Psychological Manifestations in Ilya Abu Madi’s Poem “Al-Talāsim”

Abstract

This study examines the psychological manifestations in Ilya Abu Madi’s poem Al-Talasim through a close textual reading grounded in the psychological approach to literary criticism, supplemented by descriptive and formal analysis to reveal how psychological meanings are constructed within the poetic structure. The study adopts an operational definition of psychological manifestation as a semantic level through which states of perplexity, anxiety, tension, and inner conflict emerge through linguistic, stylistic, imagistic, and rhythmic signs, without moving beyond textual evidence to diagnose the poet’s personality or infer his extratextual psychological condition.

The study focuses on four principal manifestations: existential perplexity, anxiety in the face of the unknown and destiny, internal conflict, and cognitive-existential estrangement. It also examines the linguistic and artistic devices that contribute to shaping these manifestations, particularly interrogation, repetition, antithesis, paradox, lexical fields, poetic imagery, and rhythm.

The findings indicate that psychological manifestations in Al-Talasim do not appear merely as direct emotional expressions; rather, they emerge through the interaction between the states represented by the lyrical self and the artistic devices organized within the poem. The recurring phrase “I do not know” (lastu adri) performs a significant semantic and structural function, but it does not exhaust the poem’s psychological dimensions. Existential perplexity is primarily associated with epistemic uncertainty concerning existence, its course, and destiny; anxiety arises from tension in confronting the unknown; internal conflict is embodied in the self’s confrontation with competing possibilities; while estrangement takes the form of a cognitive and existential distance between the self and the truth it seeks to apprehend. The study concludes that the psychological approach is most methodologically productive when it proceeds from textual structure and relates psychological phenomena to their artistic formation.