IN LATIN AMERICA 199Farhat's sensibility is, on the whole, remarkably unsophisticated. He is
chiefly a love poet, gifted with a sensuous imagination. His most celebrated
poem, 'The Lock of Hair', is a love poem, which, though good of its own
kind, has a rather narrow range of feeling. But it has the narrative element
which is often found in the poetry of al-Rabita, an element which one en-
counters in some of his best poems like "The Nun' which reveals the poet's
rich and sensuous imagination: a beautiful woman who becomes a nun after
having been deserted by her lover notices, while picking flowers for the altar,
a solitary flower on the convent wall. When she undresses before sleep at
night, the memory of the flower arouses doubts in her breast as regards the
point of shutting herself up and condemning her beauty to this solitary exist-
ence. But perhaps Farhat's powerful imagination and his general poetic gifts
are best illustrated in his love poem 'The Eternal Ecstasy',*^0 a poem which is
woven around an almost metaphysical 'conceit', the idea that the love be-
tween the poet and his beloved has existed from the beginning of time and
has endured in spite of the multiplicity of forms of life in which both their
souls have appeared, and that compared with their love states and kingdoms
are short-lived. The idea is obviously far-fetched, but as often in'metaphysical'
poetry it is felt and sustained throughout the whole of the poem, and con-
veyed through a series of rich images.
Like Farhat, Rashid Salim Khun opposed the extremism of al-Rabita. His
belief in the Arab heritage and Arab nationalism is such that it earned him
a decoration from President Nasser of Egypt. He was bom in the Lebanon in
1887 and, having received his early education in his village school, moved
to an American school in Sidon and then to the American University in
Beirut. On his graduation he worked as schoolteacher for some time, but
his father's death in 1910 left him with so many debts that he was forced to
emigrate to Brazil in 1913, in the hope that he would make enough money
to pay them off. But, like Farhat, he had to struggle hard as a wandering
salesman to keep himself alive. However, he was able to play an active role
in the Arabic literary life of Brazil, and at one point he became president of
al- Usba al-Andalusiyya (Andalusian League). Khuri inherited his love of poetry
from his father, and this may explain his traditionalism and passionate
concern for the future of classical Arabic. He regards any deviation from the
established canons of correctness as a danger to Arab nationalism, the extent
of his commitment to which the reader may get some idea from the preface
to his volume Tempests,^61 It is not surprising that a man so deeply involved
in political issues should write many poems on political and social matters -
this feature alone, to say nothing of the language of his poetry, should be
enough to distinguish it from the poetry of al-Rabita. It is this, too, which