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ALLS 7(4):95-112, 2016

108
 

Beauty is true to anyone who has felt it , and the appreciation of truth could 
easily be considered beautiful. But is this 
all
we know on earth and all we
need to know? Most of us would insist that we need to know more than 
simply to survive on earth. Nevertheless, this last line and a half can be read 
so as to yield an extremely useful clue to Keats's meaning. 
Now, let us consider Keats himself concerning the beauty –truth dichotomy. In his letter to Benjamin Baily, dated 
November 22, 1817, Keats has wittingly unraveled that connection between these two philosophical axioms (beauty and 
truth), when he writes (quoted in Abrams, 1987:1871-2): "What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth- 
whether it existed before or not.'" Now, it is clear that Beauty is an intuitive truth; it has nothing to do with the 
objectivity of science andempirical experience.
Meaning is the hallmark of human pursuit: Keats's meaning cannot be fully comprehended without a thorough 
comprehension of the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of beauty. Whether the questionable aphorism forms a 
coherent system of ideas or not, the Ode itself is to be judged aesthetically; this is simply so because the Ode is an 
artistic product of Imagination. The Ode is a painting with words, which gives pleasure to the perceiver's awareness. To 
be beautiful is to be disinterested, and this is the core of 
Ode on a Grecian Urn
. It is of interest to point out that a poetic 
text may carry ideological or socio- historical functions, yet, the aesthetic function is the most revealing one because of 
its deviant texture.
It is true that the youngest romantic poet is not purely a philosopher, but his lyrical intuitionism may bring him closer to 
the vision of 
Beauty.
That vision is fundamentally sensuous, which is encoded in a highly condensed and picturesque 
style. If language is a networking of interrelated choices or options, then, language, in Halliday's linguistic paradigm, is 
a 
system network.
Keats's aesthetic experience is wholly sorted out in the stratum of lexicogrammar, which is "the 
organizational space in which meanings are organized as a purely abstract network of interaction"( see Webster, 
2003:14). As with the other Odes, 
Ode on a Grecian Urn,"
is but an
 
artistic realization of the poet's aesthetic world 
view. The comprehensiveness of Keats's language may give it the impact of universality. Keats's Ode, as the stylistic 
practice has shown, is a sort of 
Transcendental romantic philosophy
moulded in poetic linguistic structure. The sense of 
pleasure created by seeing a beautiful sunset or contemplating a Grecian urn springs from the same source, i.e., 
the 
aesthetic judgment, 
which is purely 
disinterested
. This purposiveness, as the stylistic process in its two interlinked 
circles has shown, is the core of the Kantian-Keatsian aesthetic stance. Eventually, the application of the aesthetic 
axioms to the domain of literary language is valid to glow the merits of the poetic discourse, and this is the main target 
of Aesthetic stylistics.
Having shown the 
purposiveness 
of Keats' 
Ode on a Grecian Urn
, we are in position to analyze Kabbani's 
Maritime
Poem 
linguistically in terms of Halliday's Functional Linguistics, and philosophically in terms of Kant's aesthetic 
theory. Bur before going through the stylistic analysis, it is of interest to highlight Kabbani's aesthetic-poetic vision.
Nizar Kabbani (1923-1998) is a modern Syrian poet, essayist, and diplomat. He the most revealing love-poet in the 
modern Arab history of poetry. His poetics is erected on the pillars of lyrical intuition, artistic simplicity, and erotic 
aesthetics. Since his first volume, 
The Brunette Said to Me
(1944), Kabbani views the notion of Beauty as the core of 
his poetic vision. His early poems are but poetic variation on the concept of Beauty, which is fundamentally linked to 
woman and her surroundings. His early poems, with their glamour, fragrance, and colours are a sort of 
painting with 
words
, as one of his poetic volumes holds the term as a title. So painting is the aesthetic correlative of poetry: painting 
is poetry, and it is always written in a form of a poem with the structural devices of rhyme and rhythm. One more 
characteristic is the 
Nizarian 
stylistics is simplicity. Nizar, mostly, has had recourse to simple and compound 
lexicogrammatical structures. As with Wordsworth, the diction Kabbani has used is mostly simple, but not always 
clear. As with Keats, the 
Nizarian 
poetic experience has witnessed the emergence of the synaesthetic imagery, where 
the concrete, auditory, visual senses are mixed to create authentic imaginative images. There is an interfusion of the 
physical feminine nature and the physical scenic nature which is organically encoded into his interacting poetic 
creation. This brief exordium may pave the path to investigate Kabbani's poetics in terms of Kant's aesthetics as we 
shall see.
While running over the lines of the page, Kabbani's 
Maritime Poem 
forms an extended metaphor, simply because of 
that flood of exuberant images about the concrete aesthetic subject- a blue-eyed beloved: 
In the blue harbor of your eyes 
Blow rains of melodious lights, 
Dizzy suns and sails 
Painting their voyage to endlessness. 
In the blue harbor of your eyes 
Is an open sea window, 

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