The Prophet

A book of twenty-six prose poems written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and artist Kahlil Gibran, illustrated with his own drawings. Its frame story is simple. Almustafa, a prophet who has lived for twelve years in the city of Orphalese, sees the ship that will carry him back to the island of his birth. Before he leaves, the people gather and ask him to speak, and the seeress Almitra leads the questions. He answers in turn on love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion and death, before a final farewell. The teachings draw on Christian, Sufi and wider mystical themes: love both crowns and wounds us, children belong to life rather than to their parents, and joy and sorrow are inseparable. The style is cadenced and biblical.

Its short meditations on love, work, freedom and death are among the most widely read spiritual writing of the twentieth century and reward slow, repeated reading.