ZAHAWI 53embodying the author's message. On the whole Zahawi's most effective social
poems deal with the subject of women's rights: in them he championed the
cause of women, called for their education and their taking a full and active
part, with men, in the life of the community, and for their casting off the veil.
He also attacked polygamy. His sympathy for women enabled him to write a
moving dramatic monologue in which a bereft mother laments the death of
her daughter.^74
In the more personal type of his poetry Zahawi often betrays an arrogance
and egoism which is sometimes irritating. He also indulges in self-pity^75 and
seems to suffer from persecution mania, which drove him to flee Iraq, think-
ing that his life was in danger, and emigrate to Syria and Egypt, from which
he soon returned, embittered and disappointed. His sense of being persecuted
is amply expressed in the preface to the last collection of his verse published
in his lifetime (Trickles, 1934). Nevertheless his passionate belief in truth,
in spite of the martyrdom of those who uphold it, as well as his belief in the
value and nobility of the poetic ideal, resulted in some interesting personal
poems, in which the strain of allegory is particularly strong, such as 'We are
Both Strangers Here' in which one can detect a possible allusion to the Sufi
martyr al-Hallaj.^76 This tendency to write allegorically is revealed in the many
poems addressed to Laila, which at first sight seem to read like love poems,
but on closer examination show that for Zahawi the figure of Laila was often
more than the young woman he is supposed to have known and loved in
Istanbul; Laila was at times a symbol of his ideal and of justice, and at others
it stood for Iraq, much in the same way as the Rose symbolized Ireland for the
younger W. B. Yeats.
In his last volume of verse (which was recently unearthed and published by
his editor Hilal Naji (1963)) Zahawi gives expression to his metaphysical
doubts in outspoken language. For instance, in a poem entitled 'I Paused' he
writes:
I paused before the facts, not knowing
Whether it is I who have created God
Or He created me.
Another poem of Darwinian conviction, 'As He Came So He Left', opens with
the words describing the condition of man:
He came to the world not knowing why.
And as he came so he left.
In the very last poem in the collection, entitled 'To Hell', Zahawi asserts that
he is 'a child of reason alone' and therefore dismisses as illusions and super-
stitions all belief in resurrection, the Day of Judgment and Hell.^77