A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

THE ROMANTICS 132

the poet as a solitary figure in the dark, 'singing of his hopeless passion' (pp.

196,348).

Naji is undoubtedly one of the most attractive love poets in modern

Arabic: in his poems he covers the whole range of the emotion of love, from

the most passionate adoration of the beloved, in which both the physical and

the spiritual meet in a manner similar to the John Donne of The Ecstasie, to

pure romantic idealization, in which the woman who is the object of love is

placed beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, from joyful fulfilment to utter

despair. The sheer delight in love can be felt in poems such as 'A New Joy'

(p. 125) or 'The Farewell' (p. 181), where he writes:

Has love ever seen people in such ecstasy as ours?
How we created mansions of fancy around us.
Walked together the moonlit road
With joy scampering in front of us
And when we looked covetously at the stars
They came down to us and became our own
Like children we laughed together
And raced till we outran our own shadows.
In 'The Dream of Love' his happiness is such that he says
I cry for fear lest our love be a dream, (p. 264)
One day of happiness with his beloved 'brought together all the scattered
joys in the world and gave them to him'; it was not a mere day like any
other; it was a whole life-time and even more.
On the other hand many poems lament the dying of love or the unhappy
state of the lover, including "The Lyre of Pain' (p. 44), "The Cairo Nights'
(pp. 139ff.) and 'The Mirage Poems' (pp. 55ff). The last of these poems,
which is divided into three sections or poems ('At Sea', 'In the Desert' and
'In Prison'), records the shattering effect of unhappy love: his beloved has
now become an unattainable object like a star in the night sky for which he
still yearns. life to him now seems like a desert with its deceitful mirage,
and in it human beings are lost and thirsty. In the first section of the poem
the three themes are introduced: life as desert. Me as sea, and life as prison.
They are then picked up later and developed in the three component poems
almost as in an orchestral piece of music. The three themes continue to
intermingle in the structure and imagery of the whole poem in an emotional
and alogical manner. 'The wide sea, the lonely sky and the silent infinity' all
weigh down upon the poet's heart and he now feels the expanse of the open
space to be no more than a prison. The poet complains: 'In my soul night
set in long before it was night time' and 'Inside me a wintry sky, with dark