THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 252After Myths Sayyab turned to socially and politically committed poetry by
writing first long poems such as 'The Grave Digger' (1952), 'The Blind
Prostitute' (1954), and 'Arms and Children' (1954)," all of which were to be
published again in the volume entitled Hymn to Rain (1960) which contains
some of Sayyab's best and most mature poems. The long poem is a form
which had a great fascination for him, yet despite his many gifts as a poet, his
extraordinary power of evolving imagery and recording vivid sensation,
Sayyab was unable to write a long poem that is free from structural weak-
nesses. 'The Grave Digger' depicts an unpleasant type, the man who makes
a living out of the death of others and to whom wars afford the most profit-
able times: he is therefore a symbol of all that is evil, rapacious and inhumane.
Sayyab complicates the issue by making him an unlovable and sensual
character who leads a debauched life, spending his earnings on prostitutes,
but there is a sardonic paradox in the poet's making him recover the money
he has paid a certain prostitute by being asked to dig her grave after her
death. It is a gloomy poem and somewhat naive, partly inspired by the poet's
experience in the slea2y quarters of Baghdad as an impecunious young man
after his dismissal from his job as a school teacher on account of his member-
ship of the Iraq Communist Party.^67 But structurally it suffers because the
political and psychological interests seem to pull in two different directions.
Likewise, 'The Blind Prostitute' suffers from the poet's inordinate interest
in the erotic and the sensual, stimulated by the early influence of Taha and
Abu Shabaka, and which became even more striking with the approach of
death and his growing physical impotence during the last two years of the
fatal disease that killed him so young. Salima, the daughter of a poor farm
labourer, killed by a feudal landlord as a result of alleged poaching, is raped
by a soldier and is obliged to resort to prostitution for a living. She does a good
trade when young, but as she grows old she loses her eyesight and in vain
pathetically offers her body in order to earn enough to keep her alive. Sayyab
employs the technique of flashback, the stream of consciousness in the mind
of the prostitute, and he also uses many mythological allusions, both Greek
and biblical, such as Cain, Gog and Magag, Oedipus, Medusa and Aphrodite,
though the allusions are on the whole of a superficial nature. Arms and
Children is based on the obvious contrast between the innocence and beauty
of the world of children and the evil of warmongers who trade in arms which
destroy them, a simplistic contrast between war and peace, but the descrip-
tion of the world of children has, as is often the case when Sayyab turns to the
theme of children, a haunting beauty and pathos.
However, it is in the relatively shorter poems which he began to write
around 1953, poems such as 'A Stranger on the Gulf' and Hymn to Rain'
(and others included in the volume Hymn to Rain)^68 that Sayyab attained the