THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 258His broken crushed spirit
Shining through his supplicating eyes,
In mercy God will weep for him,
And ask him for forgiveness.
In the other poem, 'In the Forest of the Dark', the poet asks the Lord to have
mercy upon him and end his life, or as he puts it, 'Your bullet of mercy.
Lord'.^79
Towards the end of his life and as the realization of the hopelessness of his
health condition became apparent, Sayyab was in an almost continuous state
of hectic and feverish poetic activity, so much so that poetry seemed to be
the only means by which he felt he could still hold on to life, just as his exces-
sively erotic imagery is an expression of a desperate attempt to prove to his
paralyzed and impotent body that he was still alive. The abundant poetry he
produced was understandably of an uneven quality, but it had the mark of
authenticity and there is an almost demonic quality about it: he wrote as if
he were possessed. Although it was poetry of introspection and reminiscence
it did not contain any profound meditations on life and death. Yet it teems
with vivid impressions and primary sensations, and at its best it is an eloquent
and moving record of the terror of death, of man's helplessness when he is
reduced to a physical wreck bound to a hospital bed. Alike in its moments
of terror, and its moments of impotent fury, of resignation and of despair, it
represents a unique voice in contemporary Arabic poetry.
General remarks on the contemporary poetsSayyab died before the vogue for obscure and obscurant symbolist New Poetry
with its predominantly surrealistic imagery swept Arabic poetry, and not
only that written by the younger generation of poets — although he himself
was guilty of cluttering his verse at times with a farrago of symbols and
myths from East and West. In this respect he can be said to have contributed
towards making modem Arabic poetry more obscure than it had been. One
must also mention the influence (both direct and indirect) of French Marxist
poets who also employed the Surrealist technique, particularly Aragon and
Eluard. But it is the conception of poetry as a special kind of vision close to
dreams and daydreams, best propagated by Adunis (and the Shi'r magazine
generally) and made popular through his practice no Jess than through his
theory (and later through his magazine Mawaqif), which had a drastic effect
upon contemporary Arabic poetry from which few young poets seem to have
been able to escape, and which, for the sake of the future of Arabic poetry,
one can only hope will not be long lasting.
One revealing feature of the New poets is their very obsession with new-