ABSTRACT
Flecker’s poem comes at the end of his play Hassan, when the ‘great summer caravan’ leaves Baghdad ‘for the cities of the Far North East, divine Bokhara and Happy Samarkand’ (p. 169). One group of travellers are pilgrims who are hoping that they will find ‘a prophet’ who ‘can understand why men were born’ (p. 181). There are also poets, merchants, Jews, as well as the professional guides and camel drivers, and each group has its own reasons for travelling. In this way they resemble the disparate origins of those who set out to do research.
