A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

BAYYATI AND THE COMMITTED POETS 217

of the Ancient Knight (1964) and Meditations on a Wounded Age (1971). His

Collected Works (Diwan) appeared in two volumes in Beirut in 1972. Unlike

Bayyati, he turned from such poetry of commitment to the humanist and

socialist ideal which we find in his first volume to an increasingly personal

vision which alternates between a mild form of mysticism and melancholy

meditations on death, and even at times despair. A mystical trend begins to

be noticeable in / Say Unto You, in, for instance, lines such as

One morning I saw the truth of the world

I heard the music of stars, of flowers and water

I saw God in my heart. (1,177)

The poet's tendency towards introspection increases in Dreams of the Ancient

Knight. The first poem, after a brief verse introduction in which the poet

apologizes for the poor fare he is going to offer his companions, as 'this year's

trees have not bome fruit', is entitled 'Song for the Winter'. It begins:

This year's winter tells me that I shall die alone
One such winter.
This evening tells me that I shall die alone
One such evening,
That my past years have been lived in vain.
That I inhabit the open air, with no roof over my head.
This year's winter tells me that inside me
My soul is shaking with cold.
That my heart has been dead since the autumn.
That it withered with the withering of the first leaves,
And dropped to the ground with the first drop of rain.
Receding deeper into the stony ground with every cold night, (i, 193 —4)
In the same poem he states that his sin has been his poetry, for which he has
been 'crucified' (i,195). The poet's overpowering pessimism is obvious,
especially in the last poem of this collection, entitled 'Memoirs of the Sufi
Bishr al-Haff (i,263ff.), where the world is felt to be infected and diseased
beyond all cure and where man is a sorry sight in the eyes of the Lord.
The gloom is unrelieved in the next volume. Meditations on a Wounded Age:
here the poet suffers from a recurring nightmare in which he is shot, dis-
embowelled and made to hang as an exhibit in a museum. He amuses himself
by pretending to dismember and reshape the passers by and by evolving
similarly violent ideas, as for instance in 'Conversation in a Cafe"' (i,318ff.).
What comes through the Meditations is a sad world in which unhappy man
finds in sex a temporary escape from disillusionment and misery, as in, for
example, 'Female' (i,332). In his book My life in Poetry (1969) 'Abd al-Sabur
puts forward a basically moral and spiritual view of poetry which he now