IN THE UNITED STATES 187friends. He calls upon his comrade to follow him silently with his pick axe
and shovel to dig a pit for the dead. In the last stanza he tells his friend
to dig another pit to bury the living as well, for they too are really dead
and their stench fills the air; asleep or awake they wear ignominy and
shame. The anger which is expressed by the thought of burying the living
as well, and which comes out only in the last line, in fact the very last word
in the poem, is much more moving than in any full-length declamatory ode.
The absence of declamation and rhetoric, the bringing of the tone of poetry
to that of half-uttered thoughts, with the resulting feeling of intimacy which
this creates between the poet and his reader is a feature of much of the
Mahjar poetry, and more specifically ofNu'aima's work. It is this feature which
has led the late Egyptian critic Muhammad Mandur to describe this kind
of poetry as poetry d mi-voix (al-shi'r al-mahmus}^6 i.e. the poetry of whisper
or of the quiet voice, a phrase that has gained currency in Arabic literary
criticism, and which is used to distinguish it from the rhetoric and declama-
tion of neoclassical Arabic poetry).
Nu'aima turned his back on the traditional subjects of classical poetry:
there is no panegyric, no eulogy or self-praise in his poetry. Instead we find
poems expressing the poet's innermost thoughts and feelings, and more
specifically those related to his spiritual life. In this respect Nu'aima's verse
is purely subjective. Significantly enough it was his reading of the work of
the Russian Romantic poet Lermontov (who was heavily influenced by west-
ern Romanticism and especially by Byron) which aroused in him an over-
whelming desire to compose poetry." Yet in Nu'aima's poetry there is little
turbulence or vehemence of passion, which is not the same thing as saying
that it is devoid of feeling. On the contrary, there is a strange and almost
other-worldly serenity in his best poems, unmatched elsewhere. Even when
he writes about the conflict between good and evil (as, for instance, in his
poems 'Good and Evil' or "The Conflict',^18 which he wrote when he was
involved in a passionate love affair with a married American woman)^19 the
tone of the writing is muted and low: there is no feeling of conflict, but an
account of conflict given by someone who has made up his mind about the
universe and whose vision of life remains undisturbed. When he writes about
'Autumn Leaves' we do not find the 'wildness' of the West Wind'. It is
not an accident that one of his best-known nature poems is about a frozen
river. The vehemence and aggressiveness of the critic, the author of The Sieve,
are totally absent from his poetry. Instead there are quiet meditations on the
passing or the coming year ('From Time's Book'), the gentle nostalgia of the
poet for his childhood and for his native village ('The Echo of Bells'), and a
simple, but poignant devotional feeling that runs through most of his poems