KHAL AND HAWI 249absence from her when he was studying in England, and how she thinks that
he has not changed 'from the youth choking with tears in the airport cafe"',
while he has had much to endure which has left its mark on his face. Besides
treating the question of identity the poem contains a moving account of
the emotional difficulties he faced as a young scholar in a foreign land —
the loneliness, the futile attempt to escape from himself, the boredom of dry
scholarship and the nightmarish temptation to commit suicide by jumping
over Waterloo Bridge in London. The poem ends with a mature acceptance of
the passage of time, in fact with man's eventual triumph over time. 'Sindbad
on his Eighth Voyage' is an even more triumphant work: it records the poet's
journey within himself, on which he throws overboard one by one his luggage
which consists of old outworn preconceptions and useless inherited attitudes
until he stands all alone and naked. "When he had reached the essence of his
nature he came back and brought with him a treasure unlike any other that
he had found on his previous voyages' (p. 71). The outworn ideas which he
discarded included preconceptions on religion and its restrictions which
confine the human spirit, and excessively puritanical views of sex (re-
presented by an amusing description of al-Ma'arri's attitude to woman as an
unclean object (pp. 77—8)). The treasure he found is a vision:
I would not have welcomed the sun.
Had I not seen you in the morning,
Cleansing yourselves of the stain of sin,
In the Nile, the Jordan and the Euphrates...
Gone are the crocodiles from our land,
Stormed by our raging sea. (pp. 105—6)
It is a clear vision of Arab revival. From his eighth voyage Sindbad returned
'a poet with glad tidings' (p. 110).
Very different in mood is Hawi's third volume, The Threshing Floor of
Hunger. The first poem in the volume, 'The Cave', depicts the poet's im-
patience because the prophetic vision has not yet been realized and the mir-
acle which he had expected at the end of The River of Ashes is taking such a
long time to happea if it will happen at all. 'The Cave' is probably one of the
most eloquent poetic statements in modem Arabic, expressing fruitless
waiting that borders on despair (p. 7). In 'The Female Demon of the Shore'
Hawi shows how innocence and spontaneity are misled and destroyed by
sophistication and religious fanaticism. But it is in the last work in this vol-
ume, the long poem 'Lazarus 1962', that the poet's bitter disappointment in
his earlier vision is expressed. Here we find some of the most disillusioned
and most powerful poetry written in Arabic since the Second World War and
it is in this poem that Hawi attains the height of his rhetoric, particularly in