NAJI 133clouds but without rain, sterile they are in the regions of my soul'. His sense
of exile returns, and once more he feels he is a stranger in his community
and even in life. His rebellion goes beyond society and acquires a meta-
physical dimension, becoming a rebellion against the human condition
itself. The third of these poems opens with the poet addressing himself:
O prisoner of life, how can you escape? Night and day have bolted their
gates.Even if the gates of the prison were opened and the prisoner was allowed
to roam freely anywhere on earth, the poet asks where he could go, since
'his steps were heavy with despair' and he is in fact imprisoned within his
soul, his chains coming from within himself: 'In vain do I try to flee from
myself'. Naji's rebellion, however, never extends to a revolt against God
or to a denial of His existence. In 'Clouds', when the poet rails against his
fate in a moment of despair brought about by his unhappy love, and feels
as if the skies had fallen and the fabric of the universe was falling apart,
he hastens to ask God's forgiveness for harbouring such a feeling (p. 151). In
another poem, 'A Tempest', he asserts the need to feel the existence of God in
such moments of despair (p. 184).
It has been suggested that the preponderance of love poetry in Naji's work
and his attitude to women were caused by the poet's experience of bitter
disappointment in love very early in his life.^54 But this surely can only be a
partial explanation. What is interesting (and new) is not the fact that he
wrote so much about love or that he often placed himself in the situation of
an unhappy deserted lover. As is well known, the volume of love poetry is
very large in the Arabic poetic tradition in which the plaintive lover is a
stock character. What is new to the tradition is the particular kind of sen-
sibility expressed in Naji's love poetry, a sensibility which we have encountered
in the equally large proportion of love poetry in the work of Shukri. In the
writings of both poets, as indeed in those of many other romantics, love is
usually the context in which so many of the poet's attitudes are revealed,
such as his sense of exile, of isolation, his fear of death, his bewilderment
in the face of so many pressing questions about man's place in the universe
and his destiny. Like Shukri, Naji often idealizes his beloved: in 'A Sick
Man's Farewell' (p. 115) he calls her 'idol of my eye' or says to her 'You are
the one who has given life to a dying man', although we may point out, the
situation here is a concrete one and the beloved is fully human. Unlike
Shukri, Naji never loses his grasp on female reality. In the poem Woman'
(p. 171) he wonders if woman is a mere creature or a goddess and treats her
as a source of inspiration for artists. But in the process he emphasizes her