A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

EXPERIMENTS IN FORM 223

wards the return of Ulysses.^30 For the message in their poetry is not one of
despair, or defeat; on the contrary, without minimizing the difficulties they
preach the need to continue the struggle. For instance, in a well-known poem
'A Lover from Palestine' (1966), which gave its title to the whole volume,
Darwish movingly describes the sufferings and tribulations of the Palestin-
ians, but far from indulging in self-pity his chief emotion is anger and the
message of the poem is one of hope. In 'The Winter Moon' he has no romantic
illusion:

I shall say to the poets of our glorious nation

'I have killed the moon to which you have been enslaved.'^31

In 'Roses and the Dictionary' he says:

I must reject death

Even though all my myths die,

and in 'Promises from the Storm'

If I sing to joy behind frightened eyes

It is because the storm has promised me

Rainbows and wine.

For he says in 'My Country':

My country is not a bundle of tales

Not a memory or a field of moons,

It is not a story or a song:

This earth is the skin on my bones,

Above its grass my heart hovers like a bee.

Similarly al-Qasim writes in Road Songs (196 5 [? ])

Despite doubt and sorrows

I hear, I hear the footsteps of dawn

and in the volume entitled My Blood on my Hand (1967):

On the horizon there is a sail

Defying the wind and waves, weathering out the storm:

It is Ulysses returning from the sea of loss.^32

Experiments inform
Besides the spread of social realism and Marxist and Arab national thought
one of the factors that contributed greatly towards the downfall of the
romantic ideal was the greater knowledge Arab poets acquired of western
post-Romantic poetry, the French Symbolists and in particular the strangely