The speaker falls into silence, too, and if Eliot’s voice and the ghost “trod the
pavement in a dead patrol,” al-Baymtl’s persona suffers similarly, “We were
following the steps of the dead crowd.”^47
Indeed, Dante and al-Ma‘arrl, the great masters for Eliot and al-Baymtl,
were drawn upon, identified with and manipulated in oblique addresses
against the modern scene. Both represent the dynamic in tradition for
the ephebes, but they also act in the present against its lack of soul. They
were recalled for appropriation in a dynamic reading that raises questions
about the role of memory in poetry, about what to recall and what to ignore.
Both wrote on memory, its benefits, limitations, and restrictions.
When translated and discussed by the Palestinian Lebanese Tawflq Xmyigh
(d. 1971),^48 Eliot’s The Four Quartetsdid not leave an immediate strong impres-
sion on young poets who had already searched for the new and the challenging
in every poetry, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Russian, Spanish, French, or Anglo-
American.^49 Nevertheless, for al-Baymtlthe dilemma of exile, memory, and new
attachments involved him in further experimentation and appropriation of new
material, The Four Quartetsincluded. Memory could lead back to nostalgic rec-
ollections, as his poem the “Jur.” (Wound) demonstrates. That poem sounds as
a further elaboration on the persona’s musings in Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” for the
whole drive there is, in Gregory S. Jay’s words, “to reject the notion of memory
as nostalgic recollection and to repudiate thinking of the future as if it were
simply perpetuation or recovery.”^50 It also endows memory with another func-
tion, beyond time limitations or spans, through a counteracting poetic endeavor,
a transfiguration of experience into a new pattern beyond experiential loss:
This is the use of memory
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past....... see now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self, which as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
(“Little Gidding”)
Certainly, al-Baymtl’s fight against memory in order to begin anew also entails
recognition of aspiration and failure, expansion and limitation. In “’Nlad wa
a.tariq bi-.ubbl”/ “I am Born and Burn in My Love” (1975), loss of love as
a transfigurative act or a spring for creativity means a fall, a trap, and a lack
that equals sterility:
Exiled in my memory,
Imprisoned in words,
I flee under the rain.
(Pt. V)^51THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION