THE ROMANTICS 134'physical' charm and never rums her into a mere spirit, as we find in Shukri.
The warm and concrete aspect of love is abundantly clear in, for instance, the
short poem 'Handshaking', as it is in many others:
It was as if our souls embraced as we shook hands
And love, an electric charge, went through both our frames
Enkindling our eyes and inflaming our blood (p. 311).
Nevertheless Naji often employed religious language in his love poems.
For instance, in 'Doubt' (p. 222) he used the words 'monotheist' and 'poly-
theism', while in 'Darkness' (p. 69) he said he read 'verses' from the 'bookof
the wonderful beauty of his mistress'. He almost developed a religion of
beauty. Like Keats, whom he greatly admired (as is clear from the Introduc-
tion he wrote to Abu Shadi's volume Spring Phantoms), he often describes
beauty in divine and ritualistic terms. The house of the beloved is the sacred
mosque or Ka'ba, beauty is a holy shrine, the journey he undertakes to see
his beloved is a pilgrimage.^55 This is not the same as the conventional imagery
of Persian poetry or indeed of the poetry of medieval courtly love in Europe,
where the human and divine meet and each is conceived in terms of the
other. In most of Naji's poetry the warmth of feeling and the occasional use
of realistic detail make the whole thing heavily weighted in favour of the
human. At times it is simply that the glowing passion which the poet feels
towards his beloved reaches almost the degree of worship: with Naji love,
warm concrete human love, seems to be the only meaningful experience in
life. But of course there are times when the figure of the beloved is fused in
the poet's imagination with that of the Muse, the celestial Bride and the
Ideal in a manner reminiscent of Shukri's verse. It is she who confers reality
upon the poet's life. In his 'Quatrains' he writes that the world is a strange
illusion when his days are empty of love:
You have taken me on your wings past the wall of mist
And my heart and the whole space become full of light
Then brought me -back to the earth of illusions
And the night was dark like the raven's wings.
You have shown me the secrets of the invisible world,
Revealed to me what no eye can see.
It is clearly through love that the secrets of life and the universe are revealed
to the lover/poet (pp. 226,229). In 'Love's Prayer' (p. 263) the emphasis on the
visionary power induced by love is clear: 'it has purified me, and enabled me
to see, has torn away the closed curtains'. The call of love is divine, raising
the poet to a more elevated level of existence where 'my heart was not of this
earth nor was my body of clay'. Because woman has such spiritual power