THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 246with the French Romantics, Baudelaire and Saint-John Perse, Shakespeare,
the English Romantics, Yeats and Eliot. Among the formative influences in
his poetry are the Mahjar writers and Abu Shabaka. In many ways, stylisti-
cally Hawi is a modern development of Abu Shabaka: both poets are masters
of rhetoric. Hawi has published three volumes of verse:^60 The River of Ashes
(1957), The Flute and the Wind (1961), and The Threshing Floor of Hunger (1965).
It is not surprising for someone who was preoccupied with the problem of
reason and faith to write a poem like 'The Mariner and the Dervish' with
which The River of Ashes opens and which is one of the best known of Hawi's
poems.^61 The poem seems to concern the question of the poet's choice be-
tween two ideals: science or reason and mysticism. The mariner who is
western man (Ulysses/Faust/Huxley) or the poet who has followed in their
footsteps, is disenchanted with science, rationality and the spirit of inquiry,
with the humanist ideal as well as heroism, and therefore goes to the ideal of
mysticism in the hope that it will provide the answer, but he finds mysticism
no more satisfactory than rationality, and the poem ends with the disil-
lusioned mariner saying that he will be saved by neither 'heroic deeds' nor
'the humility of prayer', (pp. 30—1).
Although the problem appears to be a personal one, relating to the poet's
own salvation, it is significant that the conflict between science and mysti-
cism or dynamism and stillness takes the form of a polarization of East
versus West: a less crude version of the popular opposition between the
spirituality of the East and the scientific materialism of the West. There is
no doubt that the poet's failure to identify himself with either science or
mysticism, with either the dynamic West or the stagnant East, his disil-
lusionment and his loss of clear objectives and the blotting-out of the light-
houses on the way have more than just a personal relevance: they are a
reflection of the position of the poet as a modern Arab intellectual. The rest
of the poems in the first volume bear out the truth of this remark. In fact all
the thirteen poems in this volume, we are told by the poet at the end, are not
intended to be entirely independent poems but sections or cantos of one long
poem: it is worth noting that they are all written in one metre, though
in the new free form in which an irregular number of feet is used. To be
properly understood, the experience of the first poem or canto must therefore
be seen in relation to the rest of the volume.
In the second poem 'The Nights of Beirut', the poet (in whose eyes the
light has died) is unable to face the overwhelming monster of tedium:
In the nights of tedium and loss,
Where the wind echoes through the labyrinthine streets.
Who can give Us the strength to bear the cross?