THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 222Birthday' where the poet's sole problem upon receiving a card from his
mistress informing him of her birthday was what present to give her. From
this type of verse which, despite its elegance of phrase in the original
Arabic, suffers from a limited range and a narrow sensibility that borders
on the sentimental and adolescent, Qabbani suddenly moves on to a more
responsible and adult poetry which reveals real concern with social and
political issues, such as his outspoken criticism in his 'Bread, Hashish and
Moon' (1955) of an Arab society that lives in daydreams and a world of
pleasant sensations invoked by drugs:
What does a disc of light do to my land;
The land of the prophets and of the simple people
Who chew tobacco and trade in narcotics?
What does a disc of light do to us
That we lose thus our pride and importune heaven?
What has heaven to offer to the lazy and weak
Who turn into dead men when the moon is bom?^27Or his more bitter and sweeping condemnation of Arab leadership after the
Six Day War, in In the Margin of the Book of Defeat (1967).M
Among the committed poets who suddenly attained great popularity after
1967 are the Palestinian poets known in Arabic as 'Poets of Resistance',
shu'ara' al-muqawama, and 'Poets of the Occupied Homeland'. For under-
standable reasons their popularity is not always related to their poetic merit:
the poets themselves vary greatly in talent, but among the names that have
come to the foreground are Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Taufiq
Zayyad, and their works, together with others by minor Palestinian poets,
were published in one volume in Damascus in 1968 under the title The Col-
lected Poems of the Occupied Homeland^29 with an introduction by Yusuf al-
Khatib. Of course these poets have continued to publish other works since
that date: in fact if there is a charge to be levelled at their writings from the
purely literary point of view, it is that they have been overproductive, with
the result that their poetry is in danger of sounding too facile and mechanical.
Partly because most of these poets are Marxists their poetry, particularly their
early poetry, betrays the influence of Bayyati and Sayyab. For the most part
they use the new form, which consists of an irregular number of feet, and they
follow the technique of their contemporaries in all its main features, includ-
ing the use of Greek, ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Arab, Islamic and
Christian mythologies. For instance, in the poetry of Darwish and al-Qasim,
Ulysses is the dispossessed wandering Arab, and Penelope is Palestine,
Telemachus is the poet who chooses to stay with his mother and work to-