LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY
Oriental poetry, especially that of the Arabs and the Persians, is
notable for its interpenetration with ecstasy couched in intricate
conventional forms. The Oriental poems abound numerously in far-fetched
figures of speech, and are written in metres following definite laws and
are subject to difficult and uniform rhymes continued in every line in
poems of great length. In fact the greatest historian of the
Mohammedans, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), defined poetry as effective
discourse based on metaphor and descriptions, divided into verses
agreeing with one another in metre and rhyme, each verse having a
separate idea, and the whole conforming to old Arab models. A poet was
supposed to get many thousands of verses by heart before practicing his
art. One of the chapters in Ibn Khaldun's famous _Prolegomena_[203:A] or
introduction to his history, _Book of Examples_, has a title stating
that the art of composing is concerned with words and not ideas.
But in spite of slavish adherence to technique it was taken for granted
that ecstasy was the main object of poetry. There is probably more
ecstasy in the poetry of the Arabs and Persians than in that of most
other nations, and it is an ecstasy that breaks through the molds of
form. It is a matter of astonishment that the artificial forms did not
utterly choke out the ecstasy. Professor Edgar G. Browne in his
scholarly _Literary History of Persia_ has devoted the first chapter of
the second volume to Persian metres and he calls attention to the
conventional metaphors, bombast and inflation of the Arabic poets who
were not without influence upon the Persians.
We today may accept the definition of poetry given in the _Four
Discourses_[204:A] (1162) of Nidhami I Arudi, for though he also
believed in the importance of the trappings of verse, he had ecstasy
primarily in mind. He defined poetry thus:
Poetry is that art whereby the poet arranges imaginary
propositions, and adopts the deductions, with the result that
he can make a little thing appear great and a great thing
small, or cause good to appear in the garb of evil and evil in
the garb of good. By acting on the imagination, he excites the
faculties of anger and concupiscence in such a way that by his
suggestion men's temperaments become affected with exaltation
or depression; whereby he conduces to the accomplishment of
great things in the order of the world.
What more effective definition could there be of the utilitarian power
of art to take man out of himself and exalt him into a state of
beneficial ecstasy?
Ibn Khaldun said:
Poetry is, of all the forms of discourses, that which the
Arabs regarded as the noblest; they also made it the
depository of their knowledge and their history, the testimony
which would attest their virtues and faults, the store-house
in which were found the greater part of their scientific views
and their maxims of wisdom. The poetic faculty was as much
deeply rooted in them as in all the other faculties they
possessed.
He continues, that they have handled poetry so well, that one could
deceive oneself and believe that this gift, which is really an acquired
art, was with them an innate one.
These remarkable words of Ibn Khaldun will help us to understand the
famous saying that poetry was the register of the Arabs. Never before
nor since has poetry been so interwoven with a nation's life. The
stories of the competitions for prizes for composing poetry, of the
happiness when a poet was born, of the importance assumed by the
discussion and recitation of poetry among all classes, read to us like
myths. Yet the fact that poetry should be part of the life of a
passionate people who lived in the desert, free and untrammeled, is not
strange. The Arabs themselves attribute also their great superiority in
poetry to the beauty of their language, especially as spoken by the
Bedouins in the desert. The great Arabian poet Abu Nuwas completed his
education by sojourning a year among the Bedouins.
Another factor enhancing their poetry and one not to be ignored is that
after 622 A.D. in post-Islamic times, poetry was rewarded by gifts.
Hence the eulogy grew into prominence and the poets were fabulously
rewarded for their poems. This, of course, led to fulsome and cringing
eulogies. The caliph was the patron. When Mohammed appeared it seemed
that poetry would die out, but it flourished more than ever. It was only
after the Abbasid caliphate was exterminated by the Mongol invasion
(1258 A.D.) that poetry declined in Arabia to such an extent that, as
Ibn Khaldun says, no prominent man would deign to devote himself to it.
Although the Arabs excelled in various kinds of poetry, we think of them
primarily as love poets.
The Arabs, as we gather from _The Arabian Nights_, were a people
especially devoted to tenderness in love. When the Arab was smitten with
love he was a helpless weeping child. There was one tribe, that of Azra,
wherein the victims were said to die of love. One poet said he knew of
thirty young men whom love sickness carried off. In answer to a reproach
for this weakness, one of the tribe replied: "You would not talk like
that if you had seen the great black eyes of our women darting fire from
beneath the veil of their long lashes, if you had seen them smile and
their death gleaming between their brown lips." (Stendhal: _On Love_, p.
218.)
Arabic poetry in the period before Islam between 500 A.D. and 622 A.D.
did not consist of pure eroticism. Satire, eulogy, elegy, revenge,
martial feeling, chiefly characterized it. Many poems were also devoted
to the praise of animals and the description of nature. The odes or
Qasidas, however, began with a love prelude, called nasib, in which the
poet dwelt on his love sorrows merely to win the hearts of his hearers
to his chief theme. One of the best of these is that in the ode of
Imru'ul Qays the first and greatest of the seven poets of the
_Muallaqat_.
Pure erotic poetry appeared after Islam with the luxury that spread with
the growth of wealth, but the nasib continued to be used, especially in
eulogies. The poets still wrote like the Pre-islamic poets instead of
celebrating Islam. The Umayyad Dynasty, which extended from 661 to 749
A.D., saw the birth of pure love poetry celebrated not as introductory
or episodic but purely for itself. The love story of one of the Arabian
erotic poets of the period, Majnun, was celebrated by the great Persian
poet, Nidhami, who flourished in the twelfth century. His _Laila_ and
_Majnun_ has been translated into English by Mr. Atkinson. The story was
retold by many Persian and Ottoman poets. Then there was Jamil, who was
the lover of Buthaina. These love poems by Majnun and Jamil were of
popular origin, and represented the spirit of the people. There were
many other love poets, while some did not devote themselves exclusively
to love.
The most celebrated, however, of the love poets was the handsome wealthy
Omar ibn Abi Rabia (643-719 A.D.). He was of the tribe of Koraish, the
same tribe to which Mohammed himself belonged. This tribe was famous for
many things, but not for poetry until Omar took away the reproach. His
poems were called a crime against God, yet a cousin of the prophet
memorized some of them. The fullest account of him in English and of his
love affairs, with translations from a few of his poems, appears in an
essay by William G. Palgrave in _Essays on Eastern Questions_. Omar was
united in marriage to his love Zeynab after a stormy courtship, opposed
by her people, but he had several love affairs. The best idea of the
sweetness and pathos of his love poetry is conveyed without further
comment by giving two translations made by Mr. Palgrave.
Ah for the throes of a heart sorely wounded!
Ah for the eyes that have smit me with madness!
Gently she moved in the calmness of beauty,
Moved as the bough to the light breeze of morning.
Dazzled my eyes as they gazed, till before me
All was a mist and confusion of figures.
Ne'er had I sought her, and ne'er had she sought me;
Fated the love, and the hour, and the meeting.
There I beheld her as she and her damsels
Paced 'twixt the temple and outer enclosure;
Damsels the fairest, the loveliest, the gentlest,
Passing like slow-wending heifers at evening;
Ever surrounding with courtly observance
Her whom they honor, the peerless of women.
Then to a handmaid, the youngest, she whispered,
"Omar is near: let us mar his devotions.
Cross on his path that he needs may observe us;
Give him a signal, my sister, demurely."
"Signals I gave, but he marked not or heeded,"
Answered the damsel, and hasted to meet me.
Ah for that night by the vale of the sand-hills!
Ah for the dawn when in silence we parted!
He who the morn may awake to her kisses
Drinks from the cup of the blessed in heaven.
Ah! where have they made my dwelling? Far, how far, from her, the
loved one,
Since they drove me lone and parted to the sad sea-shore of Aden.
Thou art mid the distant mountains; and to each, the loved and
lover,
Nought is left but sad remembrance, and a share of aching sorrow.
Hadst thou seen thy lover weeping by the sand-hills of the ocean,
Thou hadst deemed him struck by madness: was it madness? was it
love?
I may forget all else, but never shall I forget her as she stood,
As I stood, that hour of parting; heart to heart in speechless
anguish;
Then she turned her to Thoreyya, to her sister, sadly weeping;
Coursed the tears down cheek and bosom, till her passion found an
utterance;
"Tell him, sister, tell him; yet be not as one that chides or
murmurs,
Why so long thy distant tarrying on the unlovely shores of Yemen?
Is it sated ease detains thee, or the quest of wealth that lures
thee?
Tell me what the price they paid thee, that from Mecca bought thy
absence?"
I give three other examples of Arabic love poetry by different
translators, prose renderings by McGuckin de Slane in Ibn Khallikan's
_Biographical Dictionary_ and by Terrick Hamilton in the _Romance of
Antar_, respectively, and a verse translation by Lyall.
The following poem (Ibn Khallikan, V. 2, p. 330) is attributed to Ibn
Alaamidi of the eleventh century:
Admire that passionate lover! he recalls to mind the well
protected park and sighs aloud; he hears the call of love and
stops bewildered. The nightingales awaken the trouble of his
heart, and his pains, now redoubled, drive all prudence from
his mind. An ardent passion excites his complaints; sadness
moves him to tears; his old affections awake, but these were
never dormant. His friends say that his fortitude has failed;
but the very mountain of Yalamlan would groan, or sink
oppressed, under such a weight of love. Think not that
compulsion will lead him to forget her; willingly he accepted
the burden of love; how then could he cast it off against his
will?
--O Otba, faultless in thy charms! be indulgent, be kind, for
thy lover's sickness has reached its height. By thee the
willow of the hill was taught to wave its branches with grace,
when thy form, robed in beauty, first appeared before it. Thou
hast lent thy tender glances to the gazelles of the desert,
and therefore the fairest object to be seen is the eye of the
antelope. Sick with the pains of love, bereft of sleep and
confounded, I should never have outlived my nights, unless
revived by the appearance of thy favor, deceitful as it was.
These four shall witness the sincerity of my attachment:
tears, melancholy, a mind deranged, and care, my constant
visitor; could Yazbul feel this last; it would become like
as--Suha. Some reproach me for loving thee, but I am not to be
reclaimed; others bid me forbear, but I heed them not. They
tell thee that I desire thee for thy beauty; how very strange!
and where is the beauty which is not an object of desire? For
thee I am the most loving of lovers; none, I know, are like me
(_in sincerity_) or like thee in beauty.
The next poem represents one of the many outbursts of Antar:
O bird of the tamarisk! thou hast rendered my sorrows more
poignant, thou hast redoubled my griefs. O bird of the
tamarisk! if thou invokest an absent friend for whom thou art
mourning, even then, O bird, is thy affliction like the
distress I also feel? Augment my sorrows and my lamentations;
aid me to weep till thou seest wonders from the discharge of
my eyelids. Weep, too, from the excesses that I endure. Fear
not--only guard the trees from the breath of my burning sighs.
Quit me not till I die of love, the victim of passion of
absence, and separation. Fly, perhaps in the Hijaz thou mayest
see some one riding from Aalij to Nomani, wandering with a
damsel, she traversing wilds, and drowned in tears, anxious
for her native land. May God inspire thee, O dove! when thou
truly sees her loaded camels. Announce my death. Say, thou
hast left him stretched on the earth, and that his tears are
exhausted, but that he weeps in blood. Should the breeze ask
thee whence thou art, say, he is deprived of his heart and
stupefied; he is in a strange land, weeping for our departure,
for the God of heaven has struck him with affliction on
account of his beloved; he is lying down like a tender bird,
that vultures and eagles have bereft of its young, that
grieves in unceasing plaints whilst its offspring are
scattered over the plain and the desert!
This poem by an unknown author is tenderness unexcelled:
_One Unnamed_
Nay, ask on the sandy hill the ben-tree with spreading boughs that
stands mid her sisters, if I greeted thy dwelling-place;
And whether their shade looked down upon me at eventide as there in
my grief I stood, and that for my portion chose:
And whether, at dawn still there, mine eyelids a burthen bore of
tears falling one by one, as pearls from a broken string.
Yea, men long and yearn for Spring, the gladsome: but as for me--my
longing and Spring art thou, my yearning to gain thy grace;
And men dread the deadly Drought that slays them: but as for me--my
Drought is to know thee gone, my life but a barren land!
And sooth, if I suffer when thou greet'st me with words unkind, yet
somewhat of joy it brings thou thinkest on me at all.
So take thy delight that I stand serving with aching heart and eyes
bathed in tears lest thou shouldst sunder thyself from me.
Arabic poetry may lack the light of intellectual outlook that we find in
our greatest English poets; it may be deficient in the intensity of
religious fervor characteristic of the medieval Hebrew poets; it may
fall short of the high mystic strain attained by the Persians, but in
the fervor depicting love of passion they have not been surpassed. The
greatest Persian lyric love poet, Hafiz, and the greatest Turkish lyric
love poet, Baqui, clearly were under their influence.
Arabic poetry then is probably richer in love ecstasy than that of any
nation. This is due to the fact that they are both a sensuous and at the
same time deeply religious people. They were strongly emotional,
extremely vindictive and extremely hospitable. They recorded their
emotions unabashed. They had the naïveté of the child and cried out
their slightest pain; they weep and bemoan constantly. Antar, one of the
poets of the _Muallaqat_ and the hero of the romance bearing his name,
is more of a child than Achilles. He is always sobbing and weeping
copiously; he is the prototype of the medieval knight who wept and
declaimed because of absence of his mistress, a feature of romance which
Cervantes ably ridiculed in _Don Quixote_.
Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, was one of the first to
point out the Arabic influence on chivalry and romanticism. The battle
as to the extent of Arabic influence has been waged ever since, with, I
believe, the victory to the Arabs. FitzMaurice Kelly, the historian of
Spanish Literature, emphasizing the Hebrew influence, has resented the
statement of the great Arabic influence, but Robert Briffault in _The
Making of Humanity_ has proved that this influence has been
underestimated rather than exaggerated.
The fact that there existed in Pre-islamic times equal morality for both
sexes--women also were freer than in Post-islamic times--gave rise to
romantic love.
Arabic literature made the love or erotic note in its tender or
chivalrous phase, fashionable. True, this note existed very sparingly
among the Greeks and Romans in Sappho and Catullus, but the romantic
note was singularly absent from European literature in the early
medieval ages. Men loved then as they did before and after, but the
personal romantic love note was not considered a proper theme for
poetry. The religious and martial emotions held sway. Critics now admit
that intense love poetry of the Troubadours appearing like an oasis in
the barren literature of the medieval ages was influenced by the Arabs,
the rhymes as well as the themes being taken from the east. The
troubadours influence the German Minnesingers, and these two groups
remain among the best composers of love poetry Europe has had.
The troubadours also entered England, influencing its poetry for nearly
two centuries.[214:A]
The love element in the books of chivalry is due to Arabic influence.
Cervantes attributed his _Don Quixote_ to a Moorish author because the
Moors wrote so many romances. Early Italian poetry owed much to the love
poetry of Sicily which was impregnated with the Arabic spirit. Wyatt
and Surrey, who traveled in Italy, greatly influenced English
literature. Thus Arabic poetry somewhat influenced English poetry.
Similarly the Spanish _Cid_ shows traces in marked degree of the Arabic
invasion of Spain. No one has more enthusiastically and effectively
pointed out the Arabic influences in European poetry than Sismondi in
his history of the literature of the South of Europe. He begins the work
with, after the introduction, a chapter on Arabic literature, and he
especially recognizes that the tenderness of the love sentiment and the
chivalric attitude towards women came from the Arabs. The most
sympathetic and exhaustive account of the great influence of Mohammedan
influence upon Europe is in Samuel P. Scott's _History of the Moorish
Empire in Spain_.
It is said that even the French poem, the _Chanson de Roland_, shows
Arabic traces since the Arab invasion had reached into France.
We recognize that there is an invisible thread that binds together love
poems so remotely separated by time and place as those of the medieval
Persians, Arabs and Troubadours, and the modern English poets.
The Arabic note of ecstasy is found even in the poems of Goethe,
especially in a few in his _West Eastern Divan_, influenced by his
studies of Oriental literature during the Napoleonic wars. He used his
own experiences with eastern names, but he never failed to produce
literature of ecstasy. The Oriental romance also exerted an influence on
Beckford, Landor, Southey, Byron and Moore. Even Tennyson got the idea
of _Locksley Hall_ from reading Sir William Jones's prose translation of
the _Muallaqat_; Browning adopted an Arabian metre in his _Abt Vogler_;
George Meredith's _The Shaving of Shagpat_ was written to emulate the
_Arabian Nights_.
The Arabs excelled also in the elegy. Among the most famous elegies in
Arabic poetry are those of Khansa, a Pre-islamic poetess, on the murder
of her two brothers. There is an account of her by Thomas C. Chenery, in
the notes to his translation of Hariri's _Assemblies_ V. 1, pp. 387-391.
In fact the elegy is more common among early Pre-islamic poetry than the
love poem. The Orientals, particularly the medieval Hebrews, were always
distinguished in this kind of poetry. One of the best, certainly the
best in Turkish poetry, is the elegy by Baqui on the great Sultan
Suleiman I, translated by E. J. W. Gibb in _Ottoman Poetry_.
The Arabian love poems and elegies are proofs that poetry was
originally, as to-day, a personal cry, an outburst of emotion due to
repression. The cry of grief for the dead in battle; that is the note in
all early literature, Occidental and Oriental.
The poem among the Arabs and Hebrews had also a definite utilitarian
purpose. In early times satire was one of the chief forms under which
lyric poetry appeared. The poet was employed to combat the enemy and his
curses against them were supposed to be effective. He was a soothsayer,
a prophet, a magician. He voiced not only the communistic feeling of the
tribes, but his personal emotions. Even down to our day the public
demands that the poet write poems against the enemy in time of war.
Goethe was criticized for refusing to write against the French, for
example, but he explained later to Eckermann that he had no hatred
towards the French. In all wars there have been poets who have written
against the enemy, but usually this kind of poetry has been of an
inferior order. It finds its own tomb in a poem like the famous _Hymn of
Hate_ by Lissauer in the late world war.
Nothing in literature illustrates more the belief in the magical power
of poetry than the chapters in the _Book of Numbers_ dealing with the
effort of the Moabite King Balak to get Balaam to curse the children of
Israel. Balak believed that these curses would help him defeat the
Hebrews. But instead Balaam blessed them, unwillingly, saying that he
could but utter the words God put in his mouth, for the inspiration of
the poet came to him always from hidden forces. He reached to ecstasy
every time he spoke.
Arabic poetry then deals in intricate forms conveying ecstasy, with all
the stock themes of poetry, but especially with love.
The similarities between Biblical Hebrew poetry and Pre-islamic Arabic
poetry have been touched upon by Dr. George A. Smith in his _The Early
Poetry of Israel_ and by Thomas Chenery in his excellent introduction to
his translation of Hariri's _Assemblies_. Participators in various
military events themselves composed the poems in which they told of
their exploits, as you may note by comparing the _Muallaqat_ with the
songs of Miriam and Deborah. There was the same interest in nature as
you may see by comparing descriptions from the _Psalms_ and _Job_ to
that of the thunderstorm by Imru'ul Qays in the _Muallaqat_. The poetry
of both nations was often nomadic, the product of the influences of the
desert. Both nations recorded personal emotions, springing from tribal
events.
There was also the same tendency in both nations to utter ecstatically
sententious and moral sayings. Though only one poem in the _Muallaqat_,
that by Zuhayr, really moralizes, the later Arabic poets always loved to
give vent to reflections, proverbs, words of wisdom. Two of the best
Arabic poems of the kind are the improvisations of the vagabond Abu Zayd
in the 11th and 50th Assembly of Hariri's _Assemblies_. Two finer poems
which moralize without losing their poetic quality can scarcely be found
in Arabic literature. Most of the reflective poetry of those two
pessimistic, skeptic poets Abu l'Atahiya and Abu 'l Ala al Maarri are of
this kind. The ecstatic potentiality in reflection is seen in _Job_,
_Proverbs_ and _Ecclesiastes_.
The chief phase of Pre-islamic poetry that will not appeal to us is in
the great body of martial verse where love of robbery and bloodshed,
cruelty, revenge and hatred are fostered. The Bedouins gave us a
transcript of their life. They dwelt in their vices with frankness, but
they tried to make virtues out of them. We cannot blame them for not
having our ideals of peace and it is also doubtful if cruelties in their
warfare were greater than those in our own day.
The poets before Islam sang about revenge and fighting in a way that
even nauseates us. The martial spirit in the _Romance of Antar_ has made
it less popular with us than _The Arabian Nights_, for the former work
is an account of the fighting Arabs of the desert, and the latter deals
largely with the merchant Arabs of the city. Even the great and
beautiful _Song of Vengeance_ by the Arab Robin Hood, Ta abbata Sharran,
of which we have a second hand translation by Goethe, and fine verse
versions by R. A. Nicholson, _Literary History of the Arabs_ (pp.
98-100), and by Charles J. Lyall on pages 48-49 of _Arabic Poetry_, is
very cruel.
Pre-islamic poetry reeks too much with the ecstasy of delight to shed
blood, in which tendency it of course differs little from the early
poetry of other nations. However, the remarkable thing is that the
hearts of these warriors possessed so many fine feelings. One of the
noblest descriptions of woman is by a companion of the brigand Sharran,
from the _Mufaddaliyyat_, a translation of which appears on pages 81-82
of Lyall's volume.
The Arabian poetry which has been most frequently translated and written
about in English is Pre-islamic poetry. In especial, the _Muallaqat_, or
the seven so-called suspended poems, has been translated several times.
Sir William Jones made the first translation in prose in the eighteenth
century. In modern times we have had several translations, one by
Wilfrid Blunt and his wife. There has been considerable support for the
critical view that these poems represent the highest achievement of
Arabic poetry, both among Arabs themselves and Aryan critics. Imru'ul
Qays, who flourished in the sixth century A.D., is the most famous of
the poets in the collection, and is regarded by many as the greatest
Arabian poet. R. A. Nicholson and Clement Huart have given accounts of
the _Muallaqat_ in their histories of Arabic Literature. Professor
Mackail has published in his Oxford Lectures an essay on these odes and
D. Nöldeke has given us a full study of them in the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_. I shall not therefore dwell on them except to say that they
were collected in the eighth century by Hammad, and that most of these
poems deal with warriors rather than lovers, though they contain love
laments.
Nicholson and others regard the Abbasid period as the great era of
Arabic poets. This period extended from the accession of Saffah in 749
to the destruction of Bagdad by the Mongols in 1258. Abu Nuwas, Abu 'l
Atahiya, Mutanabbi and Abu 'l Ala al Maarri are recognized by Nicholson
as the Gods of Arabian poetry, and we in our smug inordinate
satisfaction with Aryan poetry, have not even translated or paid
attention to them. Abu Nuwas, who flourished in the early part of the
ninth century, sang of love and wine and led a riotous and immoral
life, and is familiar to the reader of the _Arabian Nights_ as the
jester of Harun al Rashid. His _Divan_ is to be found in German but not
in English. Many consider him the greatest of the Arabian poets. Abu 'l
Atahiya is a pessimist and philosophical poet thinker. He was imprisoned
by Harun for having ceased writing love poetry because he was hopelessly
in love with a slave girl. He described common emotions and used simple
language instead of far-fetched conceits. Mutanabbi in the tenth century
was the most famous of all the Arabian poets, but he is criticized by
many for his rhetoric and ornament. He is the master of the grand style.
Then we have in the next century the great Abu 'l Ala al Maarri, who has
been called the predecessor of Omar Khayyam. Bauerlein and Rihani have
translated some of his verses into English, and Bauerlein has also
devoted a little volume to him in _The Wisdom of the East_ series. Abu
'l Ala is the most modern of the Arabian poets. He was a freethinker and
a pessimist and his _Luzumiyyat_ reads like a work of one of our
rational poets. It attacks all religion including Islam. His letters
have been translated into English by Professor Margoliouth.[218:A]
I have already several times mentioned the most famous Arabic work next
to the Koran, the _Maqamat_ or _Assemblies_, by Hariri (1054-1122). The
tales have been called immoral, but Abu Zayd interests us as Gil Blas
does. The work written in rhymed prose is most fascinating reading.
There is a complete translation of this by T. Chenery and F. Steingass,
1867-1898.
The _Arabian Nights_ is the best known Arabic production to English
speaking people and is full of poetry, not only in the interspersed
verses, but in the stories themselves.
The _Romance of Antar_, from which I quoted a poem, is said to have been
written by a poet and philologist in the reign of Harun al Rashid. The
work is long and a few abridged volumes were translated into English by
Terrick Hamilton in 1819 and 1820.
Then there is the great poet of Cordova, Ibn Zaydun of the eleventh
century, whose love for the princess Wallada has made him celebrated.
Here is a beautiful love poem translated by Nicholson, _Literary History
of the Arabs_, pp. 425-426:
To-day my longing thoughts recall thee here;
The landscape glitters, and the sky is clear.
So feebly breathes the gentle zephyr's gale,
In pity of my grief it seems to fail.
The silvery fountains laugh, as from a girl's
Fair throat a broken necklace sheds its pearls.
Oh, 'tis a day like those of our sweet prime,
When, stealing pleasure from indulgent Time,
We played midst flowers of eye-bewitching hue,
That bent their heads beneath the drops of dew.
Alas, they see me now bereaved of sleep;
They share my passion and with me they weep.
Here in her sunny haunt the rose blooms bright,
Adding new lustre to Aurora's light;
And waked by morning beams, yet languid still,
The rival lotus doth his perfume spill.
All stirs in me the memory of that fire
Which in my tortured breast will ne'er expire.
Had death come ere we parted, it had been
The best of all days in the world, I ween;
And this poor heart, where thou art every thing,
Would not be fluttering now on passion's wing.
Ah, might the zephyr waft me tenderly,
Worn out with anguish as I am, to thee!
O treasure mine, if lover e'er possessed
A treasure! O thou dearest, queenliest!
Once, once, we paid the debt of love complete
And ran an equal race with eager feet.
How true, how blameless was the love I bore,
Thou hast forgotten; but I still adore!
Nor have I sounded the depth of Arabian poetry. Their greatest mystic
poet was Umar Ibn ul Farid, who flourished between 1181 and 1235, and
whose work is full of fervid and inspired poetry.
There is also Baha ad Din Zuhayr (d. 1258 A.D.), the love poet of Egypt,
whose complete poems have been translated into English by Edward H.
Palmer.
One of the great products of Arabic culture was its work in literary
criticism. While it is the fashion to-day to lay much stress on the
Italian and English studies of Aristotle's _Poetics_ in the Renaissance
and Elizabethan periods respectively, the Arabs were writing learnedly
on poetry centuries before they read the _Poetics_. They made a
specialty of the literature called the Adab, or belles lettres made up
of criticism, quotation and rhetoric.
The criticism of poetry flourished among the Arabs in the ninth and
tenth centuries A.D. as a higher art than it did in the sixteenth
century among the Italians and English. Unfortunately none of these
works have been translated; there is not even a reference to their
influence in Saintsbury's _History of Criticism in Europe_. The Arabs
had so many poets even in Pre-islamic times in the sixth century that
interest in preserving this poetry gave rise later to anthologists who
made collections. These anthologists commented on the poetical work and
compared it with that of later periods, and with that of their
contemporaries.
Ibn Yunus in the early part of the tenth century translated Aristotle's
_Poetics_ into Arabic and the Europeans learned of Aristotle's work from
the Arabs several centuries later. But the best Arabic works on the art
of poetry had, however, already been produced, presenting original ideas
gleaned from the study of the great Arabian poets, and illustrated by
examples from them. The Arabic critics did not go to the Greek and Roman
poems (which they considered cold besides their own) as did the Italians
and English to study the nature of poetry. The Arabs studied Greek
science, medicine, and philosophy, but not Greek poetry. Books on
prosody and poetry appeared after the founding of the system of Arabic
meters by Khalil b. Ahmad in the eighth century. There were also the two
celebrated schools of grammarians at Basra and Kufa, soon to merge in
the school of Bagdad. Never before had the art of poetry and criticism
flourished so thrivingly and displayed a so generally high order as
among the Arabs in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. A
faint idea of the great number of Arabian grammarians, critics and poets
may be gleaned by perusing the biographical dictionary of Ibn Khallikan,
who flourished in the thirteenth century. This work, which contains only
a partial list, has been compared to the _Life of Johnson_, by Boswell
(Lucas called him a Bagdad Boswell), and to _Plutarch's Lives_.
While Europe was plunged in ignorance and barbarism, the great Arab
poets and critics were achieving work that belongs to the best; but
alas, the very names which rank so high among them are unknown to most
people. We let them slumber in the difficult Arabic. We translate the
Chinese and Japanese poems probably more out of faddish reasons than of
a true love of their poetry, but we ignore the Arabians.
The Arab example contradicts the famous platitude that great epochs of
creative literary work are not ages of literary criticism. It is just
the reverse. Good criticism is never so conspicuous as in ages of
poetry, for there is such interest in poetry as to provoke literary
discussion, then more so than ever. The best criticism of poetry
appeared in England in the great age of Wordsworth and Byron. The Arabic
grammarians and anthologists began their work about the middle of the
eighth century. Incredible stories are told of their feats of memory for
verse, in the art of improvisation, in skill in manipulating the
language. They regarded the letters of their alphabet as human beings,
just as the Hebrew Cabbalists treated their alphabetical letters as
angels.
To name even the most important of grammarians, anthologists,
philologists, critics of Arabia, is to call a long list. Even
historians, philosophers, scientists and theologians entered the field
of poetic criticism. Every one quoted the poets, consequently poetry was
bound up not only with criticism but with Arabic thought. One of the
most quoted Arabic critics is Ibn Rashiq, of the eleventh century, whose
_Umda_ or _Pillar of the Art of Poetry_ is mentioned often by Ibn
Khaldun, the historian. The latter also names four great Arabic writers
of Adab, Ibn Qutayba's _Accomplishments of the Secretary_ (Ibn Qutayba's
_Book of Poetry and Poets_ is more often cited by other writers than the
_Accomplishments of the Secretary_), Jahiz's _Book of Eloquence and
Exposition_, al Mubarrad's _Perfect_, all of the ninth century, and in
Spain Abu Ali al Qali's _Curious Notions_, of the tenth century, whose
_Book of Dictations_, however, is better known.
Among the writers on poetry in the manner of the Arabs was the Hebrew
poet and critic, Moses Ibn Ezra, author of the _Conversations and
Recollections_, which was the first study of the kind in Hebrew and the
first criticism of the poetry of the Bible from an aesthetic point of
view. Among Arab critics to whom he is indebted, besides the
aforementioned Ibn Qutayba and Ibn Rashiq, are the first book in Arabian
_Poetics_ proper, by the Caliph, Ibn ul Mutazz, of the latter part of
the ninth century, a work by Qudama, and _Ornaments of Conversation_, by
Al Hatimi, both of the tenth century.
There are many other works that were well known and often cited in
Arabic literary circles. I shall name only Tha'alibi (died 1037), whose
_Solitaire of Time_ had many continuations by later critics, and the
famous _Fihrist_ or _Index_ by the Bookseller, Ibn Ishaq (tenth
century), one of the sections of which deal with poetry.
Ibn Khaldun, the historian, and a contemporary of Chaucer in the
thirteenth century, devoted a number of chapters to poetry in the
introduction to his famous history.
As a specimen of poetic criticism among the Arabs and as a corrective to
the general impression that ornament and not ecstasy counted in Arabic
poetry, I give the following English rendering from De Slane's French
translation of Khaldun's _Prolegomena_:
One of the conditions imposed in the use of this art (of
ornament) is that the embellishments appear in the piece quite
naturally, without the author's labor in searching for them
and without his being anxious about the effect that they
should produce. If they present themselves naturally, there is
nothing to object to them, for not being purposely introduced,
they save the subject the fault of lapsing into barbarism; but
when one imposes upon himself the task of painfully seeking
these embellishments, he is led to neglect the principles
which rule the combination of words, which are the foundation
of the discourse; this injures the principles of clearness of
expression and causes the distinctness and precision which
ought to characterize the discourse, to disappear; nothing
then remains but the embellishments. . . . Another condition
which should be observed in regard to the science of ornaments
is to make a rare use of it; that the poet apply it to two or
three verses of a poem; that will suffice to give elegance
and luster to the entire piece. The too frequent use of
embellishments is a fault, as Ibn Rashiq and others have
said. . . . All that we pointed out shows that the artificial
discourse (or style), when one writes it laboriously and as a
task, is inferior in merit to the natural discourse, for one
neglects thereby too many fundamental principles of the art of
speaking well. I leave it to good taste to judge thereof.
The Arabs then regarded poetry as ecstatic utterances emanating from the
unconscious, embodying an idea, and produced with little ornament. This
despite their belief that poetry must use the established forms of metre
and figures. It is unfortunate that even to the present day these old
forms are used, while Turkish literature has only very recently been
emancipated from them. Even Arabian political articles are to-day
written in rhymed prose. But as Chenery said, the history of rhymed
prose is the history of Arabic literature. Rhyme is natural to the
Arabic language, whereas it is really foreign to the English language.
If European civilization could free itself from the prejudices against
Semitic and Asiatic culture, and if the universities, instead of
studying minutely the barren medieval literature of Europe before the
Renaissance, would give fuller courses in the poetry of the Arabs,
Hebrews, Persians and Turks, the exchange would be salutary. The only
Asiatic literature that Europe made an attempt to study was that of the
Hindus, and, as has been suspected by many, this may have been done
chiefly out of Aryan vanity, to show that the earliest culture was not
Semitic but Aryan, and thus related to European culture. But the fact
remains that the poetry of these four nations mentioned is far superior
to that of medieval Europe. The two nations who were not Semitic, the
Persians and the Ottoman Turks, are almost wholly imbued with the
Semitic spirit. Persian poetry grew out of Arabic poetry, just as
Ottoman poetry developed from Persian poetry. There is nothing of the
Tartar spirit at all in Ottoman poetry, as Gibb has pointed out.
That poetry is subjective, lyric, ecstatic, is best seen in Oriental
poetry. It will repay the lover of literature to read such works as
Browne's _Literary History of Persia_, Gibb's _History of Ottoman
Poetry_, and Nicholson's _Literary History of the Arabs_. As for
Post-biblical poetry of the Hebrews, so rich in patriotic and moral
fervor, and in hymns and elegies, there are articles in the _Jewish
Encyclopedia_, chapters in Graetz's _History of the Jews_ and works on
various phases of it by numerous writers.
To the Oriental, poetry is ecstasy first and last, and this is all the
more remarkable since their poetry is so much more ornate, artificial,
figurative, and patterned than European poetry. It is sensuous,
passionate but not "simple." Its chief inferiority to European poetry,
however, springs from its lack in intellectual profundity, and its
severance (except in the Prophets of the Bible) from problems of social
justice.
FOOTNOTES:
[203:A] There is a French translation of the _Prolegomena_ by Mac Guckin
de Slane.
[204:A] Translated by Prof. Browne in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society_, 1899.
[214:A] See W. H. Schofield's _English Literature from the Roman
Conquest to Chaucer_, pp. 67-71.
[218:A] The best account and translations of Abu 'l Ala are in
Nicholson's _Studies in Islamic Poetry_, recently published.