MAZINI 105case he finds himself slipping into monorhyme in eleven consecutive lines (p.
91). The poem which adheres to the monorhyme and monometre remains
Shukri's norm.
Stylistically, too, despite the profound influence of English Romantic
poetry on him, Shukri's style remains in many respects traditional: the vocab-
ulary is still quite difficult, requiring a glossary, and the verse does not flow
smoothly enough for the particular themes it tries to express. As has already
been mentioned Shukri addresses the beloved in the traditional masculine
form, and occasionally uses conventional love and desert imagery. He has an
unmistakable tendency to express himself in generalizations, sentiments
and moral precepts in the manner of traditional gnomic verse. Once or twice
when as a young man he talked about his great ambition he struck the note
of traditional boastfulness (fakhr) (pp. 46, 55). He sometimes complains of
his times in the manner of Mutanabbi, and even in a poem expressing ennui,
a specifically modern disease, we hear verbal echoes from Mutanabbi's verse
(p. 161). It is true that Shukri can attain a high degree of lyricism, as in his
most accomplished poem 'The Bird of Paradise' (p. 266), but this does not
happen frequently enough. On the contrary, he can easily descend to the level
of what is largely poetry of mere statement, even in a poem about a Romantic
theme, as 'The Ideal' (p. 460), which is an unabashed defence of the infinite
inner world of dreams and the imagination against the drab and limited ex-
ternal reality.Mazini
The subjective element in Mazini's poetry is paramount: in the whole body of
his collected poems there are no more than four poems dealing with themes
of public interest.^44 His poems have an atmosphere of romantic sadness; in
them the poet complains, in the manner of Shelley, of the world, of life and of
time. They are after all mostly poems of adolescence.
Mazini wrote about 'The Faded Rose', Dead Flowers'. 'The Dying Poet',
'Life is but a Dream'. In the second volume of his D'xwan (1917) a whole sec-
tion, including no less than twenty-eight poems, is devoted to the subject
'Reflections on Solitude'. Typical of Mazini's work is the long poem in the
first volume (1913), Munajat al-Hajir (To a Mistress who has Deserted Him),
which, we learn from 'Aqqad, was partly inspired by the Abbasid poet Ibn
al-Rumi.4S In this poem, which contains more than 200 lines and a single
rhyme throughout, the poet deals with a number of his favourite themes,
ranging from unrequited love, the worship of beauty and the devotion to
poetry, the lover seeking comfort in nature, especially its wilder aspects, his
loneliness and despair and his welcoming of death.