THE ROMANTICS 152regarded as taboo in his society. Abu Shabaka's anger and fulmination
against his predicament of being hopelessly caught in the grip of sexual
passion, powerfully expressed in several poems in Serpents of Paradise, we
now know were inspired by an actual passionate affair which he had in 1928
with a married woman with a child, even at the time of his engagement to
Olga.^96 The poem 'Red Prayer' (1929) is the first of such poems :^97 it begins
with these two lines in which the poet humbly begs for God's mercy:
Lord, I crave your mercy, for I am an infidel and a miserable sinner
I have starved my soul and fed my mortal love
of which the first is used as a refrain. Yet the poet is unable to free himself
from the yoke of his passion: he cries plaintively:
O woe is me! In my heart there are still hopes and desires
For an ecstasy of shame.
The poet's sense of sin acquires enormous proportions and he finds himself
thinking of great sinners of the past such as Cain, Nero and Jenghiz Khan,
with whom he unconsciously identifies himself, and in this part of the poem
the tone becomes much louder and more melodramatic, the angry voice
turns into shrieking and the style becomes rhetorical. But towards the end
the poet returns to his own private predicament.
Despite its rhetoric and melodramatic quality, 'The RedPrayer'isaremark-
ably powerful poem and its force lies in the inner conflict it expresses, in the
fact that while praying to God for forgiveness the poet is wading deeper and
deeper in sin. Abu Shabaka was not unaware of the contradiction in his
attitude to carnal pleasures: he even defended it on the grounds of the
inherent complexity and ambivalence of human emotions.^98
Abu Shabaka's ambivalent attitude is seen throughout the whole volume.
For instance, in 'The Undefiled Shadow" (1929) he writes:
There is still a shadow of chastity in my debauched heart
Undefiled by women of sin."
That chaste shadow, the poet says, belongs to another (dearly Olga). In the
poem entitled 'The Serpent',^10 ° while desiring her he condemns his adulterous
mistress for being unfaithful to a husband 'whose sweat is still damp', for
causing 'a red stain' to appear on her 'wedding garment which was gleaming
white', and he feels ashamed that he has brought her child a trifling toy to
distract him, a 'price for his mortal sin'.
In 'The Altar of Lust',^101 where women are described as having the tem-
perament of the serpent of paradise, he is pathetically torn between desire
and fear of temptation at night: