SHUKRI 95a tyrant. He calls his story 'a tale with a moral'. The next narrative poem,
entitled 'The Lover of Money' and given the subtitle 'How women are
deceived', tells the story of a man who has been professing his love for a
wealthy woman he is courting, but who ruthlessly spurns her once he learns
of the loss of her fortune (pp. 19, 22). He warns against the danger of despair
and preaches the need for resolution (hazm), a recurrent word in his poetry
which is imbued with a spirit of stoicism (p. 40). Yet in the entire volume
there are no more than the handful of poems listed above on public themes,
and of a poem like 'The Lover of Money' more than one-third is taken up by
a long detailed description of the background of nature against which the
story takes place. Nature and the poet's subjective emotions, his thoughts
and his attitudes provide the main themes of the vast majority of the poems.
In 'A Stranger's Nostalgia at Sunset' the sight of sunset arouses feelings
of sorrow and nostalgia both in the stranger and in the poet. Nature acts as a
catalyst for the poet's identification with the stranger, thereby emphasizing
his feeling of alienation from his society. This is how Shukri describes the
poet or creative writer:
At home and amidst his own people he lives like a sad stranger...
Nought in his heart but love, sorrow and anger against these
untrusted times (p. 2 5).Shukri can be more cheerful, as in his description of the sea or his hymn to
the sun at sunrise (pp. 27, 33), but the mood is generally a sombre one; even
when nature has a liberating effect upon the poet as in 'The Meadow at
Night'. In 'The Garden' we are told that 'unlike man's joy the joy of the
birds is unmixed with sorrow' (72,37). In 'Complaint against the Times',
one of many plaintive poems, the poet is in a state of near despair in which
he is 'spurned by God's mercy while being so young' (p. 40), for such is the
lot of poets, as he says in 'The Poet and His Beloved': God has ordained that
'sweet hope flees from a poet's thoughts just as a healthy man flees from a
leper' (p. 49). The theme of the lover as a worshipper of beauty already
appears here in 'The Worship of Beauty' (p. 63). There is a large number of
short poems in this volume, expressing meditations and aphorisms mainly
about love and the sufferings of the lover mostly couched in conventional
idiom, and the volume ends with a long poem in whaPhe describes as shi'r
mursal (blank or rhymeless verse), entitled 'Words of Passion', and containing
his observations on various causes of the poet's sufferings and his reflections
and aspirations towards a higher and happier state of affairs in the world,
in a rather prosaic language which is not characterized by its verbal felicity
(p. 85).