A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

THE ROMANTICS 144

enjoyment of life, the freedom it allowed to the individual and its own

exotic charms constituted a great appeal to the Arab youth of the forties.

This was depicted at its best in Laydli... In this volume, moreover, Taha

is fully accepted by his European associates, without any barrier. Europe

is immediately transformed from the land of the snobbish imperialist to a

land of peace and beauty where wine, women and song reign supreme. This

is very significant in a society that had, up till that date, regarded the West

as the stem-faced representative of usurpation and superiority.^71

It is interesting to see how many of the women the poet writes about are
European and how often his mistresses are described as fair and as having
golden hair. As an expression of his romantic attitude to the West Taha sets
many of his poems in Venice, Capri, Cannes, Como or Lugano, makes al-
lusions to Greek mythology and writes about the wine of the Rhine, the
effect of the music of Wagner and the waltzes of Johann Strauss. It is re-
markable that the vogue of writing hedonistic poems with a European setting
and describing affairs of varying degrees of innocence with fair women
which was started by Taha affected even an established 'neoclassical' poet
like Jawahiri whose poem 'Shahrazad' (1948) shows unmistakable signs of
Taha's influence.^72
There is no doubt that from his second volume of verse to the last Taha's
main attitude continued to be more or less consistently hedonistic, despite
al-Mala'ika's prudish denial in such statements as 'I believe that sensuality
and the search for pleasure are accidents in 'AJi Mahmud Taha's life, because
his nature is basically spiritual' and 'The most sensual of his poems are
hardly completely devoid of a spiritual or intellectual background'.^73
His volume Flowers and Wine contains poems entitled 'The Poet's Tavern', 'A
Kiss'. 'The Poet's Wine', and Dancing Girl in a Tavern'. In the volume
Return of Longing he writes in 'Question and Answer'.

My life is a story which began with a wine cup

And a fair woman. For both I made my song. (p. 567).

His sensuous imagination is apparent in poems such as 'The Island of Lovers'
(p. 573) and in 'Lovers' Dreams' (p. 579). In 'The Slaughtered Love' (p. 650)
the poet seeks his consolation in the bosom of prostitutes. In his final volume
East and West we find together with a poem like 'Philosophy and Imagina-
tion', describing a brief passionate affair in which the poet claims that
through the pleasures of the flesh a great beauty is revealed to the soul
(p. 699), many poems of strikingly sensual quality which express an un-
ashamedly hedonistic view of life, such as 'The Andalusian Girl' (p. 731)
and 'The Woman Cyclist' (p. 739).
Taha is chiefly a lyric poet, although two of his seven volumes represent