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ALLS 7(4):95-112, 2016

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senses in the poetic creation. This extended synaesthetic image or the cross-sensory metaphor is meant to transmit the 
speaker's emotions towards the beauty of the blue eyes.
As a syntactic creative device, the stylistician may anticipate the omnipresence of fronting and postponement. Suffice it 
to quote the lines of verse:"In the blue harbor of your eyes/Stones sing in the night." Here, the prepositional group, "in 
the harbor of your eyes," is fronted in the syntactic structure. This foregrounding or moving the syntactic element from 
its canonical location to the very beginning of the structure is functional: it is used either to create rhymed influence or 
to tract the hearer's attention to a certain content. The blue-eyed beauty is the core subject-matter of the poem, so it is 
not altogether wrong to front the prepositional group," in the blue harbor of your eyes," to highlight that aesthetic 
physicality.
One more syntactic device to be detected in the poem is
repetition
. This is clearly shown the repetition of the 
prepositional group, 
in the blue harbor of your eyes
, with its variation, 
in the closed book of your eyes
. The 
multifunction is either focusing or sentimental intensity. The language of verbal economy might result in intensity, too.
Now the question is: What purposiveness does lie beneath this picturesque flood of imagery in the 
Maritime Poem
? 
Like all things of beauty, natural or nurtural, Kabbani's 
Maritime Poem
is an artistic piece of language; a form of 
meaning, and a texture of beauty. This 
thing of beauty 
is entirely pleasurable. What lies beneath that ecstatic texture is 
neither ideology, nor pedagogy. Though philosophical in flavor, it has nothing to do the complex abstraction(s) of cold 
philosophy. What lies beneath is the aesthetic value, which exists only within the territory of art. In this light, let us 
borrow Kant's words (cited in Greene, 1957:375-383), our "
judgment of taste is aesthetic
." Since "the Beautiful is that 
which pleases universal, without a concept," "the satisfaction which determines the judgment of Taste is disinterested." 
Kant argues that beauty is equivalent neither to utility nor perfection, but is still purposive. Beauty in nature, as in the 
sunset, will appear as purposive with respect to our faculty of judgment, but its beauty will have no ascertainable 
purpose. This is why beauty is pleasurable since pleasure is defined as a feeling that arises on the achievement of a 
purpose, or at least, the recognition of purposiveness. (See 
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, 2001). Needless to 
say that 
Taste
is "the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an 
entirely disinterested
satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called 
beautiful, 
and "in order to decide whether 
anything is beautiful or not, we refer the representation by the imagination to the subject, and its feeling of pleasure or 
pain"(ibid). Hence, Kabbani's 
Maritime Poem
is pleasurable so long it is beautiful, and that artistic beauty is 
disinterested. Once more, different discourses hold different political, social, historical, and religious functions. In the 
literary discourse, these multifunctions might exist, yet, the texture of the literary discoursal text is organically aesthetic. 
Kabban's synaesthetic images are still paintings, which brings happy responses to the reader's aesthetic awareness. 
Kabbani's 
Maritime Poem 
is a piece of art, and art, according to Croce', the Modern Italian aesthetic philosopher, is 
"one of the major forms of the human spirit, the work of spirit in its aesthetic aspect"(Croce, 1964). Reading the poem 
creates that happy feeling since it deals with a subject of beauty, i.e. the blue eyes. In its structural from, The
 Maritime 
Poem 
is lyrical, and that lyricism is intuitional. In his seminal article 
Aesthetics, 
Croce elaborates on his term 
Lyrical 
Intuition
. He (ibid) says:
If we examine a poem in order to determine what it is that makes us feel it to be a 
poem, we at once find two constant and necessary elements: a complex of images, 
and a feeling that animates them. . . . Moreover, these two elements may appear as 
two in a first abstract analysis. But they cannot be regarded as two distinct
threads, however intertwined; for, in effect, the feeling is altogether converted
into images, into this complex of images, and thus a feeling that is contemplated
and therefore resolved and transcended. Hence poetry must be called neither
feeling, nor image, nor yet the sum of the two, but ' contemplation of feeling' or
' lyrical intuition' [which is the same thing] ' pure intuition- pure, that is, of all 
historical and critical reference to the reality or unreality of the images of which
it is woven, and apprehending the pure throb of life in its ideality. 
 
This philosophical view may lead us to penetrate, in brief, both Keats and Kabbani's aesthetic-cultural world views. 
Though poetry, as Croce has put it, an interwoven texture of imagery and feeling, yet poetry the vehicle which carries 
the poet's aesthetic and cultural vision(s).
Both Keats and Kabbani believe in the power of Imagination, so is Kant. The Imagination, in the Romantic Philosophy, 
is the cognitive correlative of Croce's 
lyrical intuition.
Both Keats and Kabbani are preoccupied with the doctrine of 
beauty from a romantic stance. It might be worth noting that that Keats is not a philosophical mind. For the romantic 
poet, any sort of perceptional rational thinking-whether ethical perception, philosophical abstraction, pious dogma- was 
disinterested, a conceptualization that Keats recurrently expressed and implied in his letters, yet the Keats' lyrical 
intuitionism brings him closer to the doctrine of beauty, as seen in 
Ode on a Grecian Urn
. Likewise, Kabbani, in the 
preface to his volume, 
Childhood of A Breast
is on the belief that art, in general, and poetry, in particular is lyrical, or 

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