Book: The Prophet

Overview
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet unfolds as a sequence of 26 poetic addresses delivered by Almustafa, a seer who has lived among the people of Orphalese for twelve years. On the day a ship arrives to carry him back to his birthplace, the townspeople gather at the city’s gate and along the shore, asking him to speak one last time on the matters that shape their lives. Each request becomes a meditation, on love and marriage, children and giving, work and joy, pain and freedom, reason and passion, beauty, religion, and death, forming a gentle arc from first attachment to final release.

Frame and Structure
The book’s frame is a farewell. It casts the teachings not as doctrines to be imposed but as gifts offered at parting. A seeress named Almitra prompts the first discourse; others, priests, merchants, judges, laborers, mothers, call out in turn. Almustafa answers in lyrical prose that blends parable, aphorism, and metaphor, often balancing opposites. The sea and the ship recur as symbols of homecoming and the soul’s larger journey, so that each topic feels both practical and sacramental, addressed to daily life yet constantly pointing beyond it.

On Love, Marriage, and Children
Love, for Gibran, is an austere teacher. It exalts and wounds, threshing the heart so it may become bread for the sacred feast. Marriage asks for closeness without possession, “let there be spaces in your togetherness”, so that two oaks may grow in sunlight rather than cast shadow upon one another. Children are life’s longing for itself: they come through parents but do not belong to them; parents are the bows, children the living arrows that fly toward a future the archer alone can see.

On Work, Giving, and Joy and Sorrow
Work is love made visible, a way to weave oneself into the city’s fabric and worship through craftsmanship. Giving should be free of calculation, like a tree that shares its fruit because it is full. Joy and sorrow are not rivals but twin measures of the same cup; the deeper sorrow carves the vessel, the more joy it can contain. The book returns to this law of complementarity again and again, refusing to separate what the heart experiences as one.

On Freedom, Reason and Passion, and Self-Knowledge
Freedom is not merely the casting off of chains but the refusal to carry them within. Reason and passion are the rudder and the sails; the soul needs both to voyage truly. Self-knowledge arises when one listens for the tides moving beneath speech and custom; the wise teacher does not carve himself into pupils but leads them to the threshold of their own minds.

On Beauty, Religion, and Death
Beauty is a light in the heart, a presence rather than an ornament; one sees it most clearly when one becomes it. Religion is not confined to rites, for prayer is the expansion of the self into the living ether; it is also the earthward body of love, enacted in humility and service. Death is not an extinguishing but a unsealing. To contemplate it is to know that life’s stream seeks the sea, and that the veil between departure and arrival is thinner than fear can admit.

Departure
Having poured out his counsel, Almustafa boards the ship at dusk. He entrusts the city to its own ripening and asks the people to remember not his words but the love that bore them. The vessel slips from the harbor, and the prophet, facing the open water, dissolves into the horizon of his longed-for home, leaving Orphalese illuminated by the very questions that summoned him to speak.