THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 216helped to strengthen and confirm whatever effect on his poetry was exercised
by Bayyati's earlier fascination with the work of Marxists like Mayakovsky,
Aragon, Eluard and Neruda which, besides being Marxist, was also either
futuristic or surrealistic or opaquely symbolist.Like Bayyati, the Egyptian Salah 'Abd al-Sabur <b.l931) wrote realistic
poetry about the village which reveals the degree of his social commitment.
In a poem which gives his first volume of verse its title. People in my Country
(1957),^22 and which was first published in al-Adab in 1954, he says:People in my country are predatory like hawks.
Their singing is like the winter wind blowing through the trees,
Their laughter like the hissing of wood consuming fire.
When they walk their feet wish to sink into the earth.
They murder and steal, they belch when they drink.
And yet they are human.
When they have a handful of money they are good.
And they believe in Fate.
The poet proceeds to give a picture of his pious old uncle sitting at the en-
trance of his village, whiling away the hours of dusk surrounded by men, all
listening intently to him telling a tale of 'the fruit of life's experience', a
painful tale that made them sob, bend down their heads and gaze Into the
stillness, 'into the deep waves of terror'. The narrative power of the tale set
them wondering about the end of man's toil in this life and the inscrutable
ways of the Lord, who sends his Messenger of Death to apprehend the soul
of the rich man who had built castles and 'owned forty rooms filled with
glittering gold', and despatched it, rolling down into the depths of hell. This is
how the poem ends, with the poet revisiting the village, and learning that
his poor uncle has died and that:
Behind his old coffin there walked
Those who, like him, possessed only one old linen gown.
They mentioned neither God nor the Angel of Death, nor the mysteriouc
words.
For it was a year of hunger.
At the mouth of the grave stood my friend Khalil,
The grandson of uncle Mustafa,
Lifting his muscular arm to the sky,
And a look of scom surged in his eyes
For it was a year of hunger. (i,29—32)
Together with a number of verse plays 'Abd al-Sabur published several
volumes of verse after People in my Country: I Say unto You (1961), Dreams