a refrain “O, night. O eye,” (ymlayl, ym‘ayn) in keeping with the popular
tradition of nocturnal yearning and loneliness, a tradition that is not different
from the classical use of Laylm(the female name with connotations of night),
and layland laymll(night and nights). In his Rubm‘lyat al-fara.(Quartet of
Joy),^54 the poet comes up with three mawwmls: one unfolds the singer’s suffer-
ing at night while longing for the loved one; the second, titled “Distant
Gaze,” depicts suffering at large, due to social injustice, in juxtaposition with
the joys of love and life; whereas the third, “The Bard’s mawwml,” recreates the
popular tragic story of >asan and Na‘lmah, especially >asan’s death, to
mourn the fate of singers as lovers while celebrating the permanence of the
song as beyond the reach of death. In the first mawwml, the singer is the
woman, and the persona fuses easily into her voice, for:
delirium overwhelms me seasons of harvest lay heavy
on my memory,
my head, thick with power and poetry,
fell forward, I dozed...
my body: the opened-out earth;
creation: a fist of my clay;
the folk: my children;
Ya layl!
(Ibid. 27)In the second mawwml, “The Distant Gaze,” the speaker recollects the tradi-
tional erotic prelude only in the third stanza, interweaving his songs with
ancient and modern scenes, “ropes across ropes,” but “spidered together by
storms” (Ibid.). This poetic scene invites voices and songs as befitting exile
and departure that is accelerated by recollection and memories of the ancient
past.
The quarry is the last thing
my ruined dwelling preserved for me:
hearth’s embers buried in its sand;
love, a mirage howdah on its desolation,
Racing and beaming wherever I dwell or more,
Ya layl!
(Ibid. 27)In the third mawwml, the singer applies a refrain with a thematic emphasis on
the need to be listened to, as there is no more singing if no one listens to his
songs. There are slight variations in a number of stanzaic endings to commu-
nicate the story of love and loss, while the song as a whole is punctuated with
reminiscences, comments, and oblique criticisms of injustice, oppression, and
POETIC DIALOGIZATION