Aesthetic Dying: The Arab's Heroic Encounter with Death/ la Mort Esthetique: La Rencontre Heroique Arabe Avec la Mort (Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb's Poem "Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb Yarthy Nafsah", "Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb Mourning His Own Death) (Report‪)‬

Poets have come up with much verse that deals with death, whether of man (humanity), a relative, a friend, their own selves, and, even, their animals, places, and lost love (Luck; Ross; West, 3ff; Lyne, 201ff; O'Gorman, 105-9). Elegies and elegiac verse have occupied a considerable space in the poetry of mankind. Poets have employed elegies, lamenting lyrics, to express emotions of sorrow, despair, and woe, rendering their mourning into utterances carrying their personal bereavement in absolute sincerity of emotion. Grief, brevity, and sincerity are chief characteristics of elegies. For example, English poetry has known many elegies such as, to name few, Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" and In Memoriam, the latter a collection of over a hundred lyrics centering around the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, moving on to comments on human life and destiny. Of the other famous English elegies there are Matthew Arnold's "Rugby Chapel", a recording of grief on the death of his father, and Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", one of the most famous in English, where the poet passes from personal grief to pessimistic reflections on human life in general, such as matters of human suffering, shortness, triviality, and vulnerability of human life, and the futility of human ambition, philosophical and religious thoughts that find their way in most elegies (Ross, Lyne, O'Gorman). However, English literature has known a special kind of elegiac verse called 'pastoral elegy', in which the mourning poet puts on the attire of the shepherd as he mourns the death of a fellow shepherd, such as Edmund Spenser's "Astrophel", John Milton's "Lycidas", Shelley's "Adonais", Keats's "When I have Fears that I may Cease to be", and Arnold's "Thyrsis" and "Scholar Gipsy", notwithstanding the abundance of legiac verse in the eighteenth-century graveyard school of poetry. This tradition flourished among the Greeks in the works of Theocritus and Bions, and in the works of Virgil in ancient Rome. One major distinction to be assigned to pastoral elegy is that, as a work of art drawing on images of rural scenery and artificial conventions, it lacks genuine sincerity of grief and lament (Day, Luck, Ross, West, Connolly, Lyne, O'Gorman, Wyke 1989, Wyke 1994). Traditionally, in elegies poets pour out their frustrations, despairs, and anxieties and all nature joins them in the mourning of death, despite the fact that, mainly in pastoral elegy, death is celebrated as a natural matter that fulfills the course of the cycle of life and death in nature. And in general terms, traditional elegies argue the glory of the dead and the heaviness of his loss.