Aesthetic Dying: The Arabʹs Heroic Encounter with Death

This paper examines the classical Arab poet Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb’s poem “Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb Yarthy Nafsah”, “Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb mourning his own death”, to underline elegiac patterns in Arabic poetry and pave the way for comparative studies of self elegies and elegiac verse across cultures and languages. It is to be asserted that this study of Ibn Ar-Rayb’s self-elegy is not meant to exclude the abundant elegiac verse in Arab culture; rather, it is a case study of a representative example of an Arab poet who wrote an elegy in which he mourned his conceived death, a particular case of mourning. It turns out that the elegiac pattern of the poem adopts sorrow, sincerity, and praise at its core while emphasizing the qualities of the mind and the spirit, and transforming personal grief into universal philosophical statements on the futility of human existence, death, human relations, and poetic creativity. Poetry is celebrated as a distinction the loss of which to mourn, the power of which to pride oneself at, and the help of which to invoke in order to eloquently (still sincerely) express the situation of mourning and, at the same time, immortalize the poet.