Gibran was deeply fond of women, understood them, and sympathized with their plight. He himself never married, so his ideal of love always remained the ethereal delights of courtship rather than the calmer happiness of stable marriage. His life was marked by a series of profound friendships with women: his mother and his two sisters, to whom he was devoted; Josephine Peabody, the Cambridge society intellectual who befriended him as a teenager; Hala al-Daher, the woman in Lebanon who was his first love; Micheline, a beautiful French artist; May Ziadeh, the Arab writer whom he never met in person; Barbara Young, his supporter in his last years; and, most important, Mary Haskell, who was his friend, patron, and editor for half his life. The most important of these friendships were platonic, marked by deep and thoughtful friendship. These relationships shaped his art, his writing, and his life.1

In the absence of a critical edition, we have followed the text of the collected edition of his Arabic works published by his friend Mikhail Naimy.

John Walbridge

AT THE GATE OF THE TEMPLE

AT THE GATE OF THE TEMPLE

I purified my lips with sacred fire that I might speak of love, but when I opened my mouth to speak, I found myself mute.

I sang the melodies of a love I did not yet know, but when I came to know it, the words became a muffled whisper in my mouth, the songs in my breast a profound silence.

In the past, O people, you asked me about the wonders and delights of love, and you found satisfaction in what I told you. But now, when love has draped me with its robes, I in my turn come to ask you about its ways and virtues. Is there one among you who can answer me? I come to ask you about what is in me and wish you to tell me of my own soul. Is there one among you who can explain my heart to my own heart, who can explain my essence to my essence itself?

Will you not tell me what is this fire kindled in my breast? It consumes my faculties and melts my emotions and desires.

What are these invisible hands, soft yet coarse, that grip my spirit in my hours of solitude and loneliness? Into my heart they pour wine mixed with the bitterness of pleasure and the sweetness of pain.