EXPERIMENTS IN FORM 229runs to 1200 lines (in rhyming couplets), written between 1945 and 1946,
together with two revised but incomplete versions of the poem composed in
the same form of verse in 1950 and in 1965, and entitled respectively Song for
Man I and Song for Man II. The poem, clearly influenced by Abu Madi's
'Riddles' and Taha's 'God and the Poet', is, as Mala'ika herself was aware in
the introduction, an extremely romantic work, the title of which indicates
the extent of her pessimism and her agonizing sense of life as an overwhelm-
ingly painful riddle. The theme is the poet's quest for happiness, which is
occasioned by the sufferings of the Second World War and which drives her to
seek it in vain, first in the palaces of the rich, then in the monasteries of the
ascetics, the dens of sinners, in the simple life of the shepherd and the peasant,
among poets and lovers, until finally the poet finds her rest in the presence of
God who, as in the conclusion to Taha's poem, provides the answer. There is
nothing in the least unusual or surprising in the young Mala'ika writing such
a poem on a theme of this type in the mid 1940s. What is obviously significant
and indicative of her apparently permanent romantic cast of mind is that
she should later on feel the need to go back to the poem and to revise it at two
different periods of her life. As she says in the introduction, comparison
between the styles of writing might give the reader an idea of her poetic
development. Indeed the diction of the latest version is much less unabashedly
romantic than that of the earliest one, although the earliest version would
seem to be much more successful because in it the language is more in keeping
with a theme that belongs to the heart of the romantic tradition in modern
Arabic poetry. Furthermore, the change in the title of the poem from Life's
Tragedy to A Song for Man suggests, as the poet rightly claims, that the extreme
pessimism of the earlier poem may have gone. However, if we compare the
passages in the earliest and latest versions which attempt to depict the poet,
we find that Mala'ika's conception of the poet did not undergo any funda-
mental change from 1945 to 1965. He is still the romantic poet: a visionary,
a singer of sweet songs, a lover of beauty, of man and the universe, a person
of hypersensitivity, a tragic being and a rebel who endures great suffering
In the silence of his soul' on account of his awareness of the sufferings of
mankind (i,450—5). Perhaps one should not dismiss as altogether irrelevant
in this context her remark, written as late as 1970, that the form of the New
Verse (which relies not on the symmetrical hemistichs but on the use of an
irregular number of feet) is 'unfit for long poems... dealing with philosophi-
cal ideas and complex and conflicting feelings' (i,18).
Although Mala'ika's first published volume, The Lover of Night (1946),
shows the unmistakable influence of established romantic poets, in par-
ticular Taha, it does contain poems such as the one which lends the collection