BAYYATI AND THE COMMITTED POETS 215level, revolution is to be kept up by a succession of revolutionaries. As
philosophical speculations Bayyati's prose work My Experience of Poetry is
in parts no less idiosyncratic than Yeats's book The Vision, from which, how-
ever, Yeats derived the raw material of some good poetry. But it is remark-
able to see Bayyati posing as the revolutionary poet par excellence: the portrait
he paints of himself is full of self-dramatization and totally unrelieved by
humour (n,440—1).
Bayyati's most recent volume, Love Poems on the Seven Gates of the World
(1971), includes among the personae or masks the Muslim mystic Ibn al-
'Arabi and the Arab lover Waddah al-Yaman, as well as poems addressed
to the Muslim jurist Shafii and to Ikhnatun. Now the mystical and sur-
realistic elements become dominant features of his style, in many places to
the point of unintelligibility. A more moderate example of this style is the
last poem in the collection, entitled 'The Nightmare', which in five sections
asserts the poet's faith in the value of the struggle and dissent in art and in life,
and the continuity of the spirit of revolution despite the fall of revolution-
aries. The second section is quoted here and it may give the reader some idea
of the last stage of Bayyati's development, in its least impenetrable form:
At the gate of Hell stood Picasso, and the guitar player from Madrid
Raised the curtain for the ravished theatre queens.
Restored to the Clown his virginity.
Hid weapons and seeds in the earth until another resurrection.
He died in a cafe in exile, his eyes turned towards his distant land.
Gazing through clouds of smoke and the newspaper,
His hand tracing in the air
A mysterious sign pointing to the weapons and seeds.
The guitar player from Madrid dies
In order that he may be born again.
Under the suns of other cities and in different masks,
And search for the kingdom of rhythm and colour,
And for its essence which activates a poem.
Live through the revolutions of the ages of Faith and Rebirth,
Waiting, fighting, migrating with the seasons,
Returning to mother earth with those wearing a crown of torturing light.
The dissenters and the builders of creative cities
In the bottom of the sea of rhythm and colour.^21Although Bayyati himself may hotly deny it, it is most likely that one of
the factors that have led to his change of style is the growing influence of
Adunis's poetry which, as we shall see later, reveals a mystical outlook, and
which seeks to destroy all logical connections, relies heavily on surrealistic
imagery and resorts to the use of masks. In this respect Adunis's influence