’. It is a conceptual metaphor as Lakoff
& Mark (2006) calls it. We could look at life and
at mirage, we live them, we cannot hold both of
them etc. Metaphor as Lakoff & Mark (2006)
suggested structures how we perceive, how we
think and what we do, so it is not a matter of
language. In his poem, the poet is using people
conceptual meaning that life cannot end, and that
people run for it and whenever they think they
achieve their goals they continue running to
another one till the end of life. Lakoff & Mark
(2006) stated that: ‘the most fundamental values
in a culture will be coherent with the
metaphorical structure of the most fundamental
concepts in the culture’ which I found in the
poems here. For example, the poet refers to
future as something up, he said: ‘the future is
coming, and we will see and find good things.
Future in this metaphor is something in front of
people. They are looking forward to finding it
and to see what will happen. There is also a clear
evidence of using ‘good is up’ metaphor. In
Arabic language, good things are usually up,
which are used a lot in poems. For example, the
poet said: ‘happiness is rising’, ‘your love rate is
going up’ ‘my pleasure is rising’ etc. Languages
effect cultures and cultures effect languages,
which will influence the way people think and
behave.
Our Soul
By Mohammed Almoqrn
Tell those who steal our souls,
be careful.
our souls have to be saved
I told the judge about them.
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He said,
‘with love, nothing is impossible’
Again, the poet is using plural pronouns to refer
to himself and his beloved. ‘those’ ‘our’ ‘them’
all of these pronouns are used to refer to singular
nouns. It is, as I stated before, a matter of
showing respect and high-status positioning. He
is using unknown voice sentences in this poem,
which is a literary style in Arabic language. It is
used in written and spoken language. The
unknown voice sentences style makes the reader
feels that the writer speaking on behalf of him,
which makes the reader live the action of the
poem, novel, play etc. as if he is doing it. This
style makes strong connection between the
readers and the poet. It makes them read the
poem in general social lens as if it is speaking
generally for the whole society. Since Arabic
people are in high-context culture where the way
to say the words is more important than the words
themselves, most poets and writers end up
unconsciously using many different styles at the
same time. People tend to relate things to each
other to come up with the meaning or the gist.
The poet used intertextuality a lot in his poems.
He used different types of intertextuality; he used
it with religious texts, proverbs, previous poets or
writer texts. Sami et al. (2017) defined
intertextuality with religious texts as ‘overlap of
the original text of the poem with religious texts.
On the other hand, they described literary
intertextuality as: ‘the existence of ancient or
modern literary poetry, prose texts or figures (i.e.
poets) in the text of the original poem so that the
interweaved text in its fabric corresponds with
the poet’s own idea’. For example, in one of the
poems he said: ‘except in my prayer ‘mehrab’
place’, he used the name of the prayer place,
which is a religious reference where this name
‘mehrab’ is not used in everyday talk, but it is an
expression from Quran. ‘jannet alkhuld’ is
another Quranic expression used by the poet
which means paradise. In my ‘right hand’ is also
another religious reference expression.
The poet said in one of the poems:
Oh god what we can say
You are so generous to us
‘Forgive us’
That is what we need
The poet used quotation marks when he wrote the
expression that means forgive us since it is
intertextuality with religious texts. I think there
are many religious and cultural references in the
texts. One of the cultural references he used when
he said:
Oh doctors!
How could you protect my beloved against
‘sukari’ !
He used the word ‘sukari’ which means diabetes
as a cultural reference since in Arabic people use
the adjective of ‘sugar’ as a name of diabetes.
Another example of using cultural references in
his poem when he said:
The ‘ful’ flower is so beautiful
The poet referred to a specific kind of jasmine
flower ‘ful’ that most people like and most poets
used in their poems. This expression was not
used only in poetry but also in many different
kinds of literary texts.
In one of his poems the poet said:
‘Sauhil’ is that breeze is a sign of you
or is it because of that someone is coming
‘Sauhil’ is a name of a star that most Arab poets,
both standard and colloquial language writers,
used in their poems. This is a strong cultural
reference and intertextuality in his text.
The poet also used intertextuality with proverbs
such as when he said, ‘like the round moon’. He
used this proverb which is used a lot in the
ancient and modern Arabic poetry. This makes
strong historical connection between people and
the texts.
After analyzing his poems, we could find how the
poet used his language in free verse in a way that
is suitable for people culture. He presents his
poems in uncomplicated language choosing good
words and strong rhythm. There is historical
depth in the texts and many signs of cultural
effects which are clear in analyzing
intertextuality and metaphors in his texts.
Conclusions
To conclude, Andrews (2016) described free
verse as “in one sense, free verse is ‘free’ in a
counter-positional way: it has broken free from
the constraints of the metrical world. Most
approaches to free verse prosody see it as an
aberrational type of poetry that has eschewed
regular rhythms and which, nevertheless, can
only be explained in terms of regular rhythm or
meter.” In Arabic poetry, free verse can be
explained as very different from regular rhythm
and meter. Free verse allows more freedom of
expression and a variety of choices to represent
poets’ actual abilities and experiences by using
easy language, intertextuality and metaphors.
(Khaldi, 2020) The textual analysis concluded
that free verse allows for greater freedom in
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expression and make it pleasant to read. The
results showed that using free verse gives poets
the freedom to express their ideas and feelings.
Also, it allows them to use their own personal
style of musical rhythms, to use different
rhythms that fit their themes and to express their
poetic experiences. Free verse enables poets to
use new meanings, metaphors and intertextuality
effectively. It plays a key role in Arabic poetry,
and as Jawad (2014) stated, “the free verse
movement liberated the Arabic poem from
rigidity and conventionalism.” This study has
potential limitations, the sample texts could be
more to represent many poets which would help
to generalize the conclusion. Some suggestion
for future studies is to examine those texts by
using critical discourse analysis to study the
social and ideological effects. Future studies
could also make use of comparing languages and
power on linguistically analyzing texts to see if
language effects on culture, society and texts.
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