Religion and Myth in the Poetry of Yūsuf al-Kḫāl

Yūsuf al-Kḫāl is one of Lebanon’s leading poets as well as one of the five poets of the Tammūzī Movement. Al-Kḫāl guided the foundations of this movement with his translations of the poetry of American and Western poets. The Tammūzī poets viewed the similarities in the sociopolitical depression situation with that in the Arab world as well as ways to be free from this situation, especially in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” and they were hopeful for the future. Thus, belief in resurrection was the most prominent feature in al-Kḫāl’s poems, and the function of the myth of the fertility god Tammūz in al-Kḫāl’s poems was, similar to others’ works, seen to express resurrection and rebirth. They blended this myth with legends from their own cultures under the leadership of Western names such as Eliot and Sir James Frazer and gave new meanings to mythologicalelements. References to the Old and New Testaments are frequently seen in Yūsuf al-Kḫāl’s poems, which are fed by the myths of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Greek civilizations. Especially in his poetry collection Al-Bi’r al-Mahjūra [The Abandoned Well], which this study will discuss, al-Kḫāl reveals the relationship between religion and myth by equating humans with the messiah and Tammūz with God. The concepts of bread and wine are frequently seen in al-Kḫāl’s poems, sometimes to criticize and sometimes to give hope. This study will briefly mention al-Kḫāl’s life and the poetry movement in which he took place before going on to interpret within the scope of the concepts of death, resurrection, rebirth, and fertility such religious symbols such as the Messiah, bread, wine, Abel, Cain, and Abraham and mythological elements such as Tammūz, Adonis, Astarte, and Baal that are found in al-Kḫāl’s collection that was later published in 1958.