THE EMIGRANT POETS 194every man being an island. One of the poems he translated from the Russian,
Silentium by Tyutchev (who was heavily influenced by German metaphysical
Romanticism), deals with the futility of attempts at communication, the
feeling of the poet as a romantic outsider; another is a strange lullaby about
the connection between sleep and death by the pessimist Sologub.^45 The
poet's pathetic feeling of isolation and helplessness is given expression in
several poems, especially a poem bearing the significant title: 'I Have Reached
Rock Bottom'.^46 It is a cry of despair coming from the depths of his heart,
moving in its utter simplicity and direct, unadorned language. This poem
displays one of the features of' Arida's poetry, his fondness for desert imagery,
which, however, is not merely an unconscious attempt on the poet's part to
relate himself to the classical Arabic poetic traditioa but is often symbolic
of the poet's utter sterility and despair.
Despite the highly subjective nature of this poem, the suffering described
by the poet is not a private sorrow, for the poet attempts to universalize his
experience, by regarding himself as Everyman, and what he offers here is a
lament on the human tragedy. This becomes quite clear when we relate this
poem to another entitled 'Come Closer to Me' in which the poet uses the
same image of the lonely traveller in the desert to describe not only himself
but his interlocutor as well. In 'What Are We?'^47 we have the poet's full
comment on mankind's disappointed hopes, its eternal restlessness and
boredom, its unquenchable thirst, its conflict between body and soul and
its longing for death.
Like the rest of the Mahjar poets 'Arida deals with metaphysical issues,
such as the relation between soul and body, as in his rightly celebrated poem
'To My Soul'. He also finds comfort in the return to nature, although in his
case the comfort is very short-lived. But nostalgia and homesickness are not
absent from his poetry: his attachment to his homeland is very deep. In fact,
one of his most impressive and technically accomplished poems is "The
End',^48 a short poem which he wrote on the misfortunes of his homeland
after the war. It is reminiscent of Nu'aima's poem on the same subject,
'Friend', but more violent and without Nu'aima's great compassion. The
poet begins with the idea with which Nu'aima's ends: namely that death
is the only cure for a people that is too weak to struggle but quietly suffers
all manner of humiliation. It opens with a series of imperatives conveying
the urgency and vehemence of the poet's feelings, proceeds to argue that
such a people, utterly lacking in dignity and sense of shame, deserves to be
buried unmourned, and ends with upbraiding the emigrant Lebanese for fail-
ing to give it a helping hand, content as they were with making money and
boasting of their virtues in the,safety of their exile. The poet's rage and