SAYYAB 257tion, such as the title poem which is a disillusioned comment on the absence
of ideals from human society. In the next volume. The House of Slave Girls
(1963), however, we find that with the exception of one poem celebrating the
fall of Qasim, the entire contents of the book concern the poet's experience of
disease and approaching death. He is constantly raging against the dying of
the light, although at times he is pathetically trying to leam to accept death.
The mood changes from self-pity, self-delusion and false hope to resignation
to God's will, to homesickness for Iraq and nostalgia for the past. On the
whole the style is simpler and less cluttered by mythological references.
Sayyab gave this last stage of his development the name 'the Job stage',^76
for in it he adopted the persona of Job through whom he expressed his trials
and sufferings and his attitude to God. In fact, one of the best two poems in
The House of Slave Girls is the first of a series of poems entitled 'The Book of
Job', which is one of the finest poems written on the theme of acceptance
of suffering and shows Sayyab at his best.^77 The other is the poem that gives
the collection its title, a nostalgic work about an old house in his village
Jaikur, the memory of which sets his imagination on fire, and he thinks of
all the diverse experiences of its generations of inhabitants, especially their
sufferings, which bring him back to his own suffering and to his own condi-
tion, penniless, paralyzed and without hope, tied down to a sick bed in a
London hospital in the land of snow (that was in winter 1963). Using an
ancient Arabic poetic convention he calls upon rain to fall kindly and loving-
ly on the ruined house as well as on his own 'thirsty tomb'.
The Oriel Window of the Nobleman's Daughter (1964), which followed, con-
tains mainly childhood reminiscences and memories of the poet's more
youthful days. In 'Love Me' he recalls in powerful and sinewy verse (some-
what like the verse of the later Yeats) a procession of all the women with
whom he had fallen in love. There are some very moving poems inspired by
anticipation and fear of death, such as 'In the Hospital' and 'At Night' in
which he is welcomed by his dead mother who invites him to share with her
her grave. There is also some poetry of extreme eroticism and sensuality in
the collection.^78
lqbdl (the volume posthumously published in 1965 and named after his
wife) contains his last unpublished poems, together with some juvenilia.
(More juvenilia appeared in two further posthumous collections published
in Baghdad under the titles The Wind Harp, 1971, and Storms, 1972.) Iqbal
has at least two remarkable poems. 'Hamid' is about a fellow paralyzed
patient who dies, and:
When God sees him face to face.
Crawling on his chest,