SHAUQI 35rid of it altogether. In the introduction to the first edition of his Shauqiyyat
(1898) he wrote that 'poetry is too noble to be brought down to the level of
a profession that relies upon panegyric and nothing else'. Shauqi, however,
was too weak a man to resist the temptation of worldly glory. Because he
had an eye on his social prospects and advancement he was obliged to com-
promise his principles about which his feelings could not have run very
deep. By virtue of his office at court he was expected to turn out panegyric
poems whenever the occasion demanded them. It was a great pity, since so
much of his time and effort were relatively wasted on what in some cases
amounted to mere exercises in which he borrowed extensively and indulged
in hyperbole, exaggerating the merits of the subject of his praise, sometimes
to the degree of absurdity, although he often covered up the lack of originality
in his ideas by the musical powers of his verse and his easy-flowing rhythms,
which seem never to have forsaken him at any period of his poetic career.
After his return from exile, it must be pointed out, Shauqi's panegyrics grew
noticeably less until they virtually disappeared.
Shauqi's elegies are much less forced than his panegyrics. He wrote a
large number of elegies, some on the death of near relations like his parents
or his grandmother, and others more public or even official in nature, like
the one on the death of Khedive Taufiq, or on the death of political leaders
or social reformers like Mustafa Kamil, Sa'd Zaghlul or Qasim Amin. A
further category of elegies consists of those written on the death of celebrated
authors, whether Arab or western. This was a new type of elegy at the time,
addressed to the reading public at large and strongly linked to the rise of
journalism, since not only did the newspapers place such personalities before
the public, but they also provided space in their columns for the publication
of such poetic efforts, which, when the subject of the poem was not personally
known to the author, generally served as occasion for his meditations on life
and death. Shauqi, by no means the only poet of the time to compose such
elegies, wrote on the occasions of the deaths of Hafiz Ibrahim, the journalist
Yaqub Sarruf, the prose writer al-Manfaluti, the polymath Jurji Zaidan,
and also on the deaths of Victor Hugo, Tolstoy and Verdi. Partly because of
the impassioned tone of the writing, his elegy on his fellow poet Hafiz
Ibrahim is one of the best known among his works.
Shauqi's amatory and bucolic poetry bears the mark of the sophisticated
society in which he lived. His imitations of Arabic poets in these fields are
not usually so impressive as his description and analysis of his own actual
experiences, in for instance the poems describing palace balls or his reminis-
cences of Parisian life. Much of his nasib is full of purely conventional imagery:
the beloved is like a gazelle (n,150), her figure like the branch of the willow