On Children by Khalil Gibran

ON CHILDREN

Khalil Gibran

The poem On Children by Khalil Gibran offers a critical analysis of the usual expectation of parents about their children and urges them to introspect. The poem On Children is the selection from the work ‘The Prophet’. The poet asks the parents to guide their children with love and care, not to impose their ideas and dreams on them.

The poem is in the form of conversation between the mother and the prophet. The central theme of the poem is the children, who do not really belong to parents. It is the fourteen line poem where it enlightens the parents about their children and role as parents.

A mother comes to the prophet and asks him to speak about the child. The prophet tells the parent that they are not the owners of their children. They have come to this earth as Life’s longing for itself and are born as sons and daughters and are created by parents. So the parents should not be possessive about their  children.  They have only a biological bond with the children. The parents duty is to give love and encourage them to go on the right path. They should not try to impose their ideas on their children. Parents feel that the children are the medium to get over their imperfection of life. But the poet makes the parents to realise that each child has its own uniqueness and creativity. They should be let free to explore and learn from it. A child’s physical appearance might resemble like its parents but this doesn’t mean that he/she is a ‘puppet’ of parents. Children are the future and the future cannot be stagnant. Parents must allow the child to grow and not to control their inner potentialities. Life does linger and parents should let their children to build their future. As parents are the past, children belong to the future.

For instance, the parents of Siddhartha tried to restrict him to have contact with the society and its suffering. If he wouldn’t come out of his restrictions we would not come out of his restrictions we wouldn’t have got such a great personality and his words of wisdom.

The poet effectively used the metaphors of ‘Bows-Arrows-Archer’. Here ‘Bows’ stand for parents, ‘Arrows’ for children and ‘Archer’ for God. The archer bends the bows and sends the arrows into infinite path. The parents serve as an instrument to help the child to reach the destination. They are just a ‘guiding star’ like the star that guides ship to reach its destination. As Shakespeare says , ‘Life is nothing but drama and we are merely the actor’, which justifies the idea of the past. The Archer loves parents who give their children strength and freedom to grow and to lead fruitful life. The poet asserts the fact that as he loves the arrows so he loves the bow.

Hence the parents should take the trouble take the trouble, difficulties, scarifies and compromise attitude in a glad way, so that it would bring a smile on the face of child and a fruitful future. At the end, it gives us effective message that the arrows will be the bows in future. So even children must be alert when they take any step in regard to the parents , as the saying goes,’ History always repeats.’

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