Background and Purposes: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has become an influential interdisciplinary approach in contemporary language and literary studies because it treats discourse as a form of social practice shaped by ideology, power relations, and culturally produced values. Despite the richness of research conducted on contemporary Arabic poetry, many of these studies remain confined to purely aesthetic analyses or stylistic descriptions, marginalizing the connection between linguistic structures and the socio-ethical functions arising from poetic discourse. Meanwhile, Jasim al-Sahih, an innovative Arab poet, raises themes in his works whose ideological and social layers require deeper investigation. This study examines Al-Sahih’s poem “The Color Green in the Bouquet of the Spectrum” (Akhdar al-Alwan fi Baqat al-Ṭayf) using Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA. The purpose of the study is to discover the constituent components of humanistic discourse in this ode, analyze the mirrors reflecting this discourse, and explain the position of the text in the contemporary cultural-social context, relying on Norman Fairclough's model, in order to understand how literature, as a tool for promoting human values, rises in opposition to discourses of domination or violence.
Methodology: The research follows a descriptive-analytical approach grounded in Fairclough’s CDA framework: description (text), interpretation (discursive practice), and explanation (social practice). At the descriptive level, the analysis focuses on lexical selection, semantic fields, cohesion (repetition, parallelism, and reference), and syntactic patterning, alongside rhetorical strategies such as metaphor, symbolism, and imagery. At the interpretive level, the poem is treated as a discursive practice produced and received within modern Arabic literary culture; attention is paid to the poem’s implied audience and to intertextual resonances with Arabic poetic heritage that supply shared symbolic resources. At the explanatory level, the findings are related to wider ethical and ideological structures, clarifying how the poem proposes a moral horizon, constructs a collective standpoint, and negotiates contemporary experiences of crisis without adopting direct political declaration or slogan-like language.
Results and Discussion: The analysis shows that the poem builds a coherent semantic network organized around life, renewal, hope, creativity, affection, and human solidarity. Key lexical items function as privileged signifiers, notably “green,” (akhdar) “letter,” (al-harf) “spring,” (yanbu) and “kindness” (al-atf). These terms are not merely denotative; they are discursively invested with ethical value. “Green” symbolizes vitality and regeneration, opposing emotional barrenness. “Letter” exceeds the mere linguistic unit and figures the generative power of language: poetic speech as a means to preserve memory, counter distortion, and reshape perception. Through these choices, the poem privileges life-affirmation over resignation. A second mechanism is evaluative contrast. Oppositions such as life versus falsity, sincerity versus distortion, tenderness versus violence, and collective growth versus fragmentation structure the poem’s moral universe and guide the reader’s positioning. Importantly, these contrasts are not argued explicitly but embedded in imagery, sequencing, and tonal shifts. The ethical stance is produced indirectly, through symbolic alignment and affective suggestion. In CDA terms, the poem “naturalizes” compassion, authenticity, and shared responsibility as the most reasonable horizon of feeling and thought. Metaphor and imagery serve as key discursive technologies. “The spring of metaphors,” “the fingerprint of falsity,” and “a house of love” condense complex ethical meanings into memorable forms. Falsity as a “fingerprint” suggests trace and contamination; love as a “house” implies shelter and shared dwelling. Thus, metaphor is not ornamental; it structures moral vision and increases persuasive potential while preserving poetic openness. Repetition strengthens cohesion and intensifies thematic emphasis. It is both mnemonic and ideological: stabilizing what the poem foregrounds as valuable and aligning reader attention with its humanistic center. Repeated collective expressions build an inclusive “we,” shifting the poem toward communal consciousness. Syntactically, the poem favors active constructions and affirmative declaratives, foregrounding agency. Frequent first-person plural forms (e.g., “we grow,” “we unite,” “we liberate”) construct a collective speaking subject, framing ethical renewal as shared practice. Interrogatives appear at moments of pain, violence, and existential uncertainty, functioning as reflective prompts that disrupt complacency and invite critical self-examination, transforming the reader into an implied participant in meaning-making. At the level of explanation, the poem situates within contemporary Arab experiences of insecurity, symbolic injury, and struggles over truth and representation. Yet the poet avoids direct political naming, choosing symbolic indirection that broadens the poem’s address and prevents reduction to a single event. This enables the poem to operate as cultural “soft power”: an ethical intervention resisting violence and falsification through imaginative re-description. Intertextual resonance with Arabic tradition strengthens legitimacy, but tradition is reactivated—not mechanically repeated—to support a modern humanistic project of dignity, empathy, and moral reconstruction.
Conclusion: The study concludes that “The Color Green in the Bouquet of the Spectrum” is governed by a dominant humanistic-ethical discourse promoting hope, compassion, solidarity, and resistance to deception and brutality. This discourse is produced through symbolic lexical selection, evaluative contrast, metaphorical structuring, strategic repetition, and collective syntactic positioning. The poem presents language itself as an ethical resource capable of rebuilding meaning when social life is threatened by falsity or violence. Finally, the study demonstrates that Fairclough’s CDA model is productive for contemporary Arabic poetry because it connects micro-textual choices to macro-level ethical implications while preserving the specificity of poetic form.