THE ROMANTICS 176youth passing, and power and glory giving way to weak and decrepit old age :
these are ideas which appear frequently with a cumulative haunting effect
in his work. At times, as in his poem 'Persistence', they reduce the poet to
melancholy and quiet grief, but at other times they drive him to violent
rage against what seems to be the natural order of things, as we can clearly
see in his remarkable poem 'An Eagle'.^157 For the poet is essentially a very
proud man, who finds the loss of youth, power and dignity deeply humiliat-
ing. (In fact critics have likened him to Mutanabbi, with whom he clearly
identifies himself, as is seen in his poem on the great classical poet.) The
underlying theme of the poem on Dik al-Jinn's wine cup, already alluded
to, is the poet's inability to accept old age and impotence, which drives him
to murder his mistress. In 'Stagnation'^153 he expresses his love for energy,
movement and life, stating his theme in terms teeming with sexual implica-
tions: the poem ends with
Life is but storms, and those that rage
In my blood and bones are the ones I love most.Related to this theme of time and change is the poet's preoccupation
with the world of art, since art represents man's heroic attempt to overcome
the ravages of time. like Abu Shadi before him, Abu Risha wrote much about
artefacts, although in his case it is sculpture and architecture rather than
painting which provide subjects for his poems. But unlike Abu Shadi, he often
wrote about these subjects in strongly passionate terms. Yet, paradoxically
enough, in the Keatsian contrast he draws between the transitory and
ever-changing nature of life and the permanence of art he seems to favour
the latter. In his well-known poem 'A Woman and a Statue'^15 ' he wishes
his beautiful woman could have turned into a statue so that her beauty might
have frozen and withstood the onslaught of time and the damaging effect of
old age. But it must be emphasized that there is nothing cold about his
description of the world of art; in fact his response to the statue of Venus
in this poem is so passionate and his description of it is so warm and throb-
bing with life that it is somehow difficult to believe that the poet is thinking
only of a statue. One suspects that what the poet desires is not so much the
permanence of art as the permanence of life. Like other romantics, he wants
to eat his cake and have it.
Women and love are by no means the sole subjects of Abu Risha's poetry,
although it is remarkable that in his first published volume there are no
more than four poems on nationalist themes, the rest concerning the poet's
subjective experiences. But the development of his poetry shows a rapidly
growing interest in politics and Arab nationalism, which must be related