A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

(Greg DeLong) #1
SHABBI 163

in joy, comfort them and show them Divine Mercy, finding in their lives His
sublime spirit and signs of His perfect art - Shabbi writes a short prose
introduction in which he explains how he has occasionally experienced
emotional crises during which all certainties are destroyed by sorrow and
despair, and his faith is shaken to the roots. In such moments, man feels as if
the relation of kinship which binds him to the rest of the creation had been
severed, and he becomes a stranger in a world that feels strange in his soul
and then life feels as if it were a tedious but frightening kind of absurdity
that deserves neither preservation nor sympathy (p. 98). This is clearly an
existentialist experience of angoisse, in which a person feels he is beyond the
reach of the outside world, nature and man alike. However, although nature
never becomes a source of ecstasy for Shabbi, he gradually regards it as a
place of escape from the world of men as the latter grows more and more
oppressive. In 'To a Sparrow' (p. 55), a poem imbued with the romantic
sentiments and attitudes popularized partly by Mahjar authors like Jibran,
partly by Arabic translations of Shelley's 'To a Skylark' as well as poems
inspired by it and poems on similar themes, Shabbi contrasts the world of
nature and of man:


Moved I am by the songs of birds...
But there is nothing in the world of men
That pleases my soul or satisfies my heart
When I listen to their talk I find it trivial,
Pallid, poor and dull chatter...
They grumble when I am silent, yet when I speak
They complain of my sentiments and my thoughts.
He attacks city life because it breeds vice and evil, and he openly resorts to
nature as an escape from the corrupt world of man. Typically Shabbi idealizes
childhood which in a poem on the subject he calls 'life's dream' and likens to
'sweet visions in sleep', and he contrasts the innocence of sweet childhood
with the disillusionment of the adult world of experience (p. 56). In 'The
Woods' (p. 188) nature appears as the place where the poet finds 'the world
of imagination, vision, poetry, meditations and dreams', although this is
chiefly because it is far from the absurd world of men, with their sins and
illusions.
However, it would be wrong to conclude from the preceding remarks that
Shabbi was a purely subjective poet who was exclusively concerned with
his own personal emotions. Nothing in fact can be further from the truth,
although as in the case of major poets it would be difficult to disentangle
what is subjective in his work from what is not, so passionate was his
apprehension of reality in all its aspects — physical, social, political, psycho-
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