The poem "They Corrupted the Salt" by Emirati poet Abdullah Al Hadiya rests on an intense imaginative energy that makes the figurative image far more than a mere aesthetic device — it becomes a means of revealing an intellectual stance. Whoever reads the poem senses, from its very first lines, a clear capacity to construct evocative images that transcend direct meaning into broader symbolic spaces, drawing on the possibilities of language, its structures, and its fine rhetorical details:
Where are those who departed into the night behind them?
They passed by the lote-tree of the Bedouin and moved on.
They offered their sacrifices to yesterday and were divided,
Before the circumambulation — neither lost nor arrived.
The poet's skill is not confined to inventing images; it extends to the manner in which he shapes those images within the linguistic fabric. His choices of singular and plural, of fore-grounding and deferral, appear to be part of the text's semantic construction rather than merely incidental stylistic devices — for the idea alone does not make the poem; it is language that makes it, when it grants the idea its affecting form. Among the most striking passages in the poem is this couplet:
Their pulpit still ruminates from a language
Whose tables of copied phrases have grown repugnant.
In this image, the poet endows the pulpit with the attributes of a living creature that ruminates food, forming a compound metaphor suggesting that the discourse issuing from those speakers is nothing but a tedious repetition of exhausted ideas that have lost their power to persuade or create.
The poet's skill in deploying the rational metaphor is evident here: he attributes the act of rumination to "the pulpit" rather than to the actual speakers. This formulation serves not only an aesthetic function but lends the scene far greater expressive force, so that the reader feels the repeated discourse has filled the entire space until the pulpit itself seems to be speaking, chewing over its own words.
The choice of the singular in the word "their pulpit" carries additional significance: although the poem speaks of a group, the singularisation of the pulpit implies that all their voices issue from a single source and echo a single discourse, as though all difference among them has entirely vanished.
Likewise, the phrase "ruminates from a language" conveys a sense of the rumination's continuity and recurrence; the preposition "from" carries a sense of partial extraction, implying that the act of consumption renews itself repeatedly in the vocabulary and structures of language, until the language itself becomes a victim of this repetition.
In the second hemistich of the couplet, the technique of fore-grounding and deferral emerges as an artistic device with a marked semantic effect: "the copied tables" are brought forward ahead of the grammatical subject, seizing the focal point of attention and making the image more present in the reader's mind, reinforcing the sense of revulsion at the reality the poet is criticising. Nor does the poet limit himself to condemning the discourse; he makes stagnation an attribute of the place itself. The image grows denser still in his lines:
The udders of their rhymes have dried up over a homeland
Whose eyes have scattered from the shards of its gate.
Here the rhymes are transformed into a nursing creature whose milk has run dry and whose gift is spent — a felicitous metaphor that encapsulates the meaning of creative sterility and the decline of the capacity for poetic and intellectual fecundity. It is an image that fuses aesthetic sensibility with critical significance simultaneously.
Such tightly woven images reveal a poet who possesses a deep awareness of language's expressive capacities and knows how to turn the poetic image into an instrument of vision. The images in the poem appear not as mere rhetorical ornament but as active elements in the construction of a critical stance that confronts stagnation and imitation, and calls for values more intimately connected to life, creativity, and renewal.