ABU SHADI 125haps one of the finest poems in modem Arabic, and deserves to be much
better known, the physical and spiritual sides of love are completely fused
together. 'Souls, like bodies', he says, 'are subject to hunger and thirst.'
In kissing her I kissed my dreams and phantoms of spring;
When I embraced her I held in my arms the most precious
light granted by a gentle god.
My soul was not satisfied, my heart did not cease to beat fast.
Greed upon greed, world without satiety or end.
Till when her garment fell off (who knows? perhaps by design)
Love rushed to Beauty, enfolding and protecting its dominion.
What lights, what hues are these bestowed by the Bounteous Lord I
Is it in this image that a painter draws bliss from the heavens of art? ...
She smiled and sighed, a combination of light and fire.
In turn she yielded and resisted until in the end she acquiesced.
So I knelt down before her, greeting from a distance my own
enchanting Aphrodite,
My poet's eye brimful with every passion I felt.
I gazed and gazed at her form, so lovely and bashful,
And suddenly the true meaning of life was revealed to me
(For life does not show its secret in all living things alike).
I drew closer and knelt, taking my cue from her languid eyes.
I found them filled with the vagrant dreams of love;
I peered and peered into them, stealing their secrets,
And a tremor went through my body as though it had collected
their honey.
We were two souls created inseparable, like light and heat,
Mingling in love, and both were satisfied.
At their embrace immortality was gained.
And when they parted their lives were no longer part of life...
Like a mystic in the zeal of his devotions I exhausted her,
The union of our bodies was like communion with God.
The sanctity of physical union could not be more forcefully or unambiguously
expressed. Yet at the conclusion of the poem night falls and the poet is un-
certain whether what he is describing is a real experience or simply a vision
created by the poetic imagination, and the borderline between reality and
unreality vanishes. This is a love poem of remarkable subtlety which ends
with a metaphysical statement. Another striking poem is 'Nefertiti and the
Sculptor',^28 in which we come across the intimate connection in Abu
Shadi's mind between art, beauty and love; it is by means of love that the
artist perceives and recreates beauty, of which the supreme example is
woman. Hence the idealization of woman who becomes an object of love
and adoration for the artist. This theme Abu Shadi returns to later in 'Pyg-
malion' (1942), although by now there is less of the celebration of the pleasure