ABU SHABAKA 155His soul feels the paradise of life
But his eye can only see a manacing hell.
He has reached the point of non plus ultra in disgust, because of his soul's
yearning for paradise his vision of hell is so overpowering.
It is difficult to see how the poet could go further in his rejection and
condemnation of the world than he has already done in the poems we find
in The Serpents of Paradise. The next volume he published. Melodies (1941),
does in fact represent a great change: the turbulence and violence of passion,
the incessant inner conflict, the loud screaming voice of condemnation, the
hectic imagination, have all gone. The spiritual suffering of The Serpents has
already had a cathartic effect upon the poet, and now nature seems to be
slowly healing his soul. Melodies is composed mainly of pastoral poems in
which the simple life of Lebanese shepherds and peasants is idealized and
its joys and blessings celebrated in verse characterized by exceedingly simple
diction and free stanzaic form with multiple rhymes, approaching in language
and music the structure of folk songs. By implication the complicated and
artificial Me of the city with all its vices is, of course, condemned. The volume
contains songs of reapers, of winter, spring, summer, songs of the village,
songs of the birds (which include the blackbird, the goldfinch, the nightingale
and the mountain quail), poems on the wine press, the peasant, a village
wedding and a festival. Occasionally traces of the poet's purgatorial sufferings
can be felt^107 but the dominant mood is one of acceptance and content, the
calm of mind when all passion is spent. Such calm and peace we find in the
remarkable short poem 'Night in the Mountains' when the trees, the river,
the birds and even the wind are all tranquil while the poet hears the bells
ringing in the valley beneath, 'melting the spirit of the Lord in the souls of
the tired ones', and he finds his own soul "bowing', his breath listening, and
his love and longing rendered chaste and pure.^108
With the next volume. The Call of the Heart (1944), it can be said that the
poet has managed to put the experience of Serpents entirely behind him. The
themes of these poems are no less personal or subjective than those in the
earlier volume: they are almost exclusively love poems. But the attitude to
woman has suffered a marked change from what we find in Serpents. In
Serpents we do not really find love, but lust; woman is regarded in the
traditional terms of Pauline Christianity, as basically a powerful temptation,
a snare of the devil, and the poet could only see in her a means of arousing
his lust and a symbol of his damnation. Now this mean view of woman
disappears altogether, lust is replaced by love, a noble and ennobling passion.
Woman has become nothing short of an angel of mercy: by means of love