Faith & Spirit Quote by Kahlil Gibran

Restlessness is the engine of this line: love not as reassurance, but as a pursuing dream that can never quite afford to arrive. Gibran stages intimacy as a paradox. The speaker insists on sameness ("What difference is there between us") then immediately introduces the only difference that matters: an inner, unsettled longing that haunts him while remaining frightened of the beloved. It is a clever emotional maneuver, both tender and self-protective. By calling the desire a "dream", he aestheticizes it, making yearning feel noble rather than needy. By making it "restless", he admits the ache is chronic, not a passing mood. By giving it fear, he shifts responsibility away from the beloved and onto the speaker's own psyche.

The subtext is restraint disguised as devotion. The line flirts with confession but refuses the risk of direct contact. The dream "follows my soul" suggests fate, obsession, even spiritual vocation; "fears to come near you" suggests the beloved is not safe terrain - not necessarily cruel, but powerful enough to disrupt the speaker's carefully curated interior world. It's also an argument: we are essentially the same, so why does my longing have to keep its distance? The question form presses for permission without asking outright.

Context matters with Gibran: a diasporic writer steeped in Romantic and mystical registers, composing in an era that prized the soul as a real landscape. His lovers often stand in for the absolute - beauty, God, an ideal self. That makes the fear feel less like social timidity and more like metaphysical awe: the dream can't approach because contact would turn poetry into ordinary life, and ordinary life can't hold what the speaker wants to keep infinite.