THE ROMANTICS 154literary inspiration. Clearly he came to hold this view of the Bible as a result
of his readings in French and European literature in general. In 1930 he
wrote. Tor a long time the Bible has been a source of true poetry, inspiring
Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Dante, Goethe and most European and world
poets'.^104 In his booklet Intellectual and Spiritual Ties between the Arabs and
Europeans (1943), he urges Arab authors to follow his example.^10 * It is an
undeniable fact that Abu Shabaka's 'Samson' was partly inspired by Alfred de
Vigny's poem La Coltre de Samson, in which assuming the person of Samson
the poet says angrily:
Et, plus ou moins, la femme est toujours Dalila.However, as has been shown by a recent critic, this fact in no way diminishes
the force, intensity and individuality of Abu Shabaka's poem.^106 The Arabic
poem is full of animal imagery: it is teeming with birds of prey and wild
beasts suffering from uncontrollable sexual drives, and the poet's anger
expresses itself in a variety of images of filth and disgust: 'In beauty, Delilah,
lurks a serpent whose hissing is often heard in bed', "You are not my wife
but a wild female hawk in my raging heart', "Flatter him, for between your
breasts death gapes in the soft bed'.
The impact of Abu Shabaka's personal experience upon his whole outlook
on life and society was vehement indeed. This is seen in many of his poems
in The Serpents, particularly in 'Dirt' (1934), a poem in which he piles on
images of disgust of great intensity and variety to a degree almost unparalleled
in modern Arabic poetry (except perhaps in the otherwise very different
poetry of Jawahiri). In it he regards the world as a nightmare, 'an eternal
prison', and he tries to escape from it by means of the violent sensations of
lust and wine. It is a vision of hell that has affinity with Dante's Inferno:
the poet wades in the dark mire, around him lechery is riotous, sins of all
kinds are rife, humanity is viewed as a filthy quagmire and corrupt men
move about and twitch like 'drunken worms', pieces of dirt scuttling about
in Me, singing joyfully, their songs echoing in the tombs. Men are 'mummified
phantoms', the poet laments their condition in his own private hell, while
they, unaware, are feasting all the time. The whole of humanity is condemned
whether in love or in power or politics. Women are described in terms of base
insects, and like 'Samson', Dirt' swarms with images of animals and insects,
but here they are mainly creatures of a very low order: rats, bats, frogs,
worms, locusts and cockroaches. But although the poet urges the pure
maidens of love to shut the gates of paradise in his face as he is a poet who
sings of hell, he says of himself: