THB EMIGRANT POETS 200accounts for the large bulk of his verse, most of which is written on public
or social themes. Like Farhat he wrote even on the occasion of the birthday
of the Prophet and similar Moslem religious occasions.^62 His collected works,
which were published in Brazil in 1952, run into nearly a thousand pages.
His first two volumes appeared as early as 1922.^63
Yet Khuri wrote about his feelings of homesickness, and much of his poetry
is really nature poetry. In a poem entitled 'Rebirth'^64 he points out the need
for man to be born again, to recapture the child's freshness of vision and joy
in nature, and condemns the lack of interest in nature which a business life,
centred on money-making, breeds. The idea is almost Wordsworthian:
'getting and spending we lay waste our powers'. But despite the fact that
Khuri's poetry is remarkably rich in natural descriptions, nature is never
endowed with a spiritual or mystical quality such as we find in the poetry of
al-Rabita. Even in a poem like 'The Fallen Tree,' a dramatic monologue in
which trees complain of selfish man who ruthlessly cuts them down and de-
nudes forests for his own material purposes,^65 nature remains for Khuri
something of a decoration. There is no real emotional involvement with it;
on the contrary, the poet seems to stand outside it, looking at times enviously
at it. In a poem called 'Men and Cows' he solemnly compares cows and
human beings, to the disadvantage of the latter. But although lacking in
spiritual quality, Khuri is capable of great charm and simplicity. He has writ-
ten a few excellent love lyrics, such as 'The Great Lure', a charming and
graceful poem in which the poet shows how love makes him forget every-
thing: prayer, business, beauty of landscape, and even his poetry. Another
example of his love lyrics is 'Embracing the Universe', in which he expresses
his feeling that by embracing his beloved he is embracing the essence of the
beauty of the universe. His simplicity is indeed most striking in a poem deal-
ing with the birth of Christ, called 'The Mother's Bosom', which has the
haunting beauty of folk poetry, strongly reminiscent of a ballad or a carol.^66
Unlike Khuri and Farhat, Fauzi al-Ma'luf (1899-1930) represents the
progressive and revolutionary element in Latin American Arabic poetry. He
belonged to one of those distinguished Lebanese literary families, like the
Yazijis or the Bustards. Born in the Lebanon he was educated first in an Arabic
and then in a French school. In 1921 he emigrated to Brazil (San Paolo)
where he became a prosperous business man. He died prematurely in 1930
as a result of an operation. Ma'luf's best-known work is a long poem, 'On the
Carpet of the Wind', which has been translated, either wholly or in part, into
many western languages.^67 It was first published in the Egyptian periodical
al-Muqtataf in 1929 and was later reprinted in book form in Rio de Janeiro,