BAYYATI AND THE COMMITTED POETS 221cism in general and the shattering Arab defeat of 1967. After all, the title poem
of this last volume was written in that year, and in 'Journal of a Pilgrim to
the Sacred House of God' (1968) the poet addresses the Prophet, saying:
To you. Sir, I convey the best greeting
From a nation that is lost, who cannot do well,
Driven by a civilization of darkness and destruction
To you every year in the hope you will intercede
For its blind sun in the crowd.
Sir, since we filled up the sea with dykes
And put up barriers between you and us.
We have died and been trodden by the cattle of Jews. (p. 486)
On the whole, Faituri's Sufi and religious poetry does not sound as con-
vincing as some of his political verse, and one may instance his comments on
the Arab situation after the defeat in the long poem 'The Fall of Dabshalim',
in which the poet assumes the persona of the philosopher Bidpai from the
well-known Arabic/Indian classic Kalila wa Dimna.As a measure of the spread of committed realistic writing it suffices to point
out the change in the style of a poet such as the Syrian Nizar Qabbanf (b. 1923),
already alluded to. Qabbani had attained enormous popularity across the
whole Arab world through his love poetry, in which he expressed his amor-
ous feelings in a sensuous and elegant vocabulary, of great simplicity and
immediate appeal. His collections of poems, which are numerous, often ran
into six or seven impressions.^26 From the date of publication of his earliest
volume in 1944, until 1955, love and woman remained his main themes, al-
though his attitude to woman gradually changed. In the first volume, it was
one of sexual starvation (which according to the poet was typical of the
whole of his generation), a mode heavily influenced by the Abu Shabaka of
The Serpents of Paradise and by the growing gap between the poet's readings in
Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine and his own experience of conservative
Damascus society. With his departure for Cairo, where he worked in the
diplomatic service (1945—8) and was exposed to the sophisticated social
life of diplomats, he began to develop a more 'aesthetic' interest in women,
his crude sensuality giving place to civilized and refined eroticism which
marks some of the poems in his second and third volumes, where he des-
cribes in loving detail society women with their dress, jewels and perfume.
His subsequent service in London deepened his experience and sharpened
his awareness of the complexity of human relationships. A note of melan-
choly begins to creep into his verse, but even in his mature period love and
women remained his primary concern. He would write a poem such as 'Her