A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

SHUKRI 103

and betraying his low opinion of men, for it shows the persistence of human

greed and strife when the bodies, risen from their graves, quarrel over the

missing limbs and parts on the Day of Resurrection.

In 'Ideas Beyond the Reach of Words' (p. 21), as the title suggests, Shukri

deals with the mysterious aspects of the psyche which cannot be logically dis-

cussed or formulated in words:

Part of the soul they are and how can the soul be seen by the physical

eye?

You know them only when your wakeful heart is fortunate enough to feel

them.

They are often attained by the one who keeps silent, for silence yields

much eloquence and is full of peace

The soul speaks only to those who listen in humility.

These unknown and 'virgin' regions of the soul had a deep fascination for
Shukri, as they did for his Romantic successors. He even wrote a poem en-
titled 'To the Unknown' (ila'l majhul, a word which became very potent in
romantic vocabulary) (p. 396), which shows this fascination (the patently
didactic and moralistic prose introduction to the poem in which he links this
passion to the healthy and useful scientific curiosity was added more than
twenty years later). In 'The Marriage of Souls' (p. 392) the soul of each indivi-
dual is felt to be an island, a terra incognita, a painful mystery and a riddle
yearning for communion with its like through love, without which it be-
comes an arid desert without water or vegetation. In 'In Paradise', a poem
seen by one scholar to be intimately related to D. G. Rossetti's The Blessed
Damozel on the one hand and to the Moslem tradition of the Heavenly Bride,
houri, on the other, the poet cannot be happy if he is divorced from his soul-
mate.^42 Hence the poet's constant quest for the ideal object of his desire.
'The Poet and the Image of Perfection' (p. 130) depicts a poet who in the pur-
suit of the ideal (which is ultimately Perfect Beauty - the creation of his
imagination) is lured to his destruction (p. 130). Abdul-Hai thinks this poem
is inspired by Alastor:

As in the case of Shelley, the theme of Shukri's poem is self-alienation and

the pursuit of a perfect image of the self which, in spite of its evasive nature,

is the only means of attaining self-authenticity. It is not so much a pursuit

of Ideal Beauty as an attempt of the mind to counter self-alienation by an

image which the mind itself has evolved.^43

This may be so, but arguably the poem is also a variation on the theme of La

Belle Dame Sans Merci. Imagination is regarded as a tool of insight into a

higher order of reality — a reality, however, which may render those who