A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

THE EMIGRANT POETS 186

there is one passage which we might quote because of the light it throws on

the aims and assumptions not only of Nu'aima, but also of the whole al-Rabita

movement. It is a definition of the poet:

Now we may ask ourselves, what is a Poet? A Poet is a prophet, a

philosopher, a painter, a musician and a priest in one. He is a prophet

because he can see with his spiritual eye what cannot be seen by all

other mortals. A painter because he is capable of moulding what he can

see and hear in beautiful forms of verbal imagery. A musician because

he can hear harmony where people can find only discordant noise

To him the whole of life is but a melody, sad and gay, which he hears

according to which way he turns. That is why he gives expression to it

in ringing and metrical phrases Metre is necessary in poetry, rhyme

is not, especially if it is, as is the case in Arabic poetry, a single rhyme

that has to be observed throughout the whole poem. There are now many

poets among us who plead the cause of free verse, but whether or not

we agree with Walt Whitman or his followers, we cannot but admit that

the Arabic type of rhyme, which is still dominant, is nothing but an iron

chain by which we tie down the minds of our poets, and its breaking

is long overdue.

Lastly, the poet is a priest because he has his God whom he serves,

namely the God of Truth and Beauty. This God appears to him in different

conditions and guises.... He sees Him alike in the faded flower and

the fresh flower, in the blushing cheeks of a maiden and in the pale

face of a dead man, in the blue sky and in the clouded sky, in the noise

of the day and the quiet of night.u

In his poetry Nu'aima remained faithful to the principles of al-Rabita. He
never wrote poems on social or political occasions. The work of his nearest
to public poetry is perhaps Akhi, 'Friend',^15 which, in a sense, is a war poem,
even a patriotic poem, inspired by the author's experience of the horror
and destruction of the First World War and the humiliating and pointless
involvement of the Middle Bast in it. But even this remarkable poem, surely
one of the finest achievements of modern Arabic poetry, is far more universal
in its appeal than poems on political occasions can be: it is ultimately a
cri de coeur, rather than a political speech, a comment made by a highly
sensitive individual, with a great capacity for compassion, on a situation
which was humanly degrading. Unlike patriotic poems, this one is deliber-
ately low pitched: he opens it by addressing his friend, telling him neither to
exult with the western victors, nor to rejoice over the misfortune of the
defeated, but to kneel in silence with a bleeding heart and weep over their
dead who achieved no glory but were the hapless victims of a cause not then-
own. He proceeds to describe the misery and ravages of war which he finds
on his return to his homeland — the hunger, the loss of shelter, the death of