The Manifestation of the Implied Reader in “The Wine Ode” and “The Music of Poetry”: A Study of Ibn al-Farid and al-A’sha’s Anacreontic Verses

Reader-response theories, as a modern type of criticism, open new horizons of aesthetics of literary texts to us. Emphasizing the role and importance of the audience, these theories examine how the literary text and the reader are related. One of the terms specific to these theories is the “implied reader.” This reader, as the link between the text and the actual reader, provides the means to analyze their interaction. In this paper, the context of the emergence of the “implied reader” in Ibn al-Farid’s “The Wine Ode” and al-A’sha’s “The Music of Poetry” is examined. The former is a spiritual and encoded Anacreontic and the latter is a material one. It is argued that whereas wine in Ibn al-Farid’s poem is the center of gravity of his hymn and the implied reader is totally mesmerized by it, the implied reader of al-A’sha’s poem does not consider the centrality of the poem to be wine itself, but its effects and pleasures. On the other hand, the implicit readers of both poems are interested in music, but each in their own type of music. “The Music of Poetry” is, more than anything, a reflection of the life, soul and emotion that the poet has prepared his poetry for; each component of it has to be is in harmony with the whole matrix of the work. Its Anacreontic music is soft and gentle while the other, that is “The Wine Ode,” moves toward an orgy. Although we sometimes see common musical allegories in the poems, in general, and considering the rest of the allegories, it turns out that despite their few resemblances, each has a different geometry, and all their differences and similarities do not indicate the superiority of one over the other; rather, they demonstrate that each adopts a unique system of music in accordance with its own implied reader’s demand.