THE ROMANTICS 120subjects. The dominant themes of his abundant lyrical verse are love, nature,
mythology (both Greek and ancient Egyptian) and artefact (paintings that
inspired the poet), and politics.
In his lyrical verse Abu Shadi was a precocious poet. As early as 1910
when the second volume of his first book appeared his poetry and his views
on poetry were already defined with an extraordinary degree of sharpness.
As he grew older his experiences became deeper and more varied, but he
never changed the direction taken so early in his life. Before he was twenty
years old he had been sufficiently exposed to the direct influence of English
literature to be familiar with a fairly recent work like A. C. Bradley's lecture
'Poetry for Poetry's Sake' and he felt the need to summarize it for the benefit
of other young Arab poets. 'It was that', he wrote, 'together with the teachings
of Mutran, which opened my eyes to the living world of English poetry.^10
The mainstay of poetry, he wrote in the same volume, is 'sincerity, faithful
adherence to nature, not affectation and modish imitation and departure
from nature'. Attacking the false poetry of eulogy, he said, We now look
down upon the notion of earning our living as poets by means of artificial
eulogies addressed to monarchs, rulers and wealthy men.' Abu Shadi was
capable then of writing a poem like In the Stillness of the Dark' which opens
with these lines:
In the stillness of the dark, in the desolate night.
When mind and feelings are fraught with awe,
I stand all alone, a poet in self-communion,
Thirsty for the Truth, wondering about the world
While the world takes no heed of me.
And all around me rushes swiftly past.
Such obvious romantic slant is equally to be seen in another poem,
'The Melody of the Orange Tree', which is similarly written not in the
dominant monorhyme qasida form, but in rhyming couplets. The new
romantic sentiment and attitudes are expressed not only in the poet's feeling
that he had 'mingled with the tree and become part of its captivating scent',
or in his complete absorption into nature, but also in his language which
tended to be ethereal and to rely less upon statement and more upon sug-
gestion: the poet calls the tree 'a friend singing of dreams about an enchanted
world', he uses synaesthesia as in the title of the poem or in saying that he
hears 'melodies emanating from the perfume of the orange tree'. He ends by
describing himself as a 'worshipper of light whose song is glistening winged
perfume'.^11
In the same year (1910) his gift for writing lyrical impassioned love poetry