10 of the Best Kahlil Gibran Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) was a Lebanese-American poet who is best-known for one book of poetry: The Prophet. This 1923 book is one of the bestselling books of all time: indeed, Gibran is usually named as one of the three biggest-selling poets of all time, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.

Born in Lebanon, Gibran moved to the United States as a young boy and wrote in both Arabic and English, but The Prophet was written in the latter. To date it has sold over 9 million copies in its US edition alone – about a million every decade.

The book is divided into 26 essays or sermons spoken by a wise man, Almustapha, as he waits to set sail for his homeland, having spent the last dozen years in exile. It’s a mixture of mysticism, poetic description, and philosophy (although Gibran himself rejected the title of ‘philosopher’ for himself).

But Gibran wrote other works, too: parables, fables, prose-poems. Below, we select and introduce some of Gibran’s best, and best-known, poems, many of them shorter pieces from The Prophet which can be read in isolation.

1. ‘On Love’.

When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you …

Almitra, the seeress who appears in The Prophet (from which this particular poem is taken), asks the Prophet, Al Mustafa, to tell her and his other rapt listeners about love. What is love?

Al Mustafa urges his listeners not to be afraid of love, but to embrace it when it comes to them. Even the rough and thorough nature of love and what it subjects us to, he argues, is for our own good. If you’re only interested in knowing the peace and pleasure of love, you should turn your back on it, for you must take the rough with the smooth, the hard lessons with the good times.

2. ‘On Pleasure’.

Pleasure is a freedom-song,

    But it is not freedom.

    It is the blossoming of your desires,

    But it is not their fruit …

A hermit asks the Prophet, in Gibran’s poem of that name, to tell them about pleasure. Al Mustafa responds with a series of cryptic utterances: pleasure may be like a bird taking flight from a cage, but pleasure is not the journey the bird undertakes. Pleasure, in short, is not the same as freedom.

3. ‘The Three Ants’.

Three ants met on the nose of a man who was asleep in the sun. And after they had saluted one another, each according to the custom of his tribe, they stood there conversing …

This little fable almost sounds like a joke when it begins, and in some ways it ends with a sort of ‘punchline’: the three ants sitting on a ‘barren’ plain observe how empty the land is, but the third one introduces the idea that they are atop some godlike being.

4. ‘The Astronomer’.

In the shadow of the temple my friend and I saw a blind man sitting alone.  And my friend said, ‘Behold the wisest man of our land.’

Then I left my friend and approached the blind man and greeted him. And we conversed …

This poem is from the 1918 collection The Madman, and takes the form of a parable. Like much of Gibran’s work, it’s arranged as a prose poem.

In ‘The Astronomer’, the narrator and his friend approach a blind man, who identifies himself as an ‘astronomer’. The universe of suns, moons, and stars which he watches are those found within his heart.

5. ‘And When My Sorrow Was Born’.

And now I only remember my dead Joy in remembering my dead Sorrow. But memory is an autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more …

This little prose poem is reminiscent of the work of the great Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827), who almost certainly influenced Gibran. The speaker remembers feeling Joy, but without anyone else to share this happiness with, it withered and died, turning to Sorrow.

6. ‘Ambition’.

Three men met at a tavern table. One was a weaver, another a carpenter and the third a ploughman …

Here’s another Gibran parable which begins much like a joke. Instead, this little narrative is about the theme of ambition, and the dreams the tavern-keeper’s wife has for her son to rise higher than his lowly origins and enter the priesthood.

7. ‘The Sleep-Walkers’.

In the town where I was born lived a woman and her daughter, who walked in their sleep …

When we talk in our sleep, do we give vent to our truest unconscious feelings? This poem takes this idea and elaborates on the theme of parenthood and growing up, as a woman and her daughter both sleepwalk before meeting each other in the garden.

Although both still asleep, they appear to recognise each other: the mother denounces her daughter for taking her youth from her while she spent her best years raising the girl, and the daughter curses her mother for controlling her life.

8. ‘The Wise King’.

Once there ruled in the distant city of Wirani a king who was both mighty and wise. And he was feared for his might and loved for his wisdom …

This is perhaps the cleverest and most perceptive of all of Kahlil Gibran’s poems. It’s almost satirical in the beautifully neat way it represents how ‘sanity’ or ‘reason’ are often arbitrarily ascribed to certain people based on whether their views are mainstream or not.

The wise king and his queen are the only two people not to drink from the well, which has been poisoned by a witch so that anyone who drinks from it becomes mad. But when everyone else in the city has drunk the water and become mad, they assume their formerly wise king must be mad …

9. ‘The Two Hermits’.

Upon a lonely mountain, there lived two hermits who worshipped God and loved one another.

Now these two hermits had one earthen bowl, and this was their only possession …

In this little parable, one hermit, corrupted by a spirit, announces to the other that they should part ways. But how can they divide up their possessions equally between them when all they own is one bowl, and a bowl broken between them would be worthless to both of them?

10. ‘The Seven Selves’.

In the stillest hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whisper …

Let’s conclude this pick of the best Kahlil Gibran poems with the longest one on this list. As the speaker lies asleep, his ‘seven selves’ talk to each other. One is his ‘mad’ self, another his happy self, another his ‘love-ridden’ self, and so on.

But the seventh self is envious of the other six, because they all have a pre-ordained purpose, whereas he is the ‘do-nothing’ self, lacking a direction or reason for existing. The other selves realise how lucky they are to be gifted with a reason to live, while the seventh self remains awake, keeping watch, gazing into the void …