Its rain refrain draws on the real and the mythical. Rain is worth reading in
context of fertility rites or their revocation. It may appear in benedictions as
invocation of good life and prosperity, as in Abnal-‘Atmhiyah’s erotic prelude
for his poem “My Coy Mistress.” The pleasant questioning note needs a playful
prayer to counterbalance coyness, “may God send rain upon her ruined
abode.” Recalling the past in a present calls for this verbal revitalization as
symbolic of reunion and return. As the ruined abode of the past, the deserted
encampment has a connotation of loss, the invocation invites renewal and
regeneration. The Islamic element substitutes the mythical and the poem
fares well in its subsequent swerve to the metaphorical, for the woman, as
Suzanne P. Stekevych notes, stands for the Islamic ummah. Suggestions of
beauty and coyness and subsequent submission are the poet’s mechanism to
enhance caliphal power and dominion.^31 Rain has other connotations, too.
Al-Sayymb is aware of these, as he is aware of the use of rain in the poetry of
Edith Sitwell and T. S. Eliot. Yet, al-Sayymb’s poem carries no scars of imita-
tiveness, and its primary images of eyes and rain, along with other variants
on them, hold the canticle together as one compact song, acting on its reader
or listener through reciprocal belonging. The poem regains the right balance
between tradition and modernity, and negotiates its registers effectively,
providing music, multiple voicing, and innovation. In this poem, trajectories
seem to coalesce, not in sameness but in valorization of diversity and poetic
creativity.
The poem as canticle and hymn (nashldand ’unshndah) has contemporary
resonance for, as argued elsewhere in this book, poets like Ma.mnd Darwlsh
insist that poetry means recitation. The argument runs against the inclination
among modernists to claim poetry as textual property, to be read and pondered.
This reading of poetry as recitation summons the support of a few poets from
among different generations. In poems that make use of the ancient ode as
“Anmshld l-khaymat ‘Ablah” (Canticles for ‘Ablah’s Camp) by the woman
poet from Saudi Arabia, Ashjmn al-Hindl(b. 1968),^32 there is a recreation of
the old erotic prelude, but there is also a comparable lyrical effort to intimate
emotions and passions that are impossible otherwise for a female writer in a
conservative society. She is able to let these passions unfold in orchestrated
poetic movements that move back and forth in poetic accentuations between
traditional meter and modern free prosodic experimentation. Ancient
poets like ‘Antarah and Imru’ al-Qays are present in the poem in full, so
are their women, but these are also thresholds for personal emotion, as
the poetess hides behind the ancient ode to secure secrecy in an ongoing
love affair.
Personal outpourings hide behind ancient erotic scenes or other biographical
situations that enable the canticle to flow, unrestrained by the intellect. At
times, the modern poet reads a similarity between his or her situation and a
precursor who was also exiled, or betrayed by friends and relatives. Such is the
case of the Yemeni poet ‘Abd al-‘Azlz al-Maqmli.(b. 1937). In his poem
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS