A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

(Greg DeLong) #1
THE ROMANTICS 166

and the longings and aspirations of my heart will be appreciated by thought-
ful minds even in the distant future. As for now I have lost all hope. I
am a strange bird living among people who do not understand a single
word of the beautiful language of my soul.^130

This sense of being an exile was, as J. Berque once rightly observed, typical
of many Arab intellectuals at the time and no doubt had its cultural signifi-
cance in a changing society.^131 It also must have contributed greatly to
Shabbi's 'metaphysical' sense of exile in the world.
The poetry of the last two or three years of Shabbi's life is among the most
interesting and moving in modern Arabic literature. Understandably, with
the approach of death and the deterioration of his health, it shows the poet's
preoccupation with the subject of death, but the early romantic welcoming
of death which we find in a poem like 'To Death', which depicts death as a
'beautiful spirit hovering above the clouds'and a place where'naked heavenly
brides appear swaying and singing lovely melodies' (p. 76), gives place to a
much more convincing, passionate and urgent concern. The poem 'In the
Shadow of the Valley of Death' (1932) ends with these lines:


Life's blossoms fall in silence
Sadly, boringly at my feet;
The charm of life has dried up
So come along my heart, let us now try death, (p. 143)

Here is another poem typical of his last period, 'A Storm in the Dark' (1933),
quoted in full:

If I had time in the clutch of my hand
I would scatter the days to the wind like grains of sand
And I would say to the wind, 'Wind, take them away,
And disperse them among distant hills,
Nay, in the mountain passes of death, in a world
Where no light dances, nor shade.'
If I had this world in the clutch of my hand
I would hurl it into the fire, the fire of Hell,
For what is this world? What are these men?
This sky and those stars?
Fire is a more fitting place
For sorrows' slaves, this stage of death and this nest of cares.
I say to the past that is gone
Folded away in death and the eternal night
I say to men's present that still is
And to the future that is not yet born:
'Absurd is this world of yours
And lost in a darkness without end.' (p. 181)
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