THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 244Return' is a song of hope in which the glorious return of the hero is antici-
pated and his achievements celebrated.
Khal's next volume, Poems at the Age of Forty, contains several poems of
fulfilment rather than of yearning. The spiritual experience which is regarded
as the means of salvation is to some extent lived in a poem such as the
attractive 'A Poet's Wish' (p. 30), which is at one and the same time a poem
about love, God and poetry: the love between man and woman, physical love,
is sacramental and sanctified. Such love brings man closer to God and makes
the poet's song appeal to the Heavens. The poet's wish is
Lord, when you take me back to your bosom
And wipe out my sin.
Bring me back my beloved alone
So that what I say will be a song
Which the Heavens would be pleased to hear.
Likewise, in 'Prayer at an Altar' (p. 36) we have a love poem celebrating
sexual pleasure, which is also a religious and devotional piece of writing, full
of biblical overtones, a prose poem (one of many in this volume), in which he
says 'My beloved is with me, My body is with me. God is with me. Get up
Fate and let me take your place.' The poet's beloved is 'a god whose paradise is
free from sin', and yet although he says 'On your body runs my boat, its oars
are endless desire' he also writes 'My body recedes from me, it departs like a
stranger, an unknown knight whom I have not seen before.'
In the introduction to his selection of Khal's poems, Adunis writes, in a
relatively less opaque sentence than the rest of the introduction, that 'it is the
poet's belief in an ultimate truth which makes his poetry in the end domin-
ated by a sense of the presence of the world and satisfaction with it'. This
presence, however, he adds, 'is not horizontal but vertical, it gives man a
dimension not so much social as metaphysical' (p. 13). Khal's vision of the
world is a hopeful Christian vision, for despite the many images of suffering in
his poetry there is the promise that there is that which transcends death. The
final answer, it must be emphasized, does not lead to facile optimism. On the
contrary, even if it is true, as Adunis claims, that in Khal's experience time is
not regarded as the enemy of life, its passage is not the less poignantly felt,
a thing amply illustrated in the poem entitled' [Old] Age',^58 which ends thus:
We wipe off the frosty wave
And tell it the story of all the seasons of the year.
Yet it sinks deep into our veins and is gone.
Or we think it is gone,
For it suddenly appears
Here in a hair turned grey.
Or a lip that wants food.