SHUKRI 101it be that the poet was suffering from a homosexual passion? This is not
at all a fantastic theory, although Shukri's general tendency to use the
traditional Arabic masculine pronoun in his love poetry cannot help us to
decide either way. However, we do know that Shukri never married, and
what is more interesting, there is a morbid fascination with death and the
gruesome aspects of physical decay and dissolution in practically all his
love poems, especially where beautiful women are mentioned.
In the powerful poem 'Beauty and Death' (p. 115) the poet, troubled and
unable to sleep, sees in the dark of night a vision of his recently dead
beloved, but as he embraces her she once more dies in his arms, her
beauty vanishes and her flesh disintegrates, leaving behind a skeleton
smelling strongly of decay. The image of the poet kissing a dead corpse
occurs again in his poetry ('Memories', p. 162). In "Women in Life and in
Death' (p. 13 2) he sees the ugly and the dead behind the beautiful and living,
expressing a somewhat diseased sensibility:
They rose, swaying in their clothes in the dark nights.
After they had become food for worms ...
They came in the dark, and struck the eyes of beholders with disease.
Echoing the shrieks of owls till the air grew sick.
Wearing their shrouds for modesty, lest their ugliness be seen.
Alike in death and in life they hide defects that make their modesty a
mockery.This hysterical, melodramatic and rather nightmarish vision brings out the
strong connection in the poet's mind between beauty and decay and his
ambivalent attitude towards women. In his prose work Kitab al-Thamarat
(Book of Fruit), a book ofmeditations sometimes couched in poetic prose,
on man, nature, society and art, some of which are close to the themes of his
poetry, Shukri defines love as 'an animal whose upper half is a beautiful
woman and whose lower part is a serpent'.^41
Nearly every poem on love and beauty ends with thoughts on death.
Examples are so many that they can be chosen at random. One poem is given
the title 'Love and Death' (p. 211); others, like 'Beauty, the Mirror of Nature'
(p. 216), 'Love's Paradise and Hell' (p. 218) and The End of Love' (p. 223)
and 'After Beauty' (p. 268), all - and particularly the last two - show the poet
unflinchingly facing the most unpleasant aspects of physical decay. "Would
we were' (p. 257) begins with:
Would I were a breeze and you a bloom
We would then love one another for ever
We would neither quarrel nor part.
Would I were a meadow and you the rain.