space to accommodate populism with a tinge of Anynn Sa‘mdah’s (d. 1949)
ideology of regeneration.^24
We will open our hearts to the flood,
dive in the mud and strip pebbles
and clay from the eyes of the floating;
we will whisper in their veins that we
have made the ascent,
emerged from the cave,
and changed the course of time.
(Ibid. 160–61)This redefining stance is not smooth, and the mythical patterns underlying
his early Tammnzlpoems of cyclic regeneration gives way in the 1960s to
a poetic aesthetic of Sufi and Surrealist dimensions. Another of his poems,
“Al-Yarlq” (“The Road,” 1965),^25 stands for the nascent effort to free the
poetic impulse from new idols, but it may stand as well for the new
consciousness, the second awakening of the early 1950s with its aspirations,
hesitations, unfinished aims, and amateurish politics. The composite nature
of the poem, its accommodation of the religious and the pagan, and the escha-
tological and the ideological, is worth noticing, as it reveals a mind poised at
crossroads between the old and the new.
O road, which refuses to begin:
We were a face upturned
to the day, and loved the living presence—
In our land, there was a God,
forgotten as soon as he drew apart,
and we burnt behind him the waxen Temple and all our oblations.
Now in the absence we have formed
an idol of dust,
and pelted it with sanctities
on the road which was about to begin.
O Road, you do not know where to begin.
(Ibid.)These modernist recapitulations take issue with signs of dormancy and
stagnation, and raise the level of discontent to a questioning note which looks
upon the new poetics as a rediscovery of language and culture at large. In an
article on “Poetry and Apoetical Culture,” Adnnls looks upon the whole
moment of anxiety as one of revelation, for “Language has become a raw
material to be transformed. The poet has become a manufacturer who trans-
forms words into a product: the poem.”^26 The implications of this notion
are far-reaching, as the innovatory stance means freedom from hegemonic
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS