ABU SHABAKA 153The colours and shades on your lovely pale face
On which the flame flickers with desire
Strike terror in my soul.But he urges her to
Pour out the wine and spare no heart
The waves of youth break against your feet.Likewise his torture is powerfully expressed in 'Red Lust',^102 to choose a
final example, which begins with this apostrophe to the night:
Put out thy light, be dark like me, O night I..
Lest a star should wake me to virtue ...Yet even in 1929, the year in which the last five poems discussed above were
written, Abu Shabaka could write a poem of a much quieter tone, of great
beauty and pathos and a remarkable atmosphere of mystery like 'Dialogue
in the Hut', certainly one of his best works.^103
Abu Shabaka's experience of the attraction and revulsion of sex, his merci-
less self-laceration and inner conflict, his sense of shame at his spiritual
degradation and his view of a beautiful woman as a diabolical creature and
a serpent of paradise, are not always expressed in direct confessional poems.
The poet also manages to render his feelings obliquely by resorting to themes
and stories from the Old Testament. These stories Abu Shabaka does not
relate in the form of objective narrative poems: assuming that his readers
are more or less familiar with them he gives only some of the salient events,
and he plunges in medias res. He addresses some of the characters, thereby
achieving a dramatic effect, impersonates others, and offers his own authorial
comments on the action. The result is that these poems are no less subjective
or expressive of the poet's attitudes and feelings than the rest of the volume.
As a rule he chooses biblical themes of violent passion or those which have
strong sexual implications such as 'Sodom' (1931) or 'Samson' (1933). These
he treats in a fiery style, full of images of violence, and he describes sexual
passion in frank terms, always showing woman as a cunning temptress and
the cause of man's downfall. The fact that he resorts to the Bible for some of
his poems obviously reflects the strong hold it had upon him. As it has already
been indicated, Abu Shabaka was no thoroughgoing hedonist and his rebel-
lion was not as absolute as he sometimes liked to think. For throughout he
retained his belief in God whose judgment he feared, although he was power-
less to rise above the weaknesses of the flesh. However, without underrating
the extent or depth of his religious feeling, it would be wrong to omit to
mention the importance Abu Shabaka attached to the Bible as a source of