without lapsing into pathetic fallacy, al-Sayymb gathers devices and images of
anticipation and sorrow which he animates as childhood recollections. Nature
is animated through this association, too. He makes his journey into the self
while traversing the present scene of rain, river, sea, and life in the south of
Iraq. The child who giggles and the child who cries for his mother are the
two sides of al-Sayymb’s childhood. The mixed significations of rain, its
portents and gifts, danger and beauty, gloom and sunshine enable the poem
to traverse different conditions and states. This mixed register emerges through
human intimations, childhood responses and recollections. Al-Sayymb’s naslbis
the more effective as the invoked female is anonymous, available for further
poetic transference whenever the poet commingles the land and the woman
into one single image of a charming woman in distress. The poet hides behind
anonymity while gathering a poetic subtext of mixed emotions. Between the
sadness of children and their giggling, he invokes the scene of rain:
In the hour before dawn
Your eyes are two groves of palm trees
Or two balconies
Passed over by the moon
When your eyes smile, vines flower
And lights dance...like the reflection of the moon in the river
Disturbed gently by the movement of oars
In the hour before dawn,
As if stars throbbed in their depths.
The stars drown in a mist of sorrow,
The sea opens its arms
In the warmth of winter, the chill of autumn,
Embracing death and birth and darkness and light;
the shiver of a sob wakens in my soul
and a wild ecstasy courses through me, reaching the sky-
The ecstasy of a child who fears the moon.
Smaller clouds are lost in the heavy dark clouds
Which, drop by drop, disperse in rain;
the children’s giggling in the grape arbors
tickles the silence of the sparrows in the trees.
Then comes the song of the rain.
Rain...
Rain...
Rain...Rain assumes a mixed register as concomitant with Islamic tradition, for there
is repeatedly a rain for retribution in the Qur’mn, “sm’a mayaru al-mundharln”
(Snrat al-Naml, p. 58; and al-Shu‘arm’, p. 173) evil will be the rain for the
warned. In reality, rain also causes floods and consequent suffering and
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS