It is not strange that a researcher in our current era would tend to study the poetry collection of a poet whose name became prominent and famous in the Abbasid era; it is the golden age that was rightly considered the era of prosperity and progress on various levels, whether scientific, intellectual, literary, or other areas of life, state, and society. It is the era that witnessed a true revolution in the processes of composition, documentation, translation, transfer, and Arabization; many of its scholars and writers were characterized by diversity in culture, depth of thought, and the ability to create, innovate, and renew, in addition to the diversity in the purposes, topics, or forms they addressed. It is also not unusual for a researcher today to seek to shed light on an important aspect of the intellectual, human, and philosophical aspects that were prevalent at that time: the aspect of old age and death or gray hair and death. On the one hand, it is a very sensitive topic that cannot be absent from the mind of a rational, thoughtful, and insightful person for a short time. Rather, it is the most pressing concern for every person who has advanced in age and has become aware of the dangers of death and the nearness of the end. On the other hand, it is a stimulus for creativity, a summary of thought and experience, and a mirror that reflects the prevailing philosophy of that era. The poet Mahmoud Al-Warraq was one of those few Abbasid poets who excelled in addressing this topic and left clear fingerprints in its field that are remembered by the history of literature, its critics, and researchers in it to this day. This is what led this study to address it and no other.

The Abbasid poet Mahmoud Al-Warraq is known for his wisdom, preaching, and asceticism. In fact, anyone who reads his poetry can easily ascertain this because of the dominance of this intellectual system in most of the pages of his collection. Within this system, the idea of death emerges in him and becomes one of the most important topics of his poetry, and it is remarkably compatible with the idea of old age and what is related to it. Together, they form an important duality that reveals his philosophy in life and his relationship with God, religion, and society. They also reflect, in one way or another, an important intellectual and religious revolution that occurred in his life. On the other hand, although the intellectual aspects mentioned draw attention to the abundance of the presentation, the beauty of thought, and the importance of the subject, or otherwise, what is striking is the artistic style with which Al-Warraq treated his ideas, and he expressed a clear ability to use the various elements of artistic depiction in a way that serves his ideas and is consistent with the importance of the aforementioned subject.

Although this study is not the first in the field of literary or critical studies that aim to address the aspect of asceticism, preaching, and wisdom in Mahmoud Al-Warraq’s poetry, it is the first, in view of what has been presented, that specifically addresses the part of old age and death in his poetry, considering its two sides as an integrated objective duality. Based on what has been mentioned above, this article will seek in the following few pages to address the topic of old age and death in the poetry of the Abbasid poet Mahmoud Al-Warraq with the aim of identifying its most important points and encompassing its most prominent features and characteristics, as it will try to shed light on the esthetics of thought and rhetorical imagery that have emerged in it.

If we want to talk about the details of the study, it is possible to say that it was organized according to the mechanisms of the descriptive approach, as it began with the first section, which is a theoretical introduction that briefly introduces the poet Mahmoud Al-Warraq. It became clear through research in literature and heritage books that there is little information that addresses his personality and the stages of his life, in contrast to the presence of a lot of information about his poetry and thought. The introduction also addressed the duality of old age and death in Arabic literature very briefly for representation, not detail, so it presented some of its famous evidence from Arab poetry. The study moved to its second section to address the specificity of thinking and its esthetics in the poetry of old age and death. This was presented according to three main axes: The first axis showed the details of Mahmoud Al Warraq’s transition from a reality of rejecting, denying, and condemning old age to a reality of accepting and submitting to it. This transition can be explained by the change in Al-Warraq’s relationship with religion and God from one stage to another in his life. As for the second axis, it presented the connection between the topic of old age and death and the topic of asceticism in his poetry, and he detailed this through five main points: the first is preaching, guidance and wisdom; the second is alerting the heedless to the nearness and inevitability of death; the third is belief in God’s decree and destiny; the fourth is appreciating good deeds; and the fifth is condemning the world and inclination toward it. The strength and depth of the connection between asceticism and the topic of death became clear, while The third axis is Al-Waraq’s negative view of hair dye, and he considered resorting to it in many of his poems as weakness and worthless futility. Subsequently, the study moved to the third section, which sought to highlight the esthetics of artistic poetic imagery in Al-Waraq’s poetry, which was addressed from the rhetorical aspects. He addressed examples of poetry about old age and death, which included different rhetorical types of simile, metaphor, and metonymy. It became clear that Al-Waraq sought simplicity, clarity, and accuracy in his imagery, in line with the approach of preaching and guidance that he followed. Finally, the study concluded with a conclusion that presented the most important results that were obtained.