RUSAFI 61poem 'The Nightingale and the Rose' (p. 245) which is written in an unusual
stanzaic form based on the traditional mtwashshah. Its theme is the love
between the Nightingale and the Rose: nature is here completely humanized
and set within the context of the old Persian tradition of mystical poetry,
the tradition of Hafiz of Shiraz, but largely divested of mystical implications.
Yet the attitude to nature revealed in this neat drama, with its conventional
role assigned to each character, an attitude akin to that of the authors of
Persian miniatures, gives way at least on one occasion to an almost romantic
stance. In the poem 'Sunset' (pp. 198—200), written as early as 1894,•* the
sensibility expressed is close to that of the pre-Romantic author of An Elegy
in a Country Churchyard. The sight of the setting sun, the herd wending its way
back from the pasture, the fields near Baghdad, the smoke rising to the sky in
the far horizon and the sound of the waterwheel — all fill the poet's heart with
melancholy and romantic gloom. It is worth noting, however, that the poem
ends with the comforting appearance of the stars in the night sky and the
reassuring thought that nature, 'this book of the universe', contains the de-
tailed signs of God's handiwork for those who care to read it. It is indeed
because Rusafi was capable, although rarely, of such sentiments, quite alien
to the neoclassical idiom, that he had come face to face with the frontiers of
speech and of the limitations of language. In a poem entitled 'A Poet's
Thought' he states that there are ideas and sensations too subtle for language:
There is that in the soul which no words can reveal
Which is beyond the reach of both verse and prose (p. 182).
like Zahawi, Rusafi simplified the language of Iraqi poetry, especially
in his political and social poems. A satire like his recently recovered 'The
Folly of the Times'^93 is written in a most direct language, utterly free from all
archaisms and conventions. One scholar claims that he was the first Iraqi
poet to dispense with the conventional amatory prelude, at least in his poli-
tical poems, and that he was followed in this by Zahawi.'^4 This is perhaps
inaccurate, since Rusafi does sometimes weep over ruined encampments
even in a context of social criticism (for instance, on p. 534). His elegies tend to
be conventional in approach, theme and imagery. There are still many ver-
bal echoes in his poetry from the work not only of Abbasids like Mutanabbi
and Ma'arri — both of whom provided subjects for whole poems, in one of
which Ma'arri is described 'not as Arab poet, but the poet of all mankind'
(p. 270) — but also from pre-Islamic poets like Tarfa and Samau'al. It is inter-
esting to find, for instance, in a poem on Baghdad Prison, pre-Islamic idiom
and phrases wedged into what is on the whole a thoroughly modem use of
language in which is rendered a vivid, graphic description of dirt and squalor