The Effectiveness of Metaphor in Depicting Anxiety in the Poetry of Abu al-Atahiya

Abstract

This study investigates the efficacy of figurative language (majāz) as a linguistic and cognitive mechanism for representing anxiety in the poetry of Abū al-ʿAtāhiya Ismāʿīl ibn al-Qāsim (d. 211 AH). It proceeds from the hypothesis that figuration in this corpus is not an ornament appended to a meaning already formed, but rather the very instrument through which the anxious meaning is generated; and that anxiety, being an affect whose object is diffuse and whose presence is continuous, cannot attain linguistic form except by the transfer of the abstract into the sensible, which is precisely the work of majāz. The study adopts a descriptive-analytical method, drawing on the Arabic rhetorical tradition for the classification of figurative types and their relations, and on modern Arabic criticism, particularly theories of the poetic image and conceptual metaphor, for the analysis of their semantic and psychological functions. The research falls into two chapters: the first is theoretical, devoted to defining majāz and its representational function, and to defining anxiety and the conditions of its formation in the poet's experience; the second is applied, treating metaphor and personification in the representation of temporal and mortal anxiety, then metonymy, rational figuration and allusion in the representation of anxiety concerning destiny, the self and the world. The study concludes that Abū al-ʿAtāhiya established a consistent figurative system founded upon the personification of time, the corporealisation of death, the mechanisation of annihilation, and the reduction of the world to a vanishing dwelling; and that the simplicity of his diction, long held against him, was in fact a condition of his figurative efficacy, carrying the image to the widest possible audience and converting a private anxiety into a transmissible collective one.