Language analysis of free verse; The reasons behind free verse adoption

This paper presents an overview of free verse and how it emerged and evolved in Arabic literature and examines the differences between free verse and standard poetry. It presents language analysis of using free verse in Arabic literature and discusses the reasons behind free verse adoption. The researcher analyzed pieces of free verse to study the reasons behind using it instead of standard poetry. The analysis includes pieces of free verse to understand the meaning of the texts and its different layers. Not like standard poetry, regular rhythm or meter is not required in free verse. The movement of using free verse started by simplifying poetry rules by producing poems with a single foot or simple meter and rhyme. The analysis shows that poets used free verse because it gives them more freedom to express their thoughts , to use their personal style of musical rhythms, to use different rhythms and meters that go with their emotions and themes and to best express their poetic experiences. It also shows that free verse enables poets to use descriptive language, metaphors, historical depths elements, signs of cultural effects, new meanings without chains and to adopt words repetition as a rhetorical device meaningfully.


Introduction
stated, "Poetry is a literary art exploited by poets to depict life experiences as they perceive them, and to register and convey their feelings, sensations, and sentiments.It relies mostly on melody, emotion, imagery, and imagination.Poetry is one of the prehistoric arts in all nations.Among the Arabs, it particularly enjoys a prime of place among other literary arts."People use poetry to express their feelings and to present their life experiences.Poetry elements, forms, and genres differ from language to language and from period to period.(Kappeler, 2020) According to Sarumi (2015), stylistics and music are the main features that distinguish poetry from other literary genres.For example, literature researchers consider music to be the main feature to differentiate between poetry and prose.In poetry, there are external and internal melodies.The external melody, meter, and rhyme, which are the most important features of 1 Department of English, University of Hai'l, Saudi Arabia.
traditional Arabic poetry, were first introduced by Khalil Ahmad Al-Farahidi.He introduced 16 meters with their corresponding feet that poets should follow in writing poems (Sarumi, 2015).In the standard form of Arabic poetry, every line in any poem consists of two rhymed metric hemistiches.Poets have license to slightly change some of the strict grammar rules or the sound rules for consonants and vowels to follow any of the sixteen meters.This change came about as a result of the exigencies of meter and rhyme as poetic necessities (Wright, 1977).In other words, language can be flexible enough to meet any poetic necessity.Hence, as Sarumi (2015) said, "classical Arab poets recognize meter and rhyme as the salient ingredients of traditional Arabic poetry.".Huisman (2016) point out: 'poetry is the art shaped through language; to talk about a poem we need to talk about its language'.She examined how poetic language could be described and studied through linguistic theories and methods.Using language analysis during reading any poem would help us to interpret which kind of poetry we have and to what extent it could have an effect on people and society.As Shpresa, (2015) stated: 'Pragmatics allows us to investigate how this "meaning beyond the words'' can be understood without ambiguity.The extra meaning is there, not because of the semantic aspects of the words themselves, but because we share certain contextual knowledge with the writer or speaker of the text'.In any language analysis, understanding meanings behind the words and cultural references help researchers a lot.Furthermore, to understand the meaning of the text correctly and its different layers, we have to look at intertextuality in the text as Ahmadian & Yazdani, (2013) suggested.Intertextuality is a framework that is used to examine the interconnection amongst texts, it studies the text historical depth and cultural context.(Sami, Nisreen & Imad, 2017).Intertextuality is used a lot in Arabic texts and literature, so people understand it from the context.It plays a very important role in any text meanings and gives the writer more space to express their ideas referring to others.Sami et al. (2017) stated: "Investigating intertextuality especially in Arabic poetry is needed as it intensely invests metaphoric and intertextual implicates so as to preserve the original poetic aspects contributing to the aesthetics of the original texts".This article presents different free verse analysis and how it would play important role in helping writers to express their thoughts and readers to understand effectively.It is trying to show and study the reasons that make writers and poets choose to move from standard meters to free verse.

Free Verse and Arabic Literature
Free verse is a type or style of poetry with verses without regular set meter or rhyme scheme.It is reflection of everyday speech that could be rhyme or unrhyme in an informal way not like the traditional poetry.(Abbs & Richardson, 1990).According to them, this term could be back in history to Walt Whitman's poetry and sometimes earlier and that it was originally translated from a French movement in the 1880s vers libre.Then it became popular in English literature in the early twentieth century.The famous English poets who used this form are T.E.Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.(Abbs & Richardson, 1990).The most obvious characteristics of free verse is to be free from traditional poetry chains.Allen (1948) stated "The only freedom cadenced verse obtains is a limited freedom from the tight demands of the metered line".
In Arabic poetry, a new revolutionary period in the history emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century.As a result of Western literature's influence, new genres emerged in Arabic literature in the nineteenth century; however, the strong and official recognition of these genres took place in the twentieth century (Moreh, 1968).In fact, there were early attempts to gradually free poems from the traditional constraints, as Karim (1985) stated: "there is perhaps a precedent for the use of a freer form of verse even as early as the end of the 8th century.Some poems were composed at that time based on one single foot."He mentioned many examples of early attempts by Arabic poets to simplify poetry rules by producing poems with a single foot or simple meter and rhyme.
At that time, poets started to reject the forms that had once used to write poetry; in other words, the role of meter and rhyme was no longer as strong as it had been in standard traditional Arabic poetry.Poets started to write freely without sticking to the 16-meter rules, and accordingly, as Sarumi (2015) said, "the annals of Arabic poetry have witnessed at different epochs efforts on the part of literary critics and poets to break free from the shackles and constraints of traditional poetry, all in the name of creativity, innovation, and modernity.All the attempts have thus resulted in the evolution of free verse in modern Arabic poetry."The Arabic term that is used for free verse is "Shir hurr," which is a literal translation of "vers libre" in French and "free verse" in English (Karim, 1985).
There are signs of innovations in almost all stages of Arabic poetry, both classical and modern.In the Abbasid period (750-1258), poets worked on new forms of meter and rhyme schemes.For example, Bashar Ibn Burd (714-783) was one of the poets who started using a new form of meter and rhyme; he was the first poet to use binary meters and rhymes (Sarumi, 2015).The ballad was used in the Andalusian period, which is considered, as Sarumi (2015) pointed out, a revolution in Arabic poetry structure, in which poets used new arrangements in terms of meter and rhyme.In modern Arabic literature, we could find many attempts to write free verse; one of the famous attempts was done by Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi .(Moreh, 1968) Moreh described him as one of the daring Arabic poets who tried to change poetic forms.Shadi was influenced by English literature and then by contemporary English and American poetry, as Moreh (1968) pointed out.However, Nazik Almalaika is considered the first Arabic poet to use free verse as it is today after she wrote her famous free verse poem titled "Cholera" in 1947 (Sarumi, 2015).The free verse movement worked to libertate poetry in many ways directly and indirectly.(Fomeshi, 2022;Sleiman & Gonçalves, 2021).Moreh (1968) mentioned many reasons that caused Arabic poets adopt free verse.First, poets wanted musical rhythm that was not limited to what he called "sonorous conventional forms'; therefore, they needed a simple, free, and personal style in poetry.Second, free verse gives poets more freedom to express their thoughts and feelings with new rhythm.Third, free verse is more flexible than traditional poetry and allows poets to choose the rhyme and meter that will best express their poetic experience.Fourth, free verse is found to be better for drama, epic, and narrative poetry since it allows poets to use different rhythms and meters that go with poets' emotions and thoughts and enables them to use any expression to convey their themes.In short, traditional forms enslave the poet, as Moreh (1968) stated, which led poets to get rid of what he called "unnecessary chains" by using free verse.

Methodology
In the present study the researcher employed textual analysis focusing on a text linguistic analysis to examine the reasons behind using free verse instead of standard poetry based on Moreh's (1968) suggested reasons.The analysis includes pieces of free verse to understand the meaning of the texts and its different layers.The selected poems include Nazik Almalaika's "Cholera," and Ghazi AlGosaibi's "Oh Desert" and "When I Am Without You", and "When the Eyes Speak", "Our Soul" and others By Mohammed Almoqrn.The analysis focused on text analysis to examine poets' personal styles, musical rhythms, meters, emotions, themes, poetic experiences.It also studied using descriptive language, metaphors, historical depths elements, signs of cultural effects, intertextuality, words repetition and any rhetorical device.The researcher used textual discourse analysis as a way of text interpretation of the selected texts.Theses selected texts interpreted in terms of the social and culture elements.To be specific textual analysis deals with the text through sense making practices.Mckee (2003) argues that "texts are the material traces that are left of the practice of sense making the only empirical evidence we have of how other people make sense of the world".He stated: "Performing textual analysis, then, is an attempt to gather information about sense making practices not only in cultures radically different from our own, but also within our own nations.It allows us to see how similar or different the sense-making practices that different people use can be.And it is also possible that this can allow us to better understand the sense-making cultures in which we ourselves live by seeing their limitations, and possible alternatives to them."The researcher tries to select free verse poems that represent Arabic culture in different times some are old like Nazik Almalaika (Aziza, 2015) and Ghazi AlGosaibi (The Guardian, 2010) others are new by Mohammed Almoqrn.The textual analysis focused on personal styles, descriptive language, musical rhythms, meters, emotions, themes, poetic experiences to examine sense-making practices.

Results and Discussion
This section presents pieces of Arabic free verse to show how they support the reasons that Moreh (1968) mentioned as being behind free verse adoption in Arabic poetry.Some of the poems are old free verses, such as Nazik Almalaika's "Cholera," and the others are "Oh Desert" and "When I Am Without You" by Ghazi AlGosaibi (Poemhunter, n/d)."When the Eyes Speak", "Our Soul" and others By Mohammed Almoqrn.All translations are adopted from online websites.
Cholera By Nazik Almalaika It is night.Listen to the echoing wails rising above the silence in the dark the agonized, overflowing grief clashing with the wails.In every heart there is fire, in every silent hut, sorrow, and everywhere, a soul crying in the dark.It is dawn.Listen to the footsteps of the passerby, in the silence of the dawn.Listen, look at the mourning processions, ten, twenty, no… countless.Everywhere lies a corpse, mourned without a eulogy or a moment of silence.Humanity protests against the crimes of death.Cholera is the vengeance of death.Even the gravedigger has succumbed, the muezzin is dead, and who will eulogize the dead?O Egypt, my heart is torn by the ravages of death.
This abridged version of "Cholera" shows how using free verse helped the poet convey her message by using simple words that describe her feelings.In contrast to free verse, words cannot stand alone meaningfully in one line in standard poetry forms.For example, in this poem, we can see words stand alone in a single line carrying different meanings, such as, "it is dawn, cholera, silence, it is night."This could emphasize the importance of the word, which could not be used in the standard metric form.Further, the poem's theme, "cholera," would be difficult to present in traditional metric poem form since it is describing a daily life concern-therefore, it is more expressive to use easy-to-understand descriptive language without focusing on meters and rhythm.In her poem, Almalaika describes in detail how people have died because of cholera in her time, and she describes her feelings.Using free verse has helped her to end up with a good poem that expresses her feelings in words without affecting the meaning or style.As an example, she repeated the words "death" and "dead" more than thirty times in her poem, and that did not make the poem boring as it would have if she were repeating them in standard traditional Arabic poetry forms.
In one of her books, Nazik Almalaika said that after she heard on the radio that the death rate has increased as a result of cholera, she tried twice to write poems in traditional ways to express her feelings; however, she said that these poems could not fully express her emotions and feelings.Then she gave up and wrote her poem in free verse, which, as Moreh (1968) suggested, gives poets more freedom to express their feelings.Nazik Almalaika stated in her book that after she wrote her poem in free verse, she felt that she had done something great and that the poem did fully express her feelings.(Moreh, 1968) Oh Desert By Ghazi AlGosaibi Ghazi AlGosaibi (The Guardian, 2010) is a famous Saudi novelist, poet, politician and diplomat.The Guardian described him as a "Saudi politician and poet known for his modernizing spirit."He published nearly sixty books of poems, novels, and some volumes on politics and leadership.The Guardian suggested that one of his best-known 60 books was his novel Freedom Apartment.He expresses everyday issues in smooth and easy-tounderstand language.He wrote many love and descriptive poems.The BBC described his writing thus: "Despite his privileged background his poems reveled in images of a simpler, desert culture."He is a liberal writer who worked hard and fought for women's rights.All this background could tell us that he would be likely to use free verse in his poems, which he did use in some of them, although he also wrote in a standard, traditional form of poetry.All his writing was standard, not colloquial Arabic language.
In his poem 'Oh Desert,' he expresses his feelings and thoughts easily in a free-verse poem with no meter.He described how much he loved his home country after he traveled and lived in many countries to study and work as an ambassador.Getting rid of unnecessary chains, as Moreh (1968)   their actual meeting because of our affinity.Do you remember us setting together before the dawn!The stars were like a necklace between our hands.
We were speaking to the night about our story secrets.
The poet is Mohammed Almoqrn.He is a judge, and he works as a visiting university professor in different universities in Saudi Arabia.Although he is not studying or teaching literature, in 2014 his poetry book titled 'I speak to the night' was one of the best seller books in Saudi Arabia.The following analysis is based on selected poems from this book.In the above poem, the poet speaks about his beloved.He described how he missed her, and that life means nothing without her.What is important is that how he used language and different figure of speech which helped him to come up with very emotional love poem that people like.He used time and place reference to make strong connection between him and his memory with his beloved.The poet developed his poem around the chronotope of 'the poet's eyes and heart' as a place where his lover stays even if she is not with him, and 'the night' specifically 'before the dawn' as a time for their talking.
Using time and space references makes people feel that they are living the action and using free verse help him to convey this massage.In his poem, the poet used plural pronouns instead of singular pronouns to refer to singular person such as 'their' in the first line, 'them' and 'they' in the third line; he is refereeing to his lover.And 'our' in the third line is refereeing to himself.This kind of pronouns reverse is common in Arabic language to show respect and to highlight the importance of the one that speakers or writers are talking about or addressing.It is usually used in addressing important people like kings, presidents, minsters, chairmen etc.It is also used in poetry to show how important or how much you love the one you are talking about.The poet in his poem used this kind of singular plural pronouns change to highlight the importance of the relationship between him and his beloved.This choice makes the poem's language softer and it makes the poem carries respectfulness meaning, which is the meaning that most people like in any relationship.The poet chose his words and language in a very good and clever way that hooked the readers.
The poet also used a very good strong rhythm which certainly has a strong influence on readers as Hebron (2004) said: 'The anticipation of a rhyme word creates a sense of suspense in the reader or listener, thus adding a psychological drama to the act of reading'.He used metaphors a lot in his poems and in this poem the basic theme based on a metaphoric meaning which is 'the lover living in the poet's eyes and heart' to show how much he loves his lover and that he cannot forget her since she lives inside his eyes and heart.In other poem, he described 'pain' as if it is something growing inside us.He metaphorically describes pain as something that will continue and will never end since it grows and is still growing.
In another part, he said 'she used to end up my thirsty by love' he used metaphor to describe love as water who keeps people live.In his poem, he also said: 'I tried to collect my 'emotional' injuries, yet they spread around', this metaphor is showing how much pain he had.In one of his poems, the poet used a general metaphor 'life is a mirage'.It is a conceptual metaphor as Lakoff & Mark (2006) calls it.We could look at life and at mirage, we live them, we cannot hold both of them etc.Metaphor as Lakoff & Mark (2006) suggested structures how we perceive, how we think and what we do, so it is not a matter of language.In his poem, the poet is using people conceptual meaning that life cannot end, and that people run for it and whenever they think they achieve their goals they continue running to another one till the end of life.Lakoff & Mark (2006) stated that: 'the most fundamental values in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in the culture' which I found in the poems here.For example, the poet refers to future as something up, he said: 'the future is coming, and we will see and find good things.
Future in this metaphor is something in front of people.They are looking forward to finding it and to see what will happen.There is also a clear evidence of using 'good is up' metaphor.In Arabic language, good things are usually up, which are used a lot in poems.For example, the poet said: 'happiness is rising', 'your love rate is going up' 'my pleasure is rising' etc. Languages effect cultures and cultures effect languages, which will influence the way people think and behave.

Our Soul By Mohammed Almoqrn
Tell those who steal our souls, be careful.our souls have to be saved I told the judge about them.
Again, the poet is using plural pronouns to refer to himself and his beloved.'those' 'our' 'them' all of these pronouns are used to refer to singular nouns.It is, as I stated before, a matter of showing respect and high-status positioning.He is using unknown voice sentences in this poem, which is a literary style in Arabic language.It is used in written and spoken language.The unknown voice sentences style makes the reader feels that the writer speaking on behalf of him, which makes the reader live the action of the poem, novel, play etc. as if he is doing it.This style makes strong connection between the readers and the poet.It makes them read the poem in general social lens as if it is speaking generally for the whole society.Since Arabic people are in high-context culture where the way to say the words is more important than the words themselves, most poets and writers end up unconsciously using many different styles at the same time.People tend to relate things to each other to come up with the meaning or the gist.
The poet used intertextuality a lot in his poems.He used different types of intertextuality; he used it with religious texts, proverbs, previous poets or writer texts.Sami et al. (2017) defined intertextuality with religious texts as 'overlap of the original text of the poem with religious texts.On the other hand, they described literary intertextuality as: 'the existence of ancient or modern literary poetry, prose texts or figures (i.e.poets) in the text of the original poem so that the interweaved text in its fabric corresponds with the poet's own idea'.For example, in one of the poems he said: 'except in my prayer 'mehrab' place', he used the name of the prayer place, which is a religious reference where this name 'mehrab' is not used in everyday talk, but it is an expression from Quran.'jannet alkhuld' is another Quranic expression used by the poet which means paradise.In my 'right hand' is also another religious reference expression.
The poet said in one of the poems: Oh god what we can say You are so generous to us 'Forgive us' That is what we need The poet used quotation marks when he wrote the expression that means forgive us since it is intertextuality with religious texts.I think there are many religious and cultural references in the texts.One of the cultural references he used when he said: Oh doctors!How could you protect my beloved against 'sukari' !He used the word 'sukari' which means diabetes as a cultural reference since in Arabic people use the adjective of 'sugar' as a name of diabetes.Another example of using cultural references in his poem when he said: The 'ful' flower is so beautiful The poet referred to a specific kind of jasmine flower 'ful' that most people like and most poets used in their poems.This expression was not used only in poetry but also in many different kinds of literary texts.
In one of his poems the poet said: 'Sauhil' is that breeze is a sign of you or is it because of that someone is coming 'Sauhil' is a name of a star that most Arab poets, both standard and colloquial language writers, used in their poems.This is a strong cultural reference and intertextuality in his text.
The poet also used intertextuality with proverbs such as when he said, 'like the round moon'.He used this proverb which is used a lot in the ancient and modern Arabic poetry.This makes strong historical connection between people and the texts.
After analyzing his poems, we could find how the poet used his language in free verse in a way that is suitable for people culture.He presents his poems in uncomplicated language choosing good words and strong rhythm.There is historical depth in the texts and many signs of cultural effects which are clear in analyzing intertextuality and metaphors in his texts.

Conclusions
To conclude, Andrews (2016) described free verse as "in one sense, free verse is 'free' in a counter-positional way: it has broken free from the constraints of the metrical world.Most approaches to free verse prosody see it as an aberrational type of poetry that has eschewed regular rhythms and which, nevertheless, can only be explained in terms of regular rhythm or meter."In Arabic poetry, free verse can be explained as very different from regular rhythm and meter.Free verse allows more freedom of expression and a variety of choices to represent poets' actual abilities and experiences by using easy language, intertextuality and metaphors.
(Khaldi, 2020) The textual analysis concluded that free verse allows for greater freedom in expression and make it pleasant to read.The results showed that using free verse gives poets the freedom to express their ideas and feelings.Also, it allows them to use their own personal style of musical rhythms, to use different rhythms that fit their themes and to express their poetic experiences.Free verse enables poets to use new meanings, metaphors and intertextuality effectively.It plays a key role in Arabic poetry, and as Jawad (2014) stated, "the free verse movement liberated the Arabic poem from rigidity and conventionalism."This study has potential limitations, the sample texts could be more to represent many poets which would help to generalize the conclusion.Some suggestion for future studies is to examine those texts by using critical discourse analysis to study the social and ideological effects.Future studies could also make use of comparing languages and power on linguistically analyzing texts to see if language effects on culture, society and texts.
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I
've searched the world without finding land more barren, love more pure, or rage more fierce than yours.I came back to you, oh desert, sea-spray on my face; in my mind, a mirage of tears, a shadow moving in the sea before dawn and a golden flash of braided hair.On my lips, two lines of poetry a song without echo.I came back to you, disenchanted.I've found there's no trust between human beings.I came back to you deprived; the world's like a rib cage without a heart.Love is a word devoid of love.I came back to you defeated; I've been fighting life's battles with a sword forged from feeling.I came back to you…and laid my anchor on the sand.As I washed my face with dew it seemed you were calling me.Then you whispered: 'Have you come back to me, my child?' Yes…mother…I came back to you.A child, forever grieving, flew to God's countries; unable to find his nest, he came back to search for his life in you.I came back to you, oh desert.I've thrown away my quiver and ceased wandering, I dally in your night-web of mystery, breathing on the soft winds of the Najd the fragrance of Araar.In you I live for poetry and moons.
eye! you showed some of their love.But the most love is the one you did not show Ask them how they live in our hearts and in our eyes I thought that our hearts met before one year of https://amazoniainvestiga.info/ ISSN 2322-6307 This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).Reproduction, distribution, and public communication of the work, as well as the creation of derivative works, are permitted provided that the original source is cited.
https://amazoniainvestiga.info/ ISSN 2322-6307 This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).Reproduction, distribution, and public communication of the work, as well as the creation of derivative works, are permitted provided that the original source is cited.