for “the would-be comer.”^30 Even if he or she shows up,
I will not meet this would-be comer, for this is the poet’s fate, and
hence the tragedy of al-Mutanabblwhose verse I quote, ‘restless as if
riding the wind,’ for the speaker here is the genuine Mutanabbl, the
poet and the man, not the other who waits at rulers’ gates.^31He adds, that “the one who stood there was only al-Mutanabbl’s shoe, for he
was in the habit of leaving his shoe behind and going with the wind” (Ibid.
61). Insofar as al-Macarrl’s career is concerned, al-Baymtldeems it less divided,
but the poet’s perspectives vary. At an early stage in al-Baymtl’s life
(1950–1956), there is faith in regeneration and revolution. His “Mawcid fl
al-Macarrah” (Appointment in Macarrah, that is, Macarrat al-Nucmmn,
al-Macarrl’s hometown) places the addressee and the speaker in a Tammnzl
tradition, “like mythical heroes we met at al-Macarrah.”^32 Both celebrate being
free from corrupted politics. He calls upon al-Macarrl, “hostage of the two
cloisters” or the “double siege,” to leave behind his self-imposed isolation, for
the “land sings, and the sky / a red rose, and the wind a song.”^33 Nevertheless,
disappointments drove al-Baymtllater into further sophisticated identifications
with his precursor. In “Mi.nat Ablal-cAlm’ ” (The Ordeal of Ablal-cAlm’
al-Macarrl), which was composed in 1965, the speaker identifies with the
precursor, and takes over his lamentation of personal loss in its ontological
contexts. The father, with all ontological and biological connotations, receives
blame for bringing him into this world in the first place:
I died, but you are still alive and the wailing wind
Shakes the house every evening
You deprived me of the bliss of eyesight
You taught me the weight of absent words and the agony of silence and
crying
The dead alley is covered with frost
And the door is closed forever
Three from which I look at you tomorrow
While kissing your hands: seclusion at my house, blindness and the
soul flaming in the body.
(Ibid. 2: 24)Al-Baymtlretraces al-Macarrl’s autobiographical lamentation for being jailed
in the triple prison of blindness, his house, and “this vile body” in which the
spirit resides. He also underlines the poet’s distaste for a material presence in
a corrupt world. Nevertheless, al-Baymtltracks these disappointments for a
purpose. Hence, the mask here serves an agenda that remains central to
al-Baymtl’s poetics despite some subsequent tendency to situate it within an
ontological context of great complexity. In that poem of 1965, with its ten
POETIC STRATEGIES