The duality of youth/old age and the attitude towards time: A reading of the poetry of Ibn Khafaja Al-Andalusi

Abstract

The youth/old age dichotomy creates an outstanding feature in  the poetry of Ibn Khafajah al-Andalussi.  The poet does not express the dichotomy casually but rather emphasizes, in most of his poems, that  it is tied up to every topic he tackled, leading thus to different perspectives which create the poet's view of existence and his stand regarding time. This study attempts to shed  light on poems dominated by this dichotomy, or phenomenon,  through a close  consideration of some poems in order to discover the semantic and artistic perspectives imposed by this temporal question on the poet's experience.