ABU SHABAKA 149of the poet's personal life and his relation to his Olga).^85 One does not expect
to find in such a poem the Aristotelian formal virtue of a cool and highly
conscious work, nor is one seriously disturbed by the many digressions which
would otherwise mar or impede the flow of a more controlled and less sub-
jective narrative, whether these digressions consist of an idealized description
of the happy life of a simple peasant, or of the ancient Phoenician glory to
which the remains in Tyre testify, or of the poet's self-preoccupations, his
memories or thoughts about his enemies. Yet despite some obscurities, on
the whole, Ghahva is a well-organized poem. There is ample evidence that the
poet chose his words with the utmost care: we read in his diary that some-
times he wrote no more than ten lines of the poem in a whole day.^86 For
instance, the difference between the imagery he uses in his description of
Ghalwa and Warda is striking: the former's beauty is likened to the loveliest
aspects of nature, but these seem to be very carefully selected — they are
of a pure, chaste, cold and elevated character such as flowers, breeze, clear
sky, mountain grass and snow; while Warda's physical attractiveness is
described in terms of lust, fire, blood, earthquake, snake's fang, disease,
scorpion and hell. The name Warda means Rose and the epithet she is given
'al-habiba' means loved or desired. At a deeper level of response the two
women are in fact two different facets of the same person, and the poet's
psychological insight shows itself most convincingly in making Ghalwa
suffer from the obsession that it was she who has committed the sin. Warda
is no more than the primitive lustful woman lurking underneath the chaste
and innocent Ghalwa: she is her relation and symbolically the poet makes
her inhabit the ruins of the ancient world in Tyre. It is Ghalwa who seeks
Warda and not the other way round, hence her feelings of guilt which the
sensitive reader does not dismiss as altogether groundless: unconsciously
she is in fact punishing herself for her sexual impulses and fantasies, other-
wise the full extent of her horror at the discovery of Warda engaged in the sex
act would be found to be somewhat exaggerated if not incomprehensible.
Likewise Shafiq (whose name means sympathetic) evinces considerable
complexity in his relationship with Ghalwa: he discovers he is in love with
her only after her illness, that is after she has, in one sense, lost her innocence.
In a vision he seems to divine the nature of her suffering and he goes through
the same experience of remorse and expiation, even though he knows that
she has not in fact committed any sin. It is as if the poet would like woman
to be experienced while at the same time retaining her innocence.
This ambivalent and self-contradictory attitude to woman as the diabolical
beauty, the fatal woman, Dolores our Lady of Sensual Pain, is of course
typical of Romantic sensibility.^87 Abu Shabaka's creation is a symbolic