THE ROMANTICS 136to make us see that the poet is writing about a real personal experience and
not merely engaged in a literary exercise in poetic imitation. Yet the total
situation of the poet, mournfully returning to the vacant site which had once
been occupied by his beloved, together with the use of the term talal (ruin),
ensures that in the mind of his reader an emotional charge is released, the
feelings aroused by the long-established tradition of nasib brought into play.
Secondly, the whole scene is internalized, for when we reach the last quatrain
of the poem where the poet describes himself as 'a wanderer, eternally exiled
in the world of my grief we realize that the ruins he talks about may not
be an external reality so much as a vision in the poet's mind. This possibility
makes the poem undeniably an expression of a modem sensibility. Thirdly,
the poet's manner of evolving imagery is somewhat alien to the older tradi-
tion. For instance, that night should crouch like a camel is a traditional
enough image, but it is not traditional to make the shades of night flit in the
hall. Moreover, for the poet to feel the breath of Weariness/Despair filling
the air or to see with his own eyes Decay weaving cobwebs with its hands, or
to hear the footsteps of Time and the sound of Loneliness climbing the stairs,
argues an unusual and a daring power of personification, too individualistic
for the main body of the Arabic tradition. (Naji's fondness for personification,
his ability to objectify states of feeling and personify abstractions is revealed
most strikingly in a well-known poem called 'Longing' (p. 322) where the
feeling which gives the poem its title is turned into a person to plague the
poet by his constant company and by feeding on his blood and youth.) This
is to say nothing of the freer form of the poem, written not in the qasida
form but in quatrains, the quiet meditative tone of writing, and the remark-
ably lyrical and tender quality of style and the utter simplicity of language.
It is in fact these last two qualities, lyricism and simplicity, that largely
account for Naji's enormous appeal and distinguish his poetry from that of,
for instance, Shukri. The evocative power of his simple language is most
striking. In The Message of Life^62 Naji defines poetry as the best words in the
best order (thus unconsciously echoing Coleridge), and then proceeds to say
that the poet uses the 'souls of words', that is he uses words with all their
powers of suggestion, in all their subtler shades of meaning, thereby creating
what is called internal music. The distinction he draws between what he
calls 'direct or straightforward words' and 'the soul of a word' is at bottom a
distinction between the poetry of statement and the poetry of suggestion, and
it is beyond any doubt that he prefers the latter. To help create this 'internal
music' it was necessary to abandon the traditional declamatory style, and for
this purpose Naji resorted to the use of short metres, of multirhyme and of
quatrains. Even when he employed the traditional monorhyme and mono-