ABU SHABAKA 145interesting excursions into fields other than that of lyrical verse. Spirits and
Shades is a long dramatic poem of about 400 lines, a dialogue between various
characters, a hotch-potch, in fact, of many figures from Greek mythology and
the Bible. The theme of the poem is the conflict between body and soul, re-
presented in man's relation to woman, and the style used is highly evocative,
relying heavily upon sheer profusion of imagery. Similarly, Song of the Four
Winds is a dramatic experiment, based upon a fragment of an ancient Egyp-
tian song in which a sailor makes an unsuccessful attempt to capture four
maidens, representing the four winds, by luring them to his ship. Around
this Taha weaves a dramatized story, pointing out the unhappy end met by
a dissolute and lecherous Phoenician pirate given to the pursuit of illicit
earthly pleasures. With the exception of a number of poems in the last vol-
ume East and West, which deal with political and nationalist themes, the
whole output of Taha concerns the poet's personal experiences. These he
managed to express in a highly musical verse in which he evolved a very
skilful strophic form based on muwashshah, and made a successful use of the
quatrain, especially to convey philosophical meditations in poems of unusual
length.^74 His achievement encouraged a whole generation of younger men
among his admirers throughout the Arab world to imitate him, often in a
facile and derivative manner. This is true of his hedonistic themes and images
no less than of the other aspects of his own brand of romanticism which com-
bines a fondness for sensous pleasures and a tendency to suffer from vague
metaphysical doubts. Without Taha neither the Syrian Nizar Qabbani, nor the
early Iraqi Sayyab would have been possible.
Abu Shabaka
Taha's hedonism is not so loud or so theatrical as that which we sometimes
find in the work of the Lebanese Abu Shabaka who, in spite of the feverish
tone of his writings, seems to have developed his obsession with sensual
pleasures, at least for a while, into a conscious pose. Taha's pursuit of sensual
pleasures, particularly in his later work, is marked by a conspicuous absence
of a real sense of guilt: his is a simple, almost pagan attitude, and if there is a
feeling of grief in the poems he wrote later in his life such as 'The Return of
Longing' (p. 572), that was not because he lamented his misspent youth, but
because he was no longer capable of indulging in the pleasures he had enjoyed
so much in his younger days. Different indeed was the Christian Abu Shabaka,
who whilst celebrating the pleasures of the flesh, was aware of the expense of
spirit which these pleasures entail, much in the manner of Baudelaire who
seems to have exercised a profound influence upon him.
Ilyas Abu Shabaka (1903— 47) was born in America while his parents were
on a visit there, but was brought up in Lebanon, and educated in Aintura