BAYYATI AND THE COMMITTED POETS 213I shall trample underfoot.
The champions of 'art' and the pedants.
The beggars and the old hags of poetry,
I shall smash their poems on their heads,
For lifeblood flows in my veins.
And I shall not betray the cause of man,
No, that I shall not betray.
So to Hell, Thou Muse of lies.
Here my inspiration comes
From my great love. (i,515)In the course of time, especially starting from The Book of Poverty and Revolu-
tion (1965), the tone becomes less aggressive,^20 but the political position
remains consistent even when his symbolist style grows in density and his
imagery becomes more surrealistic in What will Come and will not Come (1966),
and the subsequent volumes Death in Life (1968) and Inscriptions in Clay (1970).
In the later poetry the facile optimism and the strident tone often give place
to a quieter and more mature voice, enriched and deepened by disillusion-
ment and the tragic complexities of experience. For instance, in 'Nightmare
of Night and Day' from Inscriptions in Clay we read:
What did the song say?
Birds are dying on the pavements of the night.
The long-awaited prophet
Is still asleep in his cave, and rain is falling
Upon the walls of old dilapidated houses,
Upon the roofs of the pregnant city and the notices of estate agents.
The birth and the death of the Word is written in blood
While in the street I walk holding a corpse.
Hiding my face from God and you. (n,290ff.)However, he never loses sight of his commitment to his political ideal as
witness, for example, 'Elegy on an Unborn City' from the same collection
(II,299) and more particularly the majority of the poems in Dead Dogs'Eyes
and the poem which gives the collection its title (n,33Off.). Bayyati is of course
aware of the change that has taken place in his style ofwritingasfrom What
will Come and will not Come (and which has rendered it more opaque, visionary
and surrealistic) (n,400ff.). But in 1968 in his prose work entitled My Ex-
perience of Poetry, he hastens to defend himself, making a somewhat uncon-
vincing attempt to dissociate himself from other stylistic experiments in
contemporary Arabic poetry (n,404—5).
In vague and rather melodramatic terms Bayyati attributes the change in
his style to 'suffering, silence, death' and the rise of reactionary counter-
revolutionary forces which 'have swept over the world', as well as 'the death