The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Prophet
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The Coming of the Ship
Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn unto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth.
And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool, the month of reaping, he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward; and he beheld his ship coming with the mist.
Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul.
Almustafa has not yet gone down to the harbour. The people are still in the fields and vineyards, and the ship is a shape in the mist. The complete text is free to download.
Download Full EPUB1923
~12,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 40 minutes
Standalone
The island city of Orphalese, by the sea
26 prose poems
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
9.98 MB (EPUB) · 10.01 MB (AZW3) · 9.99 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #58585
The Prophet is a book of twenty-six prose poems that Kahlil Gibran published in 1923, when he was forty and already known in New York as a painter and a writer in Arabic and English. A prophet called Almustafa has lived twelve years in the island city of Orphalese, waiting for the ship that will take him home. On the day it comes, the people gather in the square and ask him to speak before he goes. His answers, on love, marriage, children, giving, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, trade, crime, freedom, reason, pain and death, are the book.
No plot holds these chapters together. A frame does: the hill outside the walls, the crowd in the square, the ship at anchor, the farewell from the deck. Gibran wrote in English, in short lines that keep the cadence of Arabic prose poetry, and drew the twelve illustrations himself. The book was slow to find readers in 1923, then steady, then enormous: 12,000 copies in 1935, at the bottom of the Depression, and 240,000 in 1965, at the height of the counterculture. It has never been out of print. See Wikipedia’s article on The Prophet for its publication history. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #58585.
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran: Summary, Characters & Themes
The Prophet is a summary and analysis of a book that tells no story. Almustafa, a prophet, has spent twelve years in Orphalese, an island city that is not on any map, waiting for the ship that will carry him home. On the day the ship comes, he climbs the hill outside the walls to see it, then descends into the great square, where the people ask him to speak before he leaves. He answers in twenty-six short chapters, each one a question from a tradesman, a priestess, a merchant or a hermit, and each answer an address rather than an argument. There is no plot to follow and no character who changes.
The book is by Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese-American writer and painter who had already published two English books before this one. The form is simple and hard to name. It is not a novel: there is no antagonist and no continuous action, only a speaker, a crowd, a ship and a day. It is not quite a sermon either, though its frame is a farewell. Gibran called the pieces prose poems, and they keep the cadence of Arabic prose poetry in English sentences built from short clauses and repeated phrases. The questions arrive in the order of a life: love, marriage, children, giving, food, work, sorrow, houses, clothes, trade, crime, freedom, death. The answers do not build on one another; each is complete, and the book can be opened at any point.
In the first chapter the ship comes in with the mist, and the book ends in mist. Between those two weathers, Gibran keeps to a small set of images: the sea, the shore, the wind, the seed, the lute, the bow. Love is a threshing-floor where the lover is beaten to whiteness; children are arrows and their parents the bow; death is standing naked in the wind. The farewell is the most moving chapter of the book and the least doctrinal: “A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.” Almitra, who first believed in him, does not cry at the end; she stays on the sea-wall, looking after the ship.
The book arrived quietly. Alfred A. Knopf published it in September 1923, with twelve drawings by the author, and the first printing sold slowly. Then it began to double: annual sales reached 12,000 copies in 1935, in the middle of the Depression, and the millionth copy was sold in 1957. In the 1960s the growth became something else again, 111,000 copies in 1961 and 240,000 in 1965, as a generation that distrusted institutions took the book as a portable wisdom of its own. Gibran had been dead for thirty years by then. The Prophet has never been out of print, and it has been translated into more than a hundred languages. By 2012 the American edition alone had sold more than nine million copies.
Kahlil Gibran was born in Bsharri, in Mount Lebanon, in 1883, and emigrated with his family to Boston in 1895. He studied art in Paris, settled in New York, wrote in both Arabic and English, and died in 1931, at forty-eight, before the book had become the property of everyone. Because The Prophet appeared in 1923, its United States copyright expired on 1 January 2019, and the text on this page is in the public domain there. Wikipedia has the life and the rest of the work, and the transcription this edition is built from is Project Gutenberg #58585. Two older books on the same search are The Divine Comedy and The Iliad. It is Gibran’s best-known book, and the one that made his name.
Historical Context
The Prophet belongs to the Mahjar, the writing that Lebanese and Syrian emigrants produced in the United States in the early twentieth century. Gibran was part of the New York circle that founded the Pen League in 1920, and he wrote this book in English while most of his friends wrote in Arabic. The group wanted Arabic prose to carry the rhythms of poetry, and Gibran carried that ambition into a second language, where the same cadence had to be rebuilt out of plain English words. The New York of those years was full of Arabic newspapers and debating rooms, and the League met in the apartments of its members.
The country the book leaves behind had just been through the First World War, the famine in Mount Lebanon and the end of Ottoman rule. Gibran’s family had emigrated in 1895, and he saw Lebanon again only briefly, as a young man. Orphalese is a city of the imagination, but its harbour, its emigrant’s goodbye and its longing for a birthplace come from his own life. The harbour in the first chapter is therefore not a setting but a memory of departure. The name he gave the prophet, Almustafa, is Arabic for the chosen one, a sign that the book’s wisdom was meant to be at home in more than one language.
The book also belongs to New York in 1923. It appeared from Knopf without fanfare, in a decade when American readers were buying Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and it made its way as a gift rather than a sensation. Its survival owed less to fashion than to form: a short book of plain sentences that could be pressed into a friend’s hand. It sold as a gift book for decades before critics took it seriously, and that history is part of how it reads now. The clean electronic text here depends on its arrival in the public domain on 1 January 2019.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Almustafa: The prophet of the title, called “the chosen and the beloved”. He has waited twelve years in Orphalese for the ship that takes him back to the isle of his birth. He is less a character than a voice: he answers every question put to him and turns each one back on the asker, so that the city ends by describing itself. At the end he asks whether it was he who spoke, or whether he was also a listener. Nothing of his past is given beyond the twelve years.
- Almitra: The seeress of Orphalese, who had first sought and believed in him when he had been but a day in the city. She speaks for the people, asks him to disclose them to themselves, and puts the first and the last question, about love and about death. She is the book’s second voice and its only named woman, and she is the one figure still on the sea-wall after the ship has gone.
- The people of Orphalese: The chorus of the book: a ploughman, a mason, a weaver, a merchant, judges, a priest, a hermit, a poet, and a woman with a child at her breast. Each brings the trade or the trouble of a life, and their variety is the point: the wisdom is asked for by ordinary work rather than by disciples. None of them is named except Almitra, and their questions are the book’s table of contents.
- The ship and its mariners: The ship that comes in with the mist, its patient pilot and the mariners who have heard the choir of the greater sea. They are the call home, and they wait at anchor while the prophet speaks. Their patience sets the book’s clock: they arrive in the first chapter and weigh anchor in the last, and the pilot never once asks him to hurry. The mariners are men of his own land, and their waiting is the book’s quiet joke about time.
- The city of Orphalese: Walls, a temple, a great square, fields and vineyards beyond the gate, and a sea-wall at the edge. The city is not a place on a map but the shape of a community: the crowd that asks, the priests who bless, the traders who set their scales. It is a city of gates, and the prophet’s farewell is a lesson in leaving one. The fields outside the gate belong to it as much as the temple does, which is why the farewell can promise a return.
- The vast man: The book’s largest archetype appears only in the farewell: the vast man in whom the citizens are cells and sinews, like a giant oak covered with apple blossoms. He is not a character but the image of what a crowd becomes when a prophet has looked at it closely, and the reason the farewell can praise the people without flattering them. The prophet has loved the whole body, not the parts.
Core Literary Themes
- Love as a discipline that wounds: The chapter on love does not console. Love crowns and crucifies; it gathers the lover like sheaves of corn, threshes him to make him naked, sifts him free of his husks, kneads him until he is pliant, and sets him as sacred bread on the feast. What loves only its own peace is told to leave the threshing-floor, because love gives nothing but itself. The lover’s only instruction is to bleed willingly and joyfully.
- Work as the test of love: Gibran refuses the split between the labour of the hands and the life of the spirit. “All work is empty save when there is love”: to weave with threads drawn from the heart, to build as though a beloved would live in the house, to sow and reap as though a beloved would eat the fruit. Drudgery becomes the measure of devotion, and the ploughman’s question the book’s most practical one. Work done without love is bread that feeds but half a person’s hunger.
- The self as a sea without a shore: Knowledge of the self is the book’s quiet centre. The soul unfolds like a lotus of countless petals, and the seeker is warned against saying that the truth has been found: there are many truths, and the soul walks upon all paths. Nothing in the book is finished, including its wisdom, and the farewell repeats the point: what seems most feeble in a person is the strongest and most determined part of him. The reader is left there, not at a conclusion.
- Death as going home: The last chapter calls death a standing naked in the wind and a melting into the sun. Life and death are one, as river and sea are one; the fear of death is the trembling of a shepherd before a king who means to honour him. This is why the book is read at funerals as readily as at weddings: it treats the end as a return rather than a loss, and asks the reader to open his heart wide unto the body of life.
- Joy and sorrow as one well: The book refuses to rank them. The same well fills laughter and tears; the deeper sorrow carves, the more joy the cup can hold. Joy is sorrow unmasked, and the two sit at one table, one awake and one asleep on the bed. A person is suspended between them like a pair of scales, and only emptiness is balanced. The cup that holds the wine was burned in the potter’s oven before it was filled.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Prophet?
Because the book is short and is read the way poetry is read: a chapter at a time, over years. This edition keeps all twenty-six pieces as separate sections with a working table of contents, so the chapter on death is one tap away on the day it is needed, and the farewell can be found without scrolling through the rest. The file is small enough to keep on a phone for the years it takes to finish.
The file is built for e-readers rather than scanned: chapter breaks that survive a font change, clean typography, no page images and no OCR errors. The same text opens on a phone, a Kindle or a Kobo, and it carries no DRM. Nothing stands between the reader and the book except the file itself, which is what an e-reader edition should be. The typesetting is quiet enough to read for an hour without noticing it.
Read it as a book of 1923, as an emigrant’s goodbye, or as the bedside book it became. The text is given without an introduction, so the first reading is the one Gibran intended. The summary, characters and context on this page can be read beside it, not in place of it, and the chapter notes are here for the second reading rather than the first. None of them is repeated in the file itself, so the book stays the book.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #58585 — the complete text, unabridged, with the chapter headings the author set.
- Complete text, no abridgement: The opening scene, all twenty-six prose poems and the farewell from the deck, as Knopf printed them in 1923.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB: One download per format, so the book opens properly on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and other readers.
- Free and DRM-free: Public domain in the United States, with no account, no sample chapter and no lock on the file.
- The Divine Comedy — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Iliad — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Time Machine — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The Prophet runs to twenty-six prose poems and about 12,000 words, some forty minutes of reading. The summaries below keep the order of the book, from the arrival of the ship to its departure.
- The Coming of the Ship: Almustafa, twelve years in Orphalese, climbs the hill outside the walls and sees his ship coming in with the mist. Joy goes through him, then sorrow: he has scattered too many fragments of himself in these streets to leave without a wound. The people come out of the fields and vineyards and gather in the great square. The elders ask him to stay a little, and the priests say that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. Almitra the seeress asks him to disclose them to themselves before he sails.
- On Love: Almitra asks first about love, and the answer is the harshest in the book. Love crowns and crucifies; it gathers the lover like sheaves of corn, threshes him to make him naked, sifts him free of his husks, kneads him until he is pliant, and sets him as sacred bread on the feast. Love that seeks only its own peace is told to leave the threshing-floor. Love gives nothing but itself, and the lover is asked to bleed willingly and joyfully.
- On Marriage and Children: Asked about marriage, he does not bless a bond but asks for distance inside it: spaces in the togetherness, a moving sea between the shores of two souls, pillars that stand apart. The strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. A woman with a child at her breast asks about children, and the answer turns the family inside out: “Your children are not your children.” They come through their parents but not from them; the parents are the bow, the children the living arrows.
- On Giving and Work: A rich man asks about giving and is told that giving possessions is small, and giving of oneself is the whole. An old innkeeper asks about eating and drinking, and the board is made an altar. A ploughman asks about work, and the answer turns on a single condition: all work is empty save when there is love. To weave cloth as if a beloved would wear it, to build a house with affection, to bake bread with the heart: that is the labour he blesses.
- On Joy and Sorrow: A woman asks about joy and sorrow, and he refuses to rank them. The same well from which laughter rises was often filled with tears, and the deeper sorrow carves into a person, the more joy the cup can hold. Joy is sorrow unmasked; the two come together, and when one sits at the table the other is asleep on the bed. A person is suspended between them like a pair of scales, and only emptiness is balanced.
- On Houses and Clothes: A mason asks about houses, and the house becomes the larger body: it grows in the sun, dreams at night, and is endangered less by weather than by comfort, which enters as a guest and ends as a master. A weaver asks about clothes. They conceal much of the beauty and none of the unbeautiful, and modesty is a shield against eyes that would not see. He would have the people meet the sun and the wind with more skin and less raiment.
- On Buying and Selling, Crime and Punishment: A merchant asks about buying and selling, and is told to sanctify the scales: the earth yields her fruit, and the exchange must be in love and kindly justice or it leads some to greed and others to hunger. A judge asks about crime and punishment, and the answer spreads the guilt through the city: no one does wrong without the hidden will of all, the murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder, and remorse is the justice already at work. A lawyer asks about laws, which are sand-towers built by children at the edge of the sea.
- On Reason and Passion, Pain and Self-Knowledge: An orator asks about freedom, and is told that the freest among the people wear their freedom as a yoke. A priestess asks about reason and passion: they are the rudder and the sails of one seafaring soul, and the ship that trusts only one of them drifts or stands still. A woman asks about pain, the breaking of the shell that encloses understanding. A man asks about self-knowledge, and is warned against claiming to have found the truth rather than a truth; the soul unfolds like a lotus of countless petals.
- On Teaching, Pleasure and Beauty: A teacher asks about teaching, and is told that no one can reveal anything except what already lies half asleep in the learner’s own knowledge; the wise teacher leads the student to the threshold of his own mind. Friendship, talking, time, good and evil and prayer follow in the same register: thought is a bird of space that a cage of words cannot free, and evil is good tortured by its own hunger. A hermit asks about pleasure, a freedom-song that is not freedom. A poet asks about beauty, which is not a need but an ecstasy.
- On Religion, Death and the Farewell: An old priest asks about religion, and he answers that he has spoken of nothing else: daily life is the temple, and a faith that does not break into acts is a murmur. Almitra asks the last question, about death. Life and death are one, as river and sea are one; to die is to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun. Then Almustafa goes down to the deck, tells the people that the wind bids him leave and that he will return with the tide, and sails. Only Almitra stays on the sea-wall.
The Prophet: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Poetry Classics · Classic Fiction
