THE ROMANTICS 156she delivers the poet from the hell he inhabited when he wrote Serpents.
In 'This is my Wine' he contrasts his present state of bliss, joy and certainty
with the doubt, sorrow and pain of the poisoned experience of Serpents:
thanks to his beloved (probably as some scholars maintain he means the
gentle Laila) who has provided the balsam for his soul, he now regards the
painful experience of the past as 'Purgatory leading to his present Paradise'.^109
The fire and smoke, the blood-red and black imagery which dominated the
earlier poetry has now given place to images derived from the world of
vegetation. To his beloved he now writes:
When you came along my writing turned green and noble
My love sang, my rhymes became fresh and succulent
Until then my life had been dry and from my despair
A wretched shadow crept over my blood.^110
It is now the chaste look in her eyes that holds a mysterious attraction for
him and she is endowed with divine attributes. In another poem he calls
her 'the Promised Land', and says^111 that at her touch 'All my sins died away.'
In 'You and I'"* his union with his beloved is so complete and spiritualized
that it 1s expressed in the language of pantheism, and the poem is full of
echoes from the poetry of the great Sufi martyr al-Hallaj :^113
Is this your beauty or mine?
Your love is as beautiful as mine.
And that by which I live
Is it you or me?
Because the poet has found peace and recovered his faith in love he can now
much more easily bear his predicament as a poet with a message who lives
in a society that cannot appreciate him. This is very clear in his poem 'The
Cup'.^1 "
The final volume, To Eternity (1944), confirms the position reached in
The Call of the Heart: it uses as epigraph two lines from the earlier collection.
Abu Shabaka's rebellion is now a thing of the past, its place securely and
definitely taken by a full acceptance and recognition of the beauty and
harmony of the universe. He now joyfully addresses his beloved: 1 have
mingled you with my being as wine is mixed with dewdrops'. And the
beloved now brings the poet nearer to God: 'In your tenderness I find my
ascent to God and a ladder in your lovely voice'. The mystical dimension
of love already felt in The Call of the Heart is further emphasized here:
'Beloved, you were already within me even before I set eyes on you'.^115
Instead of the tales about lust and sexual appetite Abu Shabaka now related
to his own love the world's great stories of idealized love, both in the Arab