# Poetry — Character guide

> Key figures in Poetry by Ameen Rihani.

- [Unknown Narrator](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters/unknown_narrator.md): This speaker moves through the collection as mourner, pilgrim, and prophet—kissing a dead friend's brow in one poem, passing a secret cup to a blind medieval poet in another, and watching the White Way's electric towers 
- [Allah](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters/allah.md): Addressed directly in 'Prayer in the Desert' and hymned in 'The Song of Rain,' Allah appears less as doctrine than as the force that answers thirst—'a little rain, a little rain' becomes the refrain of a whole parched pe
- [Alcazar](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters/alcazar.md): Personified as a woman of shifting moods—her throne shared by bard and saki, her feet hennaed, her gardens forever blooming—Alcazar carries the memory of Arab Spain at its most sensuous and precarious. The tension lies i
- [Zahra](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters/zahra.md): In the 'Al-Zahra' section she stands as the counter-argument to mere glamour: neither Orient rhapsody nor fickle rumor could prolong her reign, only the maxims her sovereigns wrought and the midnight oil Averroes burned.
- [Khamsin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters/khamsin.md): Khamsin moves through the poems as both destroyer and herald—passing in phantasmagoric waves over shifting dunes, through shattered orbs and barren caves, yet carrying a message of renewal rather than ruin. The tension i
- [Hanem](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters/hanem.md): In 'Water and Flowers' she is the counterweight to the desert's vast hungers—a presence whose nearness turns verdure into an arbor for love and water into a place of blessing. The tension is between restless questing and
- [Beauty](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters/beauty.md): An abstract personification of beauty, treated as a character.
- [Lebanus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters/lebanus.md): A personified mountain or figure of Lebanon.
- [Averroes](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters/averroes.md): The medieval philosopher, referenced as a symbolic figure.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_2_se/characters