Technical Usage of Poem in Fiction; A Case Study of 'Risāla al-ghofrān'

Arabs had fictions from the antiquity that naturally emerged from daily events. While poems were a part of this reality, we can find clearly the old forms of news intertwined with poetry, so existence of the poems in Arab stories, added to their beauty. The interaction between poetry and fiction led to additional results manifested in the pleasure of listening to the story and preserving the story's spirit. Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Among medieval Arab prose writers, showed his interest in this overlap between fiction and poetry in his Resalat al-Ghufrān (The Epistle of Forgiveness). In Resalat al-Ghufrān the message and the event most often completed through the interaction between fiction and poetry. Therefore, this paper, with a descriptive and analytical approach, seeks to clarify the most important goals of Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī in the use of poetry in Resalat al-Ghufrān by examining the interaction between the story and the poetry. The results show that al-Maʿarrī's application of poetry in the structure of stories had artistic motivations, and so the explicit appearance of his poetry in the structure of the stories serves its role in completing the events. This kind of explicitness of poetry is sometimes abundant and sometimes low or moderate. His poetry is sometimes devoid of the context and meaning of the story, so that its removal does not harm the meaning, but this kind of removable poems with no effect on the meaning are rare.