THE PRE-ROMANTICS 106Mazini translated or adapted a number of English poems (by Shakespeare,
Milton, Waller, Burns, Shelley, Hood, Morris, Edward Fitzgerald and James
Russell Lowell). His borrowings or plagiarisms from western writers have
become notorious ever since Shukri pointed out some of them in the intro-
duction to volume v of his Collected Works.*^6 Mazini's interest in the wilder
aspects of nature, which 'Aqqad praises in the introduction to the first
volume of his Diwan," betrays at least in part the influence of eighteenth-
century English ideas on the Sublime. This influence, which he shares with
'Aqqad, was at times reinforced by that of the traditional pre-Islamic conven-
tion of writing about atldl, (ruins). This is clearly seen in a poem like 'The
Deserted House' which is among the poems singled out for praise by 'Aqqad
(p. 29). In 'Agitation of the Soul' (p. 42) the poet likens his heart to 'a ruined
cave on the summit of a high cuff, a playground for the winds' and himself
to 'a rock in the midst of the sea of events against which beat the surging
waves'. The experience with its horrifying components is melodramatic and
hysterical, and the voice is loud and shrieking. Mazini seems to pile up vio-
lent, grotesque, dark and terrifying images in an attempt to evoke a 'sublime'
atmosphere. In 'The State of the Agitation of the Soul initsRepose'(p. 76)the
poet encounters a mad lover on a dark winter night while the winds are how-
ling by a raging sea, and the lover intends to bury himself alive in the tomb of
his beloved. We read that 'the winds were, as it were, lamenting the departure
of stars which had been destroyed by the dark, and the sea responded by the
roar of its surging waves'; that 'the demons of the dark were chanting through
the winds' and that the mad lover had a tearful eye, an aching heart and a
fearful lustre in his eyes which shone on that night, while his lips were
trembling as he told his woeful tale. In 'Reverie' (p. 93) the poet writes: 'I
heard a clamour in the dark, as if wolves were being tortured at night', the
scaring noise robbing people of their reason, echoing throughout the waste
land making the poet feel as if he was surrounded by corpses of dead men. In
'The Sea and the Dark' (p. 132) the poet complains, Darkness before me, dark-
ness behind and darkness in my heart. Where then can I flee?'
No doubt the poet's feelings of despondency and despair which are expres-
sed in many poems besides, such as 'Meditations in the Dark' (p. 167) and
'Desolation of Life' (p. 194) in terms which are patently melodramatic, are
partly a consciously adopted posture, in which suffering is cultivated for its
own sake, and which is the result of the poet's excessively solemn self-image —
all the more surprising in a man who eventually proved to be one of the great-
est humorists and masters of the ironic style in modem Arabic prose. The
concept of the poet as primarily a man of sensibility who wrote about his
suffering is uppermost in Mazini's mind, perhaps even more so than in those