NEOCLASSICISM 20Arabic poetry such as boastfulness, satire and elegies, together with bucolic,
amatory, hunting and war themes and descriptive, gnomic, moralistic,
didactic and traditionally pious subjects, including the praise of the Prophet.
He imitated well-known ancient Arab poets, for example al-Nabigha al-
Dhubyani (i,73), Abu Nuwas 0,129), al-Sharif al-Radiyy (i,22), al-Tughra'I
(n,207), Abu Firas al-Hamdanl (i,134), al-Mutanabbl (i,9,70), Ibn al-Nabih
(1,61), among others, using the same metre and monorhyme as in his models.
Like the ancients, he sometimes meditated over ruins and old encampments
(II,445), described desert life and used traditional ideas, images, similes and
metaphors in his nasib or amatory verse: the beloved is like a gazelle, her
eyes are like those of a wild cow and so on. (i,41,257) He could write a love
poem which was strongly reminiscent of the Umayyad tradition of love
poetry, where Arab tribal honour is a source of fear for the woman lest the
identity of the man who sings her praises is discovered by her male relatives
(i,40). Even his language is at times very similar to that of the ancients,
especially the Abbasids. He had a predilection for the old and archaic word,
and even for 'poetic diction': the pigeon is called ibn al-aik (the child of the
grove), the cock al-a'raf (the crested one) (i,124), and sea-birds banat al-ma'
(daughters of the water) (i,142).
Barudi's intense desire to relate himself to the tradition produced at times
unfortunate results, when the poet's individuality is utterly crushed by the
weight of the tradition. Not content with introducing into his poetry, perhaps
not always consciously, echoes from or allusions to well-known poems of the
past^13 he wrote some poems which, however interesting they may be in
revealing the poet's complete assimilation of the tradition, must be dismissed
by the impartial critic as mere literary exercises. For instance, in a poem
which by its combination of metre and rhyme is meant to evoke the poetry
of the pre-Islamic al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani, we find Barudi writing in the
manner of pre-Islamic poets about love and war and desert life in a tribal or
heroic society (i,73). He opens his poem with his gloomy meditations on the
eve of his departure from his beloved, then moves abruptly from thoughts of
love to an account of his heroic achievements in war, gives a detailed descrip-
tion of his horse, followed by a description of his wine-drinking and merry-
making with his boon companions, and finally he relates his amorous and
sexual exploits: his stealing into women's tents under cover of darkness and
his leaving them in disguise brandishing his gleaming sword in his hand,
and so on. Such poetry can be no more than a literary curiosity, for the ancient
Arabic poetic conventions are used in it as an end in themselves; they do not
point beyond themselves in the sense that the poet does not use them as a
convenient medium or a set of pregnant symbols to express his own genuine
experiences.