THE ROMANTICS 124Light is, in fact (like 'thirst', 'exile' and 'fire') one of the dominant and re-
current images in his verse. Mutran realized this early in the poet's career
with the result that he called him 'the Poet of light'.^2 * In The Beginning and
the End'.^23 he says that he worships light and adores its inspiration, for
it is the finest expression of the Creator, and adds:
From light we began, to light we return.
The world is made with minute waves of light.This last statement turns Abu Shadi almost into a pantheist. There are
indeed many instances in his verse which seem to indicate that at least Abu
Shadi the poet held a pantheistic view of the universe. Kamal Nash'at col-
lected some of these instances which pointed to the poet's belief that all parts
of the universe are related to one another by means of love and that the entire
universe is a manifestation of God. He concluded that Abu Shadi's pantheism
explains his deep love of nature and his adoration of woman. The latter is
particularly fitted to be a symbol of divinity, for besides being an expression of
the spirit of God as much as any other element in the universe, she is the
source of man's life, affection and love and is therefore the most sublime
symbol of God.
This attitude to woman Abu Shadi seems to have arrived at very early in his
career (even before his apparent pantheistic position was fully developed): in
1910 he wrote: 'woman deserves not only to be respected but also to be
worshipped body and soul.'^24 It was confirmed later in his life: in the poem
'The Disguised God' from the collection Spring Phantoms (193 3) he writes that
divinity has assumed the form of a beautiful woman so that 'in worshipping
her we only worship the God of life in his visible sign'.
Yet unlike Shukri, Abu Shadi does not rum woman into a purely spiritual
entity: her body no less than her soul is an object of his almost mystical
adoration. In his view the female is the finest expression of beauty in nature.
He was always fascinated by the female nude (usually against a background
of the sea) and he wrote many poems inspired by paintings of nude women, a
rather daring theme for the generally conservative Muslim society that Egypt
was at the time, and it was no doubt just as much a source of some of the
hostile criticism that his poetry met with as his liberal use of Greek mytho-
logy.^25 In 'My Paradise', a poem of a strikingly lyrical quality, he says that the
meadow, birds on trees, the babbling brook, the roaring sea and its cleansed
pearls, the honey of bees, the refreshing rain after drought, the spring sun, the
whole world with its people and their achievements — all these things put
together are worth no more than 'an atom of the unique beauty of his be-
loved'.^26 In another equally lyrical poem, Wanton Beauty',^27 which is per-