THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 230its title, or 'Sunset' which can be regarded as among the minor contributions
of Arabic romantic poetry (i,556ff., 549ff.). Her second collection. Splinters and
Ashes (1949), is perhaps her most revolutionary work, and at least the intro-
duction in it reveals the poet's dissatisfaction with the limitations of the
tradition, in prosody, themes and diction alike. Apart from her experimenta-
tion in form, perhaps her most interesting contribution in this volume is her
attempt to describe the subtler shades of feeling and the twilight state of
consciousness in poems such as The Train has Gone' and 'The Snake', poems
which she says 'treat states of mind relating sometimes to the inner self, and
at other times to the Unconscious, and these are states seldom dwelt on in
Arabic poetry' (n,22). Another interesting feature of the collection is the use
of allusions to Greek mythology and to a work by Longfellow, Hiawatha. But
the states of feeling which the poet successfully depicts in her poetry often
belong to a romantic experience, expressed in a romantic or post-romantic
style. Among the best is 'The Bottom of the Stairs' (n,108), where she writes:
Days have passed, whose light has been snuffed.
When we did not meet, not even in imagination,
While all alone I have been here feeding on the footsteps of the dark
Outside the cruel window pane, outside the door.
Days have passed while all alone I have been here,
Cold days creeping, dragging along my suspecting impatience.
And I have listened and counted the anxious minutes.
Was it time that has passed or have we been wading through timelessness?
Days have passed, made heavy with my longings,
And I? I am still gazing at the stairs,
The stairs that begin here, but I know not where they end?
They begin here in my heart where it is all dark,
But where is the door, the shadowy door
At the bottom of the stairs?
In the two succeeding volumes, The Bottom of the Wave (1957) and The Moon
Tree (1968), Mala'ika has not gone much further than this experience. For
instance, in 'The Fugitives' the poet tries in vain to escape from herself and
from her painful feeling of being an outsider in the universe (n,3O2), while
in 'The Visitor who Has not Come' (n,329) she clearly prefers her dreams to
reality. There are a handful of political poems in her work, but nature and
nature descriptions dominate her poetry, especially in the last volume where
we also find her romantic sense of suffering driving her to write the moving
but rather masochistic 'Five Songs to Suffering' (n,458) in which she expresses
her love for pain (n,460), saying:At dawn in our sleep we have crowned you a god
And wiped our foreheads on your silver altar,
Our love, our pain. (n,466)