TAHA 143Taha's hedonism is amply illustrated in the rest of the collection, for in-
stance in 'A Night's Dream' where he addresses his mistress:
Do not deny me. Only nights of love and song matter in the world
(p. 259)
and in 'To a Dancing Girl' (p. 261). But perhaps the most succint state-
ment of his attitude is to be found in 'The New Thais', where he says.
Lord, I have worshipped Thee in the lips of a woman,
a liberal hand and a radiant face.
Were it possible I would make the beads of my rosary
nipples of women's breasts.
A most sacred rosary that would be. (p. 324)
There is general agreement that it is The Nights of the Lost Mariner which
brought to Taha great popularity throughout the Arab world, a popularity
which was not due exclusively to the fact that 'Song of the Gondola' had
been set to music by 'Abdul Wahhab. In her study of Taha's poetry (a study
which is full of perceptive remarks, although at times vitiated by the author's
moral and poetic prejudices) the distinguished Iraqi poet and critic Nazik
al-Mala'ika points out how in the Arab world many favourable reviews of the
collection quoted lines not only from 'Song of the Gondola' but also from
'The Rhine Wine', 'Como Lake' and 'The New Thais' — what she describes as
the 'western' poems in which Taha advocated joie de vivre and the need to
shake off conventional ties in order to join western civilization — as well
as 'The Enamoured Moon' because of its sensuousness. She also explains quite
rightly how the combination of Taha's music and his sensual tendency in-
fluenced many young poets writing in Arabic during the 1940s." In her at-
tempt to explain Taha's great popularity she says that he appealed on many
levels and to a wide variety of tastes: alike to traditionalists and modernists,
to the average reader and to the intellectual elite, to those who believed in
commitment and to the champions of art for art's sake, for he combined
traditional prosodic forms with modem content, music of verse and depth
of ideas.^70 This is of course true, but it is also true, as the other poet and
critic Salma Jayyusi points out in her excellent unpublished study of modern
Arabic poetry, that Taha's poetry provided one of the greatest outlets for the
emotionally and sexually suppressed youth of the Middle East. Another
reason which Mrs Jayyusi rightly suggests is of some cultural significance:
A new Romantic element is introduced in Laydli. For [just as] the East
with its exotic charms and supposedly mysterious ways was an element of
attraction to western Romantics, the West [too] with its seemingly liberal