The Semiotics of Sea Significance in Mahmoud Darwish's Poetry

This thesis talks about the significance of poetry rhythm and its development in Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry. The thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, with an introduction, I displayed the meaning of the rhythm in lingual dictionaries and ancient Arabic tradition. Then, I gave an analysis to the rhythm image in the works of three Palestinian poets who lived with Darwesh and were his friends. In the second chapter, I discussed the rhythm image in Darwesh’s, and the traditional and modern meanings. I divided the development of the rhythm into six stages: the first stage has traditional meanings which he recited his poetry as previous poets in their beginnings. In the second stage, his poetic uniqueness and his special images appeared, and the stage expanded till the beginning of the third stage in 1982. The fourth stage expanded from ‘It’s a song, It’s a song’ Dewan to ’11 planets’ Dewan. The fifth stage started from ‘Bed of a female stranger’ and ‘Why did I leave the horse alone?’ The last stage includes ‘The wall’ till the last Dewan which was published after his death. The third and the last chapters focused on studying the most important distinguished writing techniques. The first half was for studying the significance of words. The second half was for studying the significance of images. After that, I added a conclusion summarizing the most important results that I came up with during the research. The importance of this thesis comes from taking care of the development of the significance of the rhythm in Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry during his full poetry life. A significance study based on the analytic method which depends on understanding the verse itself and analyzing its lingual significance. Although a lot of people wrote about Darwesh, this particular subject has never been discussed before in this deep and comprehensive way. One of the most important results that I came up with is how the rhythm was changed according to the period which the poet lived in. And it gained its privacy from Darwesh’s own experience, his child hood memories in Jaffa, his life in cities on the sea such as Beirut for a long time which was filled with events and his culture and knowledge in history and ancient myths. But Darwesh’s rhythm is still unique and special as the poet itself.