'AQQAD 109Despite some obscurities this little-known poem is perhaps Mazini's most
mature work. Considering its length, its vocabulary is largely straightforward,
apart from words used mainly for the exigencies of the monorhyme. The
theme of the poem is a problem, akin to that which faced the aged Yeats:
an old man troubled with his lust and his fascination with the world of the
senses, his love of beauty and beautiful young women. Should the poet not
find solace and satisfaction in wisdom and the 'monuments of unageing
intellect', as befits an old man, or should he give in to the urge of his instinct
and the call of the world of the senses? The poem, as the title suggests, is a
debate in which the balance between the two attitudes represented by the
Poet and his Soul is nicely maintained, although the Poet ends with the re-
fusal to create idols of the sages of the past to worship them, and instead
calls upon his Soul to 'worship the Truth, not those lips that murmured for
a while, then grew tired and soon shut up' (p. 277).
'AqqadLike Mazini, but not quite to the same extent, 'Aqqad wrote mainly about
himself, his emotions and attitudes. He did occasionally turn to public
themes: he wrote on national leaders such as Muhammad Farid and Sa'd
Zaghlul, on disasters like the death of a large party of Egyptian students
in a railway accident in Italy, and important events like the abdication of
Emperor William II. Volume iv of his Diwan (1928) which has a larger num-
ber of poems on public themes, opens with a poem welcoming the return of
Zaghlul from exile in 1923, followed by a long work of 187 lines in mono-
rhyme and comprising fourteen sections, which is an elegy on Zaghlul, re-
vealing the extent of hero worship which he, in common with many of his
generation, felt for the national leader. Like Shauqi he wrote political and
moral exhortations to the Egyptian people in which he could be just as direct
and his language just as much a language of statement.^48 In 'Glory and
Poverty' (p. 53) he laments the wide gap between the rich and the poor.
'Aqqad wrote descriptive poems on the remains of ancient Egyptian civiliza-
tion such as Anas al-Wujud and the Statue of Ramses II, which are not very
different from similar exercises in purely external description by neoclassi-
cists (pp. 28, 195), although his poem on Karnak (p. 270) is closer to Mutran's
"Baalbek' in that it ends with a subjective meditation. In 'Cinematograph'
(p. 62) we find the naive approach to modem inventions, revealing the poet's
childish wonder at such miracles of science or technology which we associate
with the work of some neoclassicists. 'Aqqad can also be a stern moralist, as
in his 'The Lesson of Beauty' (p. 36) or 'Pharoah's Column' (p. 37), where he
draws an obvious contrast between man's ephemeral and fragile existence