NAJI 135over the poet his disillusionment becomes almost unbearable when he
realizes that she cannot live up to his ideal standards. This feeling of shock
and horror is expressed in many poems, particularly in his long poem 'Ruins'
(pp. 342ff.) which records the story of the downfall of his love from the
spiritual pedestal where he had placed her.
Apart from religion there are a number of dominant images in Naji's
poetry, the most recurrent of which are perhaps the desert, the mirage, the
desert caravan, the road and the journey.^56 He wrote poems entitled 'The
Travellers' Return', 'A Journey', 'Mirage in the Desert', 'Deceitful Mirage',
and 'The Little Desert Caravan'. The word sarab (mirage) is a potent word
in his poetic diction: it has a peculiar fascination for him, perhaps equalled
only by the word layali (nights) from which hardly a poem is free: he gives
his poem the titles of 'The Nights' (p. 289), 'Sleepless Nights' (p. 294) or 'A
Night' (p. 301), and, as has already been mentioned, the second of his volumes
of verse bears the title The Nights of Cairo. Apart from the musical quality of
the Arabic word in its plural form, there is the undeniable influence of de
Musset's work, Les Nuits and the significance of the appeal of night to the
Romantic mind in general and the Arab romantics in particular, a point ably
discussed by M. Abdul-Hai." There is also the star and/or moon image, for the
setting of many of Naji's love poems is starlit or moonlit night and often
the beloved is likened to a star.^58 Finally there is the bird image, especially
a wounded bird: the poet likens himself to a bird that loves the open sky and
high altitudes being shot and wounded or being shut up in a cage.^59 He gave
one of his poems the title 'The Wounded Bird'. Wounds proliferate in his
poetry, though these and other disease images or terms such as sickness,
pallor, pain have been attributed by one scholar to the poet's medical profes-
sion.^60
Most of these images meet in his justly celebrated poem 'The Return' where
we find the religious imagery, the desert, the journey, the nights and the
wounded bird. In it Naji skilfully uses the old outworn classical convention,
that of weeping over the desolate encampment of the beloved, but in a
manner, typical of the great artist he is, in which at his touch the dead
convention springs to life again. It acquires immediate relevance and becomes
an adequate medium for the expression of a thoroughly modern sensibility.
This is done in a subtle fashion. In the first place, although the poet returns
to the place once inhabited by his beloved, it is not the ruins of a deserted
encampment in the desert. It is clearly a house in a city, with a hall or a
drawing room, a staircase and a door (in fact we do know that it is a house
situated in one of the main streets of Cairo).^61 But the delineation is left
deliberately vague and no further details are given; we are only told enough