THE ROMANTICS 148and not Warda, who has committed v sin of fornication. The first part
of the poem ends with a 'vision' in which Shafiq, anxious and troubled, by
a mysterious kind of affinity, goes through the same painful experience of
guilt as Ghalwa. The second part describes the tortures of conscience and
ends with Ghalwa's contrite prayers in the Church and Shafiq's profession
of love to her; while in the third part, entitled 'Revelation', the poet recounts
how his heart has been purified by suffering and he dreams of visions of
beatitude in which he sees hosts of angels and chaste beautiful maidens and
hears divine music. In the fourth part, Ghalwa's slow recovery from her
illness takes place when she feels she has been forgiven. The lovers are
united, but it is a sad, chaste reunion ennobled by suffering and in the end
Ghalwa is told by Shafiq what in effect is the obvious moral of the poem:
Pain is the ladder to Heaven
Those who have suffered inherit the Garden of Eden.^82
Yet the poem is more than a statement of this romantic commonplace and
is an extraordinary achievement. For one thing this thought is not expressed
in general abstract terms, but is rendered obliquely in some very powerful
poetry which relies occasionally on vivid imagery, as, for instance, in
these lines:
The heart is the source of all true feeling
The heart is the site of inspiration.
Unless you suffer, and dip your pen
Into the very depths of your sorrow
Your rhymes will remain mere glittering ornaments.
Dry bones in a marble tomb.^83
Or,
Old women with their arms shaking
Like bent candlesticks
In which the candles had dried up.
Furthermore the poet has a remarkable power of creating atmosphere as
in the scene in the church where Shafiq finds Ghalwa at prayer.^84 But above
all the value and originality of this poem lie in its being a product of a state
of consciousness bordering on dreaming — hence its haunting quality and
its enormous power of evocation and suggestion, the dominance of dreams
and visions in it, its rich complex texture which, as in the case of dreams,
allows a multiplicity of symbolical interpretation. Because it is the creation
of the twilight of consciousness the poem does not seem to have suffered
much from the fact that the poet was apparently forced to destroy a large
section of it (because he was afraid lest people should read into it too much