رثاء المدن في الشعر العربي الحديث

This research examines the phenomenon of city elegies in contemporary Arabic poetry and compares it with city elegies in classical poetry, focusing on the evolution of elegiac poems in terms of ideas, style, and the events accompanying the destruction of Arab cities due to local and international political, religious sectarian, and natural causes. The contemporary poems reflect these events, including forced displacement, seismic disasters in northern Syria, southeastern Turkey, Morocco, Libya, and most recently Gaza, as well as the destruction and genocide witnessed in Syria and Iraq, affecting specific cities and altering their original populations. The history of elegy poetry is closely linked to the introductory verses celebrating ruins (mukaddimetü't-talliyye), which serve as the initial kernel of elegiac poetry, an authentic theme in Arabic poetry. Themes of loss, death, and annihilation are evident in the original elegies of the pre-Islamic period and evolved into elegies for wellknown cities and capitals such as Baghdad and Basra during the Abbasid era. This authentic art form continued to develop in Andalusian literature and subsequent known literary periods up to the present day. In light of the structure of the elegy, which is based on the sincerity of emotion, this research investigates what distinguishes contemporary city elegies from their predecessors. The contemporary elegy has preserved its genuine emotion, sometimes intersecting with thought and imagery, while differing from earlier works in terms of imagery, structure, style, and the use of artistic language, as well as the selection of contemporary vocabulary and expressions in suitable contexts. Contemporary city elegies also contain symbols and meanings related to the poet's experience