The Poetics of the Hidden Rhythm in Salim Barakat's Flashes: The Five Hundred Shards as an Example

Abstract

This study addressed the analysis of the subtle rhythm in Salim Barakat's 'Flashes,' manifested in the parallelism between linguistic structures, such as the repetition of a specific structure or morphological pattern, as well as the juxtaposition between sentences, which includes the repetition of sentences in terms of their grammatical structure and the predication relations between them that determine the grammatical function, the variation in sentence structure significantly contributes to the rhythm of the words, we also investigate the visual formation techniques in the construction of his poetic flashes, which include the variation in line lengths, creating a mental rhythm, in addition to the distribution of poetic sentences and the phenomenon of white space on the page, the aim of this thesis is to highlight the rhythmic formation and the artistic aesthetics it reflects, manifested in the subtle rhythm, which contributed to enhancing poetic rhythm and creating an innovative, distinctive poetic text with a new spirit, the research problem arises from the nature of the 'Flashes' themselves, as they are characterized by brevity and density, necessitating a deeper analysis of their specific rhythm within this limited space, we also seek to shed light on the sources of beauty that stem from the internal harmony between letters, words, and poetic structures, and the distinctive rhythmic impact created by that interconnected unity, in our study, we adopt the poetic structuralist approach, which focuses on analyzing the structure of language, we also focus on linguistic phenomena, and through this, we aim to define the main concepts and fundamental criteria associated with this theoretical framework, among the most prominent findings of the research is that rhythm in modern poetry transcends overt meters to appear through subtle features such as parallelism, juxtaposition, and visual formation, Barakat used 'black and white' techniques to create a visual and auditory rhythm that enriches the meaning, furthermore, grammatical links contributed to enhancing this rhythm and giving his language a special coherence and beauty.