MUTRAN 73Mutran was therefore the first to be aware of the subjective nature of much of
his poetry in that volume. In a famous statement which is often quoted, he
once said that two main factors had shaped his personality: extreme sensi-
tivity and a great predilection for self-examination.^13 Mutran's extreme
sensitivity is directly revealed in a number of poems of a highly subjective
nature, in which he gives utterance to a deep and almost overwhelming emo-
tion. In 'The Lion in Tears' (iU7),u which registers the poet's despair at
the sudden discovery of the loss of his fortune, the emotion rises almost to the
pitch of hysteria, although it is fair to point out that this melodramatic title
was not the poet's own choice, but that of his friends, his own original title
being the less high-falutin 'A Moment of Despair'. One of the best known of
these poems is 'Evening', written in 1902 (i,144). In this poem, composed in
the traditional metre of al-Kamil and observing the traditional single rhyme
throughout, Mutran expresses his dejection as a result of falling a prey to
sickness and unhappy love; the sensibility shown in this poem is something
new in Arabic poetry. It is not that in 'Evening' we meet for the first time the
lonely figure of the poet in the presence of nature. Such a situation does occur
in classical Arabic poetry: the best and most memorable example is the
pre-Islamic al-Shanfara. But both the poet and the nature against which he is
placed have now at Mutran's hands been almost fundamentally changed. The
poet here is primarily a thinking and feeling being, his self-communion and
introspection make him an almost different species from al-Shanfara, whose
limited self-awareness, or to be more precise, whose simple and primitive
consciousness puts him almost on the same level as the animal inhabitants of
the desert. Shanfara's experience belongs to the world of what Schiller would
call 'naive' poetry, in his well-known distinction between naive and senti-
mental poetry. Mutran's, on the other hand, despite the emotion it expresses,
or, perhaps, because of the quality of its emotion, is a product of a civilized
and highly sophisticated type of sensibility. Basically it is a romantic sensi-
bility, which creates a deep and intangible spiritual bond between external
nature and the mind of man. This is what distinguishes it from the neo-
classical attitude to nature which we have found in Shauqi and which gives
us what is mainly an external observation, with the poet standing outside
the object of his observations and recording what he sees. With Mutran the
emotional life of the poet colours the external objects of nature, thus bestow-
ing a life, which is ultimately human life, upon them. Here again Mutran
had a great influence upon many of the younger generation of poets who
further developed this romantic attitude to nature. The rock on which the
lonely figure of the poet is settled is: