The Analysis of Semantic Fields of Death in Labid bin Rabieh's Poetry

One of the most important subjects that has occupied man’s mind, particularly scientists and poets, is the question of death. Death as the greatest event in man’s life was a great concern to Arab poets before and after Islam too. An example is Labid bin Rabieh, the Arab poet of the pre-Islamic (Jahili) era, who composed many poems on death. Thus, a close reading of his collection of poetry will prove the semantic fields of death to be dominant in the works of this death-minded poet. This paper seeks to examine all death-related-words such as “al-mawt”, “al-maniyyah”, “al-hatf”, “al-himam”, etc. based on famous dictionaries such as Lesan al-Arab and Mogam al-Maghaeis, with their implications within the context of the poems. This research also studies the symbolic (marked/unmarked) use of words in the death semantic field, thus concluding that the poet is greatly capable of summoning proper diction.