VOLUME II

CHAPTER FOUR

GREEK, ROMAN AND OTHER CULTURAL ALLUSIONS IN NĀZIK’S POETRY:

THE HERITAGE OF KEATS, SHELLEY, BYRON AND ANATOLE FRANCE:

INTRODUCTION:

The word   ميثولوجي (Mythology) was first introduced into modern Arabic poetry by Rifā^Cah Rāfi^C al-Tahtāwī, and Sulaymān al-Bustānī in 1904:

    " The word mīthūlūgī, and now mītholojyā, was first adopted by the Egyptian Rifā^Cah Rāfi^C al-Tahtāwī from the French mythologie in his book Takhlīs al-Ibrīz fī talkhīs Bārīz. Nearly seventy years later, Sulaymān a1-Bustānī published his neo-classical verse translation of the Iliad which was the first practical introduction to classical Greek poetry. with a glossary of fifty-one pages of Greek names, illustrations of some of the mythological creatures and divinities mentioned in the epic, cross references to Arabic tradition, parallel quotations in the footnotes from two hundred Arab poets, and a more or less meticulous rendering in the jaz1 style, al-Bustānī managed to a large degree to domesticate the Homeric epic into neo-classical Arabic poetry... For his neo-classical contemporaries, al-Bustānī’s verse translation of the Iliad demonstrated that Arabic poetry could possibly absorb Greek mythology without necessarily losing its essential identity." ⁽¹⁾

This event encouraged the Arab Romantic poets "not only to use mythology in their poetry but also to argue that myth and poetry are inseparable" ⁽²⁾

To the Arab Romantics, the beginning of the twentieth century represented a turning point, as the beginning of the 19th century had done to the Europeans. They found themselves in a conflict between traditional and modern culture. One of the most noticeable ways in which this conflict manifests itself in their poetry is their employment, suggested by their westernised education, itself one of the symptoms of the conflict, of symbols and allusions derived from cultures other than their own for the expression of sentiments and opinions that still could not be directly voiced. Greek and Roman mythology, and to a lesser extent Assyrian and Babylonian, was a favourite medium through which to present, among other things, their attitudes towards their governments and social traditions. Being mainly educated in English literature, they mostly depended on the English Romantic use of Greek and Roman mythology.

At the time when Nāzik was beginning her career as a poet, there was little scope in Iraq, as in the other Arab countries, for freedom of expression for men, let alone for women. She accordingly chose to invest her poetry, especially that written in the 40’s, with mythological trappings, in order to indicate her position in an oblique way. Her political, social, and emotional attitudes are disguised in her adaptations of ancient mythologies. As well as serving her as a convenient vehicle for these purposes, Greek and Roman mythology also had a considerable impact, with its polytheism, on her monotheistic Islamic belief, until, at all events, the latter period of her work.

SOURCES OF NĀZIK’S  MYTHOLGICAL POETRY:

Like other Arab Romantics, Nāzik embellishes her poetry, particularly that written early in her career, with allusions from Latin. Greek, and other cultures. Her work contains borrowings from many sources -- Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Assyrian, Biblical, as well as Islamic.

In a written communication, Nāzik prided herself on studying Greek and Roman mythology widely at Ma^Chad al-Funūn al-Jamilah in Baghdad in 1942:

(I have used all these names and the like, because I know every minute detail of Greek mythology; I studied it in detail in the Department of Performing Art at Ma^Chad al-Funūn al-Jamīlah in 1942.)

Latin was taught at the Institute, and she took a Latin course in addition to studying Arabic. Her higher studies in America helped her to extend her study of world mythology. Thus, according to her own account, she was able to derive many of her classical allusions from the original sources. She even claims that she wrote her diary in Latin, but this has not been published. She continued her study of Latin and Greek mythology in America while studying for her M. A. in Literary Criticism (see chapter 1). She read Catullus, Cicero, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, among others (see chapter 1).

Although Nāzik claims to derive her allusions partly from the original sources, her transliteration appears, on the whole, to suggest that she is familiar with them in the form in which they occur in English or perhaps French literature, in which she was educated, rather than in the form in which they occur in the classical languages. Examples of this are the transliterations of Aurora as أورورا Urūrā, Cupid as كيوبيد Kyūbīd, Labyrinth as لابيرنث Lābirinth, Diana as دايانا Dāyānā, Venus as فينوس Finūs and Medusa as ميدوزا Mīdūzā, all of which suggest an English influence. It might be said that the transliteration of Narcissus asنارسيس  Nārsīs suggests French influence, but it is possible that the latter, at any rate, represents merely a standard Arabic version of the name.

Nāzik’s mythology may directly derive from:  1) English and classical poetry,   2) mythological handbooks, and indirectly from:    1) the Arabic versions of English Romantic poetry,     2) critical studies of English mythological poetry.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF "THE GOLDEN BOUGH" TO NĀZIK:

Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough was an important source of mythological lore, for Arab poets just as it had been for western poets, such as T. S. Eliot, some years earlier. Frazer’s imaginative, anthropological approach offered to both eastern and western poets a means of assimilating the tradition of mythological poetry without abandoning a specifically modern sensibility. Frazer’s importance was well recognized in the Arab World. In his article "al-Ghusn al-dhahabī: Kūmīdyā al-sīr Jīmis Frīzir al-Khālidah", in al-Siyāsah al-usbū^Ciyyah, ^CAbd al-Halīm Muhammad writes of The Golden Bough: "Everybody should be aware of this book." ⁽³⁾

In a foot note to his article " al-Ghusn al-dhahabī; waq^{C C}amīq wa namat a^Clā" (The Golden Bough; a deep impact and a higher form) in al-Ustūrah wa 'l-ramz; dirāsah fī 'l-asātīr wa 'l-adyān al-sharqiyyah (the myth and the symbol; study of the eastern myths and religions), which is based on Vickery’s book The Literary impact of the Golden Bough, Jabra confirms the influence of this book on the Arab poets in the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s: ⁽⁴⁾

“The reader can find the following paragraph in my translation of the first part of the fourth volume of "The Golden Bough" –"Adonis"; I would like to mention here that I translated this volume into Arabic in Jerusalem, in 1945; the first and the second chapters were published in Baghdad, in 1954. Then the complete translation was published in Beirut, in 1957. It had an influence on our poetry of the fifties and the early sixties".

In "Modern Arabic Literature and the West", in Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature,⁽⁵⁾ Jabra talks again about the significance of his version of volume IV of The Golden Bough to the modern Arab poets:

"My own translation of James Frazer’s volume "Adonis", from The Golden Bough, provided the Arabic text of the Tammuze myth which partly underlay Eliot’s poem [The Waste Land]. And as the myth originally belonged to our part of the world it seemed natural that Arab poets would incorporate it into their work. Thus the dominant theme in the Arabic poetry of the fifties was that of the parched land waiting for rain; of fertility restored through the blood of Tammuze, murdered by the wild boar; of death and resurrection."

In al-Bahth ^Can ma^Cna,^{(6) C}Abd al-Wāhid Lu'lu'ah thinks that Jabrā’s version of volume IV of The Golden Bough had a considerable impact on modern Iraqi poets; it was through this version that they became acquainted with many mythological names. It inspired them to seek further references to other mythological studies.

For Nāzik, as well as her fellow-Romantic al-Sayyāb, The Golden Bough  may have been of special importance, because its second volume, Adonis, Attis, Osiris was translated by Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, who had taught both poets in Ma^Chad al-mu^Cal1imīn al-^Caliyah. This translation encouraged a widespread interest in mythology in Iraq, and, although Nāzik does not acknowledge the influence of The Golden Bough on her it may be more than a coincidence that so many of the mythological personages referred to by her are discussed by Frazer. Among these are: Buddha, Brahman, Adam and Eve, Abraham, Jesus, Apollo, Demeter, Olympus, Plutus, Midas, Hyacinth, Narcissus, Aurora, Adonis and Venus; and names of the supernatural creatures that frequent her poems, such as the Jinni, demons, ghosts, sirens and giants, are also to be found in Frazer.

MYTHOLOGICAL THEMES AND SYMBOLS:

In examining Nāzik’s uses of mythological themes, we find that there are erotic, artistic, religious and political implications behind her employment of these myths. Within these there are common concepts -- the concepts of sin, punishment and repentance. In Ma'sat al-hayāt (the tragedy of life), she introduces the concepts of sin and punishment in many poems, such as Ādam wa Hawwā' (Adam and Eve), Qābīl wa Hābīl (Cain and Abel), al-Harb al-^Cālamiyyah (the world war), ^CUyūn al-amwāt (the eyes of the dead), Salāt ilā Blāwtus (a prayer to Plutus) and Ughniyat Tāyīs (Thais’s song).

These concepts are apparently linked with many fictional characters who are employed as symbols to represent these concepts. These characters are: Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Sarah, Abraham, Hagar, Ishmael, Buddha, Brahma, Prometheus, Jupiter, Minerva, Jesus, Thais, Paphnutius, Mary Magdalen , Muhammad, Rābi^Cah al-^CAdawiyyah, Plutus, Midas, Rapunzel, Nahawand, Venus, Adonis, Diana, Endymion, Narcissus, Demeter, Persephone, Vulcan, Vica Pota, Semiramis, Shahrazād, Jamīl Buthaynah, Qays Laylā, Tawbah Laylā, Kuthayr ^CAzzah. The names of these characters are not always employed, they are alluded to in terms of their significant actions, such as Prometheus: stealing the fire from Heaven for his people; Rābi^Cah al-^CAdawiyyah: her repentance; Paphnutius: his religious hypocrisy. Alternatively, these characters may be alluded to by an alternative name or a sobriquet: Ahmad for the prophet Muhammad, the lover of the moon for Endymion, the mistress of the countryside for Demeter and the goddess of flame for Vesta. The third means of allusion is metonymical, to indicate Nessus by his poisoned shirt, and Rapunzel by her very long hair.

Each one of these characters carries an important concept in Nazik’s life (see tables 2 & 7(:

1) sin and punishment (Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel(,

2) sacrifice and punishment (Prometheus and Jesus(,

3) sin and repentance (Buddha and Brahma, Paphnutius and Thais, Muhammad, Magdalen and Rābi^Cah al-^CAdawiyyah),

4) materialism and punishment (Plutus and Midas(,

5) victim of greed (Midas and Rapunzel [= Nahāwand] ),

6) human vanity (Narcissus(.

These characters are linked with supernatural creatures, such as the Jinniyyah, the serpent, the monster, the ghouls, the giant fish, the giant, the spider, the ghosts and the sirens. The Jinniyyah stands as a counterpart of almost all the characters and the supernatural creatures. She and the other supernatural creatures and neutral mythological things are employed as symbols for the arts, especially poetry (see below), and other themes. For instance, the supernatural creatures and things appear variously representing:

1) Mortal sins (the serpent in al-Uf^Cuwān, the giant, the giant fish and the ghoul in La^Cnat al-zaman, and the Jinniyyah in Nidā' ila 'l-sa^Cādah(

2) evil power (the spider in Salāt al-ashbāh, and the demons in Nidā' ila 'l-sa^Cadāh(

3) the turbid past (the ghosts in Salāt al-ashbāh and La^Cnat al-zaman(

4) happiness (the Jinniyyah in Nidā' ila 'l-sa^Cādah(

5) beauty (the Houri in al-Amīrah al-nā'imah (the sleeping princess(.

6) the inevitability of love (Cupid’s arrow in al-Bahth ^Can al-sa^Cādah)

7) complexity (the Labyrinth in al-Uf^Cuwān),

8) oblivion and repentance (Pactolus in Salāt ila Blāwtus and Lethe in Suwar wa tahwīmāt amām adwā' al-murūr(

9) generousity (al-Kawthar in Suwar wa tahwīmāt amām adwā' al-murūr)

THE RELATION OF THE JINNIYIAH TO POETRY:

The Jinniyyah in Nāzik’s poetry is employed as a symbol to suggest poetry. In "al-Shā^Cir wa 'l-lughah" (the poet and language),⁽⁷⁾  Nāzik defines the poet’s language as a treasure, and as the inspiring Jinniyyah:

... فاللغة منبع وليســت مجــرد أداة ولا هـي تلك الآلة التــــي قررها بعض النقاد المحدثين وإنما اللغة كــنز الشاعر وثروته وهـــــي جنيته الملهمة في يدها مـــدر شاعريته ووحيه فكلما ازداد صـلته بها وتحسسه لها كشفت عن أسرارها المذهلة وفتحت له كنوزها الدفينة. ان كل صورة في قصيدة الشاعر يكمن فيها من العوالم ما لا حدود له والشاعر هو الذي يفتح هذه الكنوز.

(Language Is a spring; it is not merely an implement, nor is it the machine that it has been represented as by some of the modern critics. Language is the poet’s treasure and wealth, it is his inspiring Jinniyyah. In her hands is the source of his poeticism and inspiration. The more his relations with her and his feeling for her increase, the more she reveals her amazing secrets and opens her buried treasures to him. Every image in the poet’s poem conceals unlimited worlds, and it is the poet who opens these treasures(.

In her dialogue "al-Ibrah wa ‘l-qasīdah" (the needle and poetry),⁽⁸⁾ she compares poetry to a 'beloved Satan', or to a 'kind and celestial angel' :

ولكن هذا الشيطان الحبيب أو الملك الإلهي الطيب لا يعطينا كل شيء وإنما يعطي شيئا ويغيب عنا أشياء أو هو يعطي المفتاح ثم يقف مبتسما مشجعا, وعلى الشاعرة بعد ذلك أن تشق طريقها وحدها.

( But this beloved Satan, or kind celestial angel does not give us everything. It gives (us) something and hides froth us (other) things; or it gives the key and then stands smiling and encouraging; thereafter it is for the poetess to make her own way alone.(

In al-Amīrah al-nā'imah (The sleeping princess) [St. 1], a word in a dictionary is compared to the Houri, who, like the sleeping beauty, was destined to sleep a hundred years until a prince came to kiss her and then she was awakened. A word in a dictionary is passive and sterile until brought to life by a poet. It must await the arrival of the poet, just as eastern woman must wait passively for the arrival of the unchosen husband. A word is also similar to a mermaid who sleeps in her isolation until a poet takes her out and uses her in his poetry. The Houri here is identical to the Jinniyyah, and both resemble eastern woman, who is isolated from her society:

والكلمة

حورية, غافية, منعمه

يخرجها الشاعر من عزلتها لآلئا عذرية الأصداف

في أبحر بعيدة تائهة الضفاف

ينثرها عرائسا مائية في أفق مفقود

وشرفة مسحورة الأستار لم يسمع بها الوجود

تفتح شباكا على عوالم الأطياف

(The word is a slumbering Houri, cosseted, / removed from its isolation by the poet like virgin-shelled pearls / in distant forlorn-shored seas, / scattered by him like water-nymphs in a lost horizon, / and like a magic-curtained balcony, unheard of by existence, / opening a window on the worlds of phantoms.)

This echoes the last three lines of the seventh stanza and the first two lines of the eighth stanza of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale:

The same that oft-times hath

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

It also echoes the last two lines of Ode to Psyche [1. 66-7]:

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

To let the warm love in!

In Nidā' ilā 'l-sa^Cādah (a call to happiness) [St. 41], she brings together the Jinniyyah with three ^CUdhrī poets, Qays b. al-Mulawwah, Tawbah and Jamīl. She does not mention the names of the poets’ beloved ones; she alludes to them as the Jinniyyah. First, she is Qays’s beloved—Laylā al-^CAmiriyyah; then she is Jamil’s beloved—Buthaynah; the third time, she is Tawbah’s beloved—Laylā al-Akhyaliyyah and, by implication, Nāzik’s lover:

ورأوها تهش في مقلتي (قيـ         ــس) مع الدمع والضباب الثقيل

وأحسوا كيانها الــمرح الرا           قص في حزن توبة وجميل

( And they saw her in Qays’ eyes smiling, in spite of the tears and the heavy fog; / And they felt her cheerful dancing existence in the sadness of Tawbah and Jamīl.)

In Wa lākinnaha satakūn al-akhīrah (this is going to be the last time) [St. 2], a version of Rupert Brooke’s It's not going to happen again (1913), she substitutes the Arabic names:

Buthaynah, Tawbah, Jamīl, Qays, Laylā, Kuthayyir and ^CAzzah:

وتعرف هذا بثينة في دركات الجحيم

ويدركه توبة وجميل

وكم غمغمته أناشيد قيس بصوت رخيم

وواست به حزن ليلى الطويل

وكم رددته شفاه كثيرة في نشوة

لعزة وهي تموت كسيرة

ولكنها ستكون الأخيرة يا حلوتي

ولكنها ستكون الأخيرة

( And Buthaynah knows this in the lowest levels of hell, / and Tawbah and Jamil are aware of it; / how often have Qays’ odes muttered it in a soft voice / and consoled with it Laylā’s long sorrow; / how often have Kuthayyir’s lips uttered, it in ecstasy / to ^CAzzah while she was dying broken:/ "But this is going to be the last time, my sweet girl, this

is going to be the last time.")

for the original names: Juliet, Romeo, Cleopatra, Paris and Helen in the second stanza of Brooke’s poem:

It’s the very first word that poor Juliet heard

 From her Romeo over the Styx;

And the Roman will tell Cleopatra in hell

When she starts her immortal old tricks;

What Paris was tellin’ for good-bye to Hellen

 When he bundled her into the train--

 Oh, it’s not going to happen again, old girl,

it’s not going to happen again.

Brooke writes in a self-consciously comic manner. The joke is to describe classical beauties in a style derived from Kipling’s Barrackroom Ballads. Nāzik removes the comic vulgarity and transforms Brooke’s poem into a poignant Romantic lyric.

Keats, in Ode to a Nightingale [st. vii], describes fancy as a 'deceiving elf! ' :

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf!

Shelley, in Mont Blanc [1. 44], describes the Witch as poetry:

"the still cave of the witch poesy"

Shelley and Byron were identified by a contemporary reviewer (admittedly a hostile reviewer) as forming a Satanic school of poetry.

THE RELATION OF THE JINNIYYH TO GOD (=POETRY):

To many Arab modern poets, poetry and god are related to one another. In his article "Allāh wa 'l-shi^Cr" (God and Poetry),⁽⁹⁾ Nizār Qabbānī, for instance, explains the relation of poetry to God (= the Jinniyyah in Nāzik’s poetry). He believes that the scriptures, the Bible and the Qur’an, are written in poetry, because poetry is God’s means for communicating with his people; he quotes verses from the Qur’an and asks his reader to read verses of the Bible:

حين أراد الله ان يتصل بالإنسان ويقنعه بوجوده, لجأ إلى الشعر ........

هذه واحدة من قصائد الله. هل أدلكم على قصائد أخرى؟ إذن فافتحوا

الأناجيل, افتحوا المزامير .. لتروا كيف تسيل حنجرة الله بالشعر ...

 ( When God wanted to communicate with man and convince him of his existence, he had recourse to poetry .... This is one of God’s poems. Shall I tell you where to find other poems? Then open the gospels and the psalms .. to see how God’s throat flows with poetry.)

Like God, Nāzik’s Jinniyyah (= poetry) has two contrasting qualities: mercy and revenge, In La^Cnat al-zaman [St. 6], the Jinniyyahs have positive qualities; they participate in Nāzik’s Romantic experience:

ونجوب العالم في عربات

صنعتها اذرع جنيات

من عطر الأزهار الخجلات

من أسلاك الضوء الالاق

على قعر النهر على ارض لم يلمسها القمر الالاق

وتناست مولدها الآفاق

( And we wander the world in chariots / made by the Jinniyyahs’s hands / from the perfume of the shy flowers, / from the wires of the glittering light / at the bottom of the river by a land, which the glittering moon had not touched, / and whose birth the horizons had forgotten.)

In the next stanza, the Jinniyyahs are revengeful. While dreaming, the two lovers hear 'a kind of obscure echo' – 'a throbbing echo' – 'in the darkly silent waves'. Nazik thinks that this sound is made by supernatural beings, who are perhaps the former lovers of both of them:

" الجنيات المنتقمات

صعدن إلينا في عربات"

(The revengeful Jinniyyahs / ascended towards us in chariots.)

In Ughniyat Tāyīs (The song of Thais) [st. 3], Thais shares the Jinniyyah’s two contrasting qualities -- goodness and badness :

وشفاهي ها هنا اللين                ورؤى صيفية لدنه

إنها إن شئت سكين                  وإذا شئت رقى فتنه

 (And my lips are here, the smoothness and the gentle summer visions. They are, if I wish, a knife, and if I wish, charms of infatuation.)

The gentle and revengeful Jinniyyah in Nāzik’s poetry is comparable to Shelley’s 'merciful and avenging God' in Queen Mab [vi, 1. 93-104]:

A while thou stoodst

Baffled and gloomy; then thou didst sum up

The elements of all that thou didst know;

The changing seasons, winter’s leafless reign,

The budding of the Heaven-breathing trees,

The eternal orbs that beautify the night,

The sunrise, and the setting of the moon,

Earthquakes and wars, and poisons and disease,

And all their causes, to an abstract point

Converging, thou didst bend and called it god!

The self-sufficing, the omnipotent,

The merciful and the avenging god!

In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley describes Prometheus as a Christ in as much as he saved his people from starvation, and as a Satanic figure in as much as he stole fire from Jupiter. Nāzik’s Jinniyyah is also similar to Shelley’s witch of Atlas; they both are kind and cruel; they enchant men, and then leave them in misery.

The cruelty of Nāzik’s Jinniyyah in Ughniyah li-'l-insān⁽¹⁾ [st. 194] also reminds us of Lamia’s cruelty in Keat’s Lamia [Part 1, 1. 290-91]:

هذه الربة النحاسية الاحـ       ــساس لو لان قلبها الصخري

(This mistress, with feelings of brass if only her stony heart would soften)

Compare:

The cruel lady, without any show

Of sorrow for her tender favorite’s woe ….

THE JINNIYYAH’S DWELLING PLACES AND THEIR RELATIONS WITH POETRY:

Poetry is very often defined by English and Arab poets as a magical cave, room, palace or castle. In Arabic poetry, these places are regarded as the dwelling places of the Jinniyyah. Nizār Qabbānī, for instance, describes poetry as a magical cave in his article "Allāh wa 'l-shi^Cr" (god and poetry):⁽¹⁰⁾

الشعر كلمة السر .. من عرف بقولــــها وكيف يقولها استطاع ان يزحزح

الصخرة المسحورة عن المغارة المسحورة ... ويصل إلى صناديق اللؤلؤ

والمرجان .. والى الحور المقصورات في الجنان.

(Poetry is the secret word .. He who can say it, and knows how it should be said, will be able to move the magical rock from the magical cave ... and reach the boxes of pearls and corals .. and the Houris who are confined in the Gardens.)

In "al-Ibrah wa 'l-qasīdah",⁽¹¹⁾ Nāzik compares poetry to a locked magical room:

وقد تاتيني قواف مفاجئة منفردة ليس لها اشطر غير انها تعطيني مفتاح

غرفة مسحورة مقفلة تشق للقصيدة دربا لا عهد لي به.

( And sudden Isolated rhymes may come to me, with no lines, but giving me the key to a magical locked room which opens a way to the poem which I have not known before.)

Nāzik’s Jinniyyah and shelley’s genii dwell in places isolated from human beings. Nāzik’s Jinniyyahs live in a shell, like the Houri in al-Amīrah al-nā'imah, or in an enchanted fortress as in Salāt ilā Blāwtus, or at the bottom of the river as in La^Cnat al-zaman, or in a monastery as in Unshūdat al-ruhbān, whereas Shelley’s Jinniyyah lives in a cave as in The Witch of Atlas, or in an ethereal palace as in Queen Mab.

In Salāt al-ashbāh [st. 54], Nāzik describes a legendary place associating it with memories of an even more remote and fabled castle built by Vulcan In the days of early Greece and finished off by Vica:

في خفايا هذا المكان الخرافي      أساطير قلعة مسحورة

من تراث الإغريق شيدها (فلـ       ــكان) سرا في أعصر مطمورة

                               *      *     *

وبناها على رواب من المعـ          ـدن منحوتة الذرى سوداء

ناعمات على مزالقها تصـ            ـقل (فيكا) خدودها الملساء

 (In the secret parts of this mythical place, there were myths of an enchanted fortress, / from the Greek heritage, which Vulcan constructed secretly in long-buried times / *   *   * / and built on black hills of metal with sculptured peaks, / smooth, on whose slopes Vica polishes her soft cheeks.)

Vica Pota, in Roman literature, is a goddess of victory. Nazik refers to her as Vica associating her with Vulcan, the god of blacksmith In Salāt ilā Blāwtus. She describes Vica’s cheeks as smooth and she compares them to the smooth walls of Midas’s and the witch’s palace. Shelley, Keats and Byron do not refer to Vica in their poetry. Very likely, Nāzik derives her reference to Vica from a mythological dictionary.

The castle of the Jinniyyah, in Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st. 16], is made from pearls, collected by the nymphs of the sea:

ويقولون ان جدرانها الغـــــا               مضة اللون من لآلئ البحار

جمعتها عرائس الماء من اعـ              ــماق بحر مطلسم الاسرار

( And its dark-coloured walls are made from the pearls of the seas -- said they;    / the nymphs collected them from the depths of a sea whose secrets are magically protected.)

in al-Amīrah al-nā’imah [st. 1], the bottom of the river is a dwelling place for nymphs (= the Jinniyyah). The description of the fortress and the walls that are made of pearls recalls Shelley’s genii, who dwell in the ocean, in The Cloud [1. 21-24]:

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,

This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move

In the depths of the purple sea;

The walls of the Jinniyyah, in Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st. 18], are taken from Semiramis’s palace:

ويقولون ان أبوابها المقـــــ                ــفلة الصمت فوق أروع سر

تزعت من جدران قصر سميرا        ميس في ليل بابل ذات عصر

 (Its doors closed in silence over the most wonderful secret, said they, / are taken from the walls of Semiramis’ palace one night in Babylon long ago.)

The materials of the magical castle [st. 18], in which the Jinniyyah lives, come from various eastern regions. The domes, for instance, are made from Indian wood:

والقباب الضخام من خشب الجو                   ز الشذي المعطر الألواح

من شعاب الهند الملفعة الغــــا                        بات بالذكريات والأشباح

( The huge domes made of scented fragrant planks of walnut wood, / from valleys of India, the forests of which are entwined with memories and ghosts.)

India is traditionelly associated with wealth and exotic luxury in English verse from the late 16th century onward. An example of this is Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound [Act ii, scene 3]:

Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist,

As a lake, paving in the morning sky,

With azure waves which burst in silver light,

Some Indian vale. Behold it, rolling on

Under the curdling winds, and islanding

The peak whereon we stand, midway, around ….

The eastern doors of the Jinniyyah’s castle also remind us of the eastern gates of Hyperion’s palace in Keat’s Hyperion [Book 1, 1.  263-265]:

…. Releas’d, he fled

To the eastern gates, and full six dewy hours

Before the dawn in season due should blush ….

In Ughniyah li-’l-insān (1) [st. 186], Nāzik describes happiness as a magical thing; its Jinniyyah lives in a limitless and remote place:

من غبار النجوم جدران ماوا         ها الغريب المشيد فوق الزمان

في مكان من الموجود على با        ب رؤاه يضيع حد المكان

( The walls of her strange shelter, built above time, are made from the dust of the stars, / in a place in existence, at the door of whose visions the limitation of place disappears.)

In stanza 189, the Jinniyah’s palace is built in the air:

تلك جنية السعادة في قصـ              ـــر بعيد يقوم خلف الغيوم

( That is the Jinniyyah of happiness in a distant palace situated behind the clouds.)

This recalls Coleridge’s dome of pleasure in Kubla Khan [1. 46]:

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

In  Ughniyyah li-’l-insān (1) [st. 198], the image of the fog which surrounds the castle makes the story more mysterious even for tellers of riddles and tales:

وانظري من ضباب قصرك من لغــ             ــزك من مت جوك المجهول

 ( And look from the fog of your palace, from your riddle, and from the silence of your unknown atmosphere.)

In Ughniyah li-’l-insān [st. 181], she describes the Jinniyyah as لغز (a riddle) because her secret is 'hidden behind the fog':

ذلك اللغز, ذلك الحلم المحـ                 ــجوب خلف الضباب اين تراه؟

(That riddle, that dream hidden behind the fog. Where do you see it?)

The substance of the misty palace of the Jinniyyah in Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st. 19]:

هذي القلعة الضبابية الشكـــ                       ــل اليها يضيع خطو الساري

(The steps of the person who comes by night to this fortress whose form is misty are in vain.)

and the mercury palace in Nidā' ilā 'l-sa^Cādah [St. 20]:

قصرك الزئبقي اين يغور؟

كلما كاد ان يبين

(Your mercury-palace, where does it sink / whenever it is about to appear?)

are parallel to the misty form of the witch in Queen Mab [Part i, 1. 109-110]:

                 Her thin and misty form

                              Moved with the moving air ….

and heavenly palace in Queen Mab [Part ii, 1. 30-39]:

Yet likest evening’s vault, that faery Hall!

As Heaven, low resting on the wave, it spread

Its floors of flashing light,

Its vast and azure dome,

Its fertile golden islands

Floating on a silver sea;

 Whilst suns their mingling beamings darted

Through clouds of circumambient darkness,

And pearly battlements around

Looked o’er the immense of Heaven.

THE JINNIYAH’S APPEARANCE IN NĀZIK’S POETRY:

The Jinniyah’s character is the core of Nāzik’s mytho logy; she appears as a counterpart of many mythological, fictional and religious characters, and supernatural creatures. She plays the role of many sinful female characters, such as Thais, Magdalen and Rābi^Cah al-^CAdawiyyah. Most of the details of the Jinniyyahs’s features and character, and their functions in Nāzik’s poetry mainly derive, I think, from Anatole France’s novel Thais,⁽¹²⁾ and Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas. We will compare the features of the Jinniyyah’s beauty and character In Nāzik’s poetry, France’s novel and Shelley’s poem.

(1)  HER COMPLEXION AND HAIR:

The colour of the Jinniyyah’s complexion varies from one poem to another; in Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st. 26] (see below), her complexion is brown. In Ughniyah li-’l-insān [st. 194], her complexion is white:

لو أراقت ضياءها فوق هذي ألا                 رض وافتر وجهها ألزنبقي

(Oh! if she spilt her light on this earth and her lily-white face faded.)

This is reminiscent of the white colour of the Greek Courtesan Thais (= the Jinniyyah) in Thais:⁽¹³⁾

"with her white arm she held above her head the heavy curtain."

In Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st. 25], the length of the Jinniyyah’s hair is comparable to that of Rapunzel’s hair. Unlike Rapunzel’s hair, but like the hair of Shelley’s Witch, the Jinniyyah’s hair is dark:

Seen through a Temple’s cloven roof -- her hair

Dark -- the dim brain whirls dizzy with delight,

The Witch of Atlas [st. v]

In stanza 26, like Rapunzel’s hair, the Jinniyyah’s hair is used as a ladder:

أرسلي يا طويلة الشعر يا سمــ                   ــراء إحدى الجدائل المسحورة

وارفعي الهائمين بالذهب البر                    اق من هذه الوهاد الكسيرة

(Let down one of your magical tresses, oh long-haired one!, oh brown one! / and lift the lovers of glittering gold up from these shattered low lands.)

The blind man in stanza 25:

ذلـك الشــعر ربما أرسلته              سلمـــا للضرير كـــل مساء

يتخطى عليه مرتعش الخطـ         ـو مراقي تلك الربى الملساء

(That hair, perhaps she lets it down as a ladder every evening for the blind man / to ascend on with trembling tread the steps of those smooth hills.)

is an allusion to the prince who used Rapunzel’s hair as a ladder to reach Rapunzel. In the fairytale, Rapunzel’s hair was used by the witch as a ladder to bring food to Rapunzel. The witch cut Rapunzel’s hair off and let it down, so that the prince would climb up to see her instead of Rapunzel. When the prince climbed the tower, the witch cut the ladder (=the hair) off. The prince fell down on a thorn and was blinded.

(2) HER HANDS AND HAIR:

In Ughniyah li-'l-insān [st. 188], like her hair, the Jinniyyah’s hands are supernatural; their function is to hold the stars across space:

ويداها المسحورتان تقودا            ن النجوم الشقراء عبر الفضاء

)Her magical hands drive the reddish stars across space.)

In Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st. 24], the Jinniyyah has a similar astronomical function:

إن أرادت شدت به القمر النا         ئي إلى الأرض أو إلى الجوزاء

)If she wants she will fasten with it the distant moon to the earth or to Gemini.)

Nāzik’s imagery, vocabulary, and main theme in al-Bahth ^Can al-sa^Cādah remind us of Abu Mādī’s al-^CAnqā' (phoenix). The two poets liken happiness to supernatural creatures; Nāzik compares it with the Jinniyyah and Abu Mādī with the phoenix. In Line 6, Abu Mādī looks for happiness in every historical epoch; he even seeks it in the planets:

فتشت جيب الغجر عنها والدجى           ومددت حتى الكواكب إصبعي

)I looked for it in the pocket of dawn and of darkness, and I stretched out my finger even to the planets.)

In Salāt ilā Blāwtus [St. 23], the Jinniyyah’s long hair is described as blessed by the inhabitants of Olympus’s peaks:

شعرها -هكذا رووا- باركته            من قنان (الاولمب) أيد خفيه

(Her hair - said they- was blessed by hidden hands from the peaks of Olympus.)

(3) HER CLOTHES:

Shelley’s Witch, in The Witch of Atlas [St. v], is clothed in light:

        A lovely lady garmented in light

                   From her own beauty ….

Similarly, the Jinniyyah’s clothes, in Nāzik’s Ughniyah li-’l-insān (1) [st. 192], are made of light:

ربما لونت ملابسها الغجـ                ــرية اللون من لهيب دمانا

)Perhaps she coloured her dawn-coloured clothes from the flame of our blood.)

Nāzik alludes to Aurora, the goddess of dawn, when she talks about the Jinniyyah’s dawn-like clothes; in stanza 113, she refers to the goddess by name:

وأطلت آلهة الغجر اورو              را على المشهد المثير الرهيب

لحظة ثم أطبق الأمس جفنيـ            ــه على الحاضر المقيت الجديب

)And Aurora, the Goddess of dawn appeared on the exciting, fearful scene, / for a moment, and then yesterday closed its eyelids upon the hateful, barren present.)

THE JINNIYYAH AS A SYNCRETIC OF MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS:

Very often Nāzik’s Jinniyyah appears, disguised in many supernatural forms, with various kinds of religious, fictional and mythological couples:

1) she appears with two gods From related religions, like Buddha and Brahma, as a spider.

2) with a conjugal couple, like Adam and Eve, as a serpent (= Satan),

3) with two brothers, like Cain and Abel, as Medusa (= a cursing god),

4) with a courtesan and a priest, like Thais and Paphnutuis, as a god of pleasure,

5) and with lovers From classical Arabic poets -- examples of these couples are: Qays/Laylā, Tawbah/Laylā and Jamil/Buthaynah -- as the Jinniyyah of happiness.

This may perhaps indicate a certain inclination towards pantheism, in Nāzik’s somewhat idiosyncratic religious outlook, at this stage.

THAIS AND PAPHNUTIUS AND THE THEME OF SIN AND REPENTANCE:

The theme of sin and repentance is the core of Nāzik’s mythological poetry. The Jinniyyah, in this theme, plays the role of a god -- the merciful and the revengeful, who is responsible for everything, whether bad or good. Thais and Paphnutius dominate Nāzik’s Ma'sāt al-hayāt, and its versions. Nāzik, I think, read about these two characters, most likely in Douglas’s English translation of Anatole France’s Thais, or in Ahmad al-Sāwī’s Arabic version of Thais. She refers to Thais by name, and alludes to Paphnutius as the monk, possibly because the monk’s name does not fit her poetic measure.

The Jinniyyah and Thais are identical in Nāzik’s poetry; they both suggest happiness and sorrows; they are both related to supernatural creatures. In Ughniyat Tāyīs (the song of Thais) [st. 3], Thais is parallel to the Jinniyyah because they are both good and bad at the same time.

In France’s novel, Thais is not described as a witch, but her mother is described by her people as a witch:

"They said in the neighbourhood that she was a witch, and changed into an owl at night, and flew to see her lovers. It was a lie. Thais knew well, having often watched her, that her mother practised no magic, but that she was eaten up with avarice, and counted all night the gains of the day."⁽¹⁴⁾

In her search for happiness, Nāzik visits the monastery of the monks; she fails to find happiness there because she finds the Jinniyyah, represented by Thais, in the thoughts of the monks.

Nāzik gives Thais various titles to describe the two contrasting sides of Thais’s ( = her) conflict; in ^CInd al-ruhbān (a mong the monks) [st. 15], and Unshūdat a1-ruhbān [st. 20], she is called ربة الدير  (the Lady of the Monastery) to suggest the positive side of the conflict:

انه وجهها, أينسون؟ هذه           ربة الدير, هذه تاييس

)It is her face; do they forget? This is the mistress of the monastery, this is Thais.)

Another time, she is calledابنة الإثم  (the daughter of sin) in Fī dunyā 'l-ruhbān (in the world of the monks) [st. 14], to suggest the negative side:

ما نسينا غواية الراهب المفــ              ــتون في حبها وكيف هداها

يا له بائسا سما بابنة الاثـــــ                ــم الى قمة السماء وتاها

(We have not forgotten the erring of the monk infatuated with love for her, and how he guided her. / How miserable he is! He led the daughter of sin to the highest heaven and then lost his way.)

Elsewhere, as in Nidā' ilā 'l-sa^Cādah (a call to happiness) [st. 36], she is called the mistress of the countryside.

In Unshūdat al-ruhbān (the ode of the monks) [st. 15], Nāzik reiterates the notion that the monk’s religion is not the solution for her personal problem, because of the hypocrisy inherent in the monkish life style. She believes that the monks are hypocrites: they live in misery although they pretend to be happy in their religious life, but they are not so, because God does not live in the monastery, but sorrow does:

انه الدير فيه ينتصر المو               ت وفي قبوه يعيش الاه

في خفاياه, في ممراته السو            د الحزينات لا يعيش الله

(It is the monastery in which death is victorious and in the vault of which live sighs. / God does not live in its secret places, its black, sad corridors.)

Nāzik differs from her source in her account of the temptation. Thais seduces the monk; she does not repent until the very end of the poem. In France’s Thais, Thais becomes a saint, but the monk retreats; it is the monk who is torn between the conflict of heart and mind, not Thais as it is in Nāzik’s poem. Nāzik concentrates on Thais’s evil and good character more than the monk’s; she often talks generally about the monks in terms of the monastery, whereas France describes the falsehood of the religion of an individual monk. She does not give any detail of the monk’s background, nor does she mention his name. In Thais, the monk Paphnutius occupies the first part and the last part of the novel, which describes his life. Paphnutius was seduced by Thais at an early age, before becoming a monk:

"one day when, according to his pious custom, he was recalling to mind the hours he had lived apart from God, and examining his sins one by one .... he remembered that he had seen at the theatre at Alexandria a very beautiful actress named Thais. This woman showed herself in public games .... whilst she lost her own soul, she also ruined the souls of many others .... She had led Paphnutius himself into the sins of the flesh. She had awakened desire in him …."⁽¹⁵⁾

Nāzik’s Thais seduces the monk in his monkhood as in stanza 14 of Fī dunyā 'l-ruhbān (see above.)

Unlike Nāzik, France does not present the monastary unfavourably. He focusses on the double standards of the monk Paphnutius who decided to convert Thais to Christianity, and Thais as a priestess when she was a courtesan, and as a courtesan when she becomes a priestess:

"After some hours of meditation the image of Thais appeared to him clearly and distinctly. He saw her again, as he had seen her when she tempted him, in all the beauty of the flesh. At first she showed herself like Leda, softly lying upon a bed of hyacinths, her head bowed, her eyes humid and filled with a strange light, her nostrils quivering, her mouth half open, her breasts like two flowers, and her arms smooth and fresh as two brooks. At this sight Paphnutius struck his breast and said – 'I call Thee to witness, my God, that I have considered how heinous has been my sin.' Gradually the face of the image changed its expression. Little by little the lips of Thais, by lowering at the corners of the mouth, expressed a mysterious suffering. Her large eyes were filled with tears and lights; her breast heaved with sighs, like the sighing of a wind that precedes a tempest. At this sight Paphnutius was troubled to the bottom of his soul."^{(16)    "} Fool, fool, that I was, not to have possessed Thais whilst there was yet time  ... Oh, stupid fool! thou hast seen her, and thou hast desired the good things of the other world! Oh, coward! thou hast seen her, and thou hast feared God! God! heaven! what are they ..... Oh, miserable, senseless fool, who sought divine goodness elsewhere than on the lips of Thais!"⁽¹⁷⁾

In Ughniyat Tāyīs [st. 5], Thais ( =Nāzik) wonders what sort of life she might have lived if she had responded to the monk’s (= lover’s) sexual invitation and 'become his Thais':

مـــا حياة الديــر؟ ما الله؟                      إن أنا أصبحت تاييسه

وهوى في ركب من تاهوا                    وهبطت الخلد قديـســه

(What is the life of the monastery? What is God? if I become his Thais / and an object of passion in the procession of those who have gone astray and then enter paradise - a priestess.)

In Thais, Paphnutius, not Thais, asks the two abbots:

"What is the monastic life if not peculiar? And ought not the deeds of a monk to be as eccentric as he is himself? It was a sign from God that caused me to ascend here; it is a sign from God that will make me descend."⁽¹⁸⁾

The first sentence may linger in Nāzik’s mind, when she writes these two lines. She remodels them in Thais’s terms, not the monk’s. The second hemistich of Nāzik’s line tells us that Thais, Like Thais in France’s novel, became a priestess.

The availability of Thais as a poetic symbol might equally have derived from ^CAli Mahmūd Tāhā’s Tāyis al-jadidah (the new Thais)  (1939  [1. 6-8], which was written when he was in Zurich. He wrote it on the occasion of the Swiss national festival:

يــارب, صنعك كله فتـــن             أين الفرار, وكيف مطرحي

هذه الروائع أنت خالفـــها             مـــا بيــن منجــرد ومتشــح

(تاييس) لم تعبث براهبـها            لكنــه اشغــى علـــى البـرح

(O Lord! All your creation is temptations. Where can I flee? yet how can I reject them? / You are the creator of all these wonderful things - some naked and some veiled. / Thais did not succeed in corrupting her monk, but he was on the point of sinning.)

Thais is not as important for Tāhā’s poetic purposes as she is for Nāzik’s. In Tāhā’s poem, Thais fails to seduce the monk (= Tāhā). Tāhā talks about himself in terms of the priest, who was about to be corrupted by Thais, whereas Nāzik, as a female, identifies herself with Thais and understands the monk as a normal human being who falls in the conflict of heart and mind. Tāhā, as a priest, resists the temptation of Thais although his sensations willingly embrace it. Nāzik, as Thais, Is torn between her passions (the call of love), and her other-worldly self (the voice of God) (see above).

Nāzik contemplates the contradictory feelings of the monk; his wish to lead Thais into a pure life, and his libidinous desire to consummate his lust with her. She sublimates her own experience and divides it between the monk and Thais; both the monk’s conflict and Thais’s beauty are essentially hers. She combines in her nature the wanton and the ascetic. She believes that this dichotomous nature is common to all human beings; concealing it is not a recipe for true happiness. She would resolve to live like a monk but knows that her sexual desires would thwart this ambition. She asks the monks (and so herself) whether they are aware that they are suffering the same confusion and that this old-age problem admits of no solution, at least as far as religion is concerned. When the monks sought salvation by this means, religion could only offer them virtue, not happiness. Thus, her disapproval of virtue in ^CInd 'l-ruhbān [st. 23]:

أولم تنكر الفضيلة ألوا            نك يا لهفتاه ضاع رجائي

(Did virtue not deny your [i.e. happiness’s] colours? 0 my longing! my hope has perished.)

Nāzik is certain that the asceticism of the monks cannot bring them happiness, despite their denial of human nature [st. 15]:

لن تذوقوا شهد السعادة ما دمـ                   ـتم أناسي من ترب وماء

(You will not taste the honey of happiness as long as you are human, made of dust and water.)

This recalls the theme of Ilā 'l-shā^Cir Kīts [st. 2], in which Nāzik admits that she is, as a human being, made of dust and water:

حياتي يا, شاعري, كلها

حياة فتاة من الحالمين

إلهية الروح لكنها

على الأرض حفنة ماء وطين

 (My life, O my poet, is all / a life of a visionary girl, / with a divine soul, / but on earth, she is but a handful of water and clay.)

This theme is found in a stanza of Tāhā’s Arwāh wa Ashbāh (spirits and ghosts):

وما الآدمية بنت السماء           ولكنها بنت مـــاء وطين

يريد لها الفن أفق النجوم          فيقعدها جسم عبد سجين

(The daughter of Adam is not the daughter of the sky, but she is the daughter of water and clay. / Art wishes her to have the horizon of the stars, but the body of an Imprisoned slave hinders her.)

The theme of seeking happiness in the monastery perhaps derives from Abū Mādī’s theme in al-^CAnqā' (the Griffin) [st. 3]:

قالوا: تورع, إنها محجوبــة              إلا عــــن المتزهــد المتـــورع

فوأدت أفراحي وطلقت المنى            ونسخت آيات الهوى من أضلعي

وحطمت أقداحي ولمـــا ارتو            وعففت عـــن زادي ولما اشبـــع

وحسبتني أدنو إليها مســرعا             فوجدت أني قد دنوت لمصرعي

(They said, be pious! it [happiness] is veiled from everyone but the pious mystic. / So I buried my happiness and divorced desire, and I made the verses of passionate love from my ribs. / I destroyed my goblets, but my thirst was not yet quenched, and I held back from my provisions, but I was not yet satisfied. / You thought that I was approaching it [happiness.] quickly, but I found that I had approached my death.)

Abū Mādī’s wandering round the world is comparable to that of Paphnutius, when travelling a long distance to reach Thais, in order to convert her to Christianity.

The monks, according to Nāzik and Shelley are hypocrites in his poem; they cheat their followers; they pray for them and curse them at the same time; they perpetrate immorality in the name of God. The monk in France’s novel cheates the courtesan when converting her to Christianity because, despite his pretension to be a devoted monk, his faith is superficial. When Thais is dying he hates God because he is removing Thais from him:

"If only God exists, that he may damn me. I hope for it-- I wish it. God, I hate Thee --- dost Thou hear? Overwhelm me with thy damnation. To compel Thee to, I spit in Thy face. I must find an eternal hell, to exhaust the eternity of rage which consumes me."⁽¹⁹⁾

At the very end of the final part of the novel, Paphnutius confesses his frank feelings to Thais, who is dying in his arms:

" 'I love thee! Do not die! Listen, my Thais. I have deceived thee? I was but a wretched fool. God, heaven -- all that is nothing. There is nothing true but this wordly life, and the love of human beings. I love thee! Do not die! That would be impossible -- thou art too precious! Come, come with me! Let us fly? I will carry thee far away in my arms. Come, let us love! Hear me. O my beloved, and say, "I will live; I wish to live." Thais, Thais, arise!' "⁽²⁰⁾

Her sense of religious hypocrisy may also have been sharpened by her reading of Shelley’s early poetry, particularly Queen Mab [part ii, 1. 180-1 & p. viii, 1. 185-6]:

A cowled and hypocritical monk

                   Prays, curses and deceives.

………………………………………….

Where kings first leagued against the rights of men,

And priests first traded with the name of God.

THAIS AND RĀBI^CAH aL-^CADAWIYYAH:

The counterpart of Thais in Islamic culture is Rābi^Cah 'l-^CAdawiyyah, a famous mystic and saint of Basrah; Nāzik does not mention Rābi^Cah 'l-^CAdawiyyah's name, but talks about her by implication. In Fī dunyā 'l- ruhbān [st. 13], she describes Thais’s conflict of heart and mind in terms of Rābi^Cah 'l-^CAdawiyyah, who converted to Islam, and fell in love with God like any mystic. The two characters symbolize sin and repentance. The conflict of heart and mind in Rābi^Cah 'l-^CAdawiyyah and Thais reminds Nāzik of her conflict; her cultural tradition prevents her from revealing her sexual desire to her lover, so that her 'heart is torn between two voices -- the call of passion and the voice of God ' :

واسم (تاييس) لم يزل في شفاه الــ                ــريح يتلى على الوجود اللاهي

رمز قلب ممــــزق بين صوتيـــــ                 ــن: نداء الهوى وصـــوت الله

(The name of Thais is still on the lips of the wind, being recited to oblivious existence -- / the symbol of a heart torn between two voices: the call of passion and the voice of God.)

This recalls Rābi^Cah 'l-^CAdawiyyah’s famous lines in which she reveals the two kinds of love:

احبك حبين حــب الهـــوى             وحـبا لأنـــــك أهـــل لذاك

فأما الذي هو حب الهــوى              فشغلي بذكرك عمـن سواك

وأما الذي أنت أهل لــــــه              فكشفك لي الحجب حتـى أراك

فلا الحمد في ذا ولا ذاك لي            ولكن لك الحمد فـي ذا وذاك

(I love you with two kinds of love  --the love of passion and a [another] love, because you are worthy of it; / as for that which is the love of passion, it is my preoccupation with remembrance of you to the exclusion of all others; / as for that which is worthy of you, it is your drawing back the veil for me to see you. / There is no praise for me in either this or that; the praise is yours in both this and that.)

In France’s novel, the conflict of heart and mind is Identified in the monk, not Thais, whereas Nāzik focusses on Thais’s conflict more than the monk’s, because she uses Thais as a foil for herself, thereby revealing her own sexual impulses, describing the effect of her beauty on her lover, attendant upon his request that they share the delights of illicit union. She employs Thais as a symbol to suggest sin and repentance. The difference between Nāzik’s sin and Thais's is that Thais's sin is that of harlotry  whereas Nāzik’s sin is occasionally yielding to and consummating an all-engulfing desire. Thais seems, however, also to be used by Nāzik as a symbol of ultimate desirability: she is all that men want from a woman - a priestess and a whore.

In Fī dunyā 'l-ruhbān [st. 4], like Thais and Rābi^Cah 'l-^CAdawiyyah, Nazik turns away from the past and self-consciously embarks on a new stage of life. Her conflict is at an end; her life assumes a greater optimism than it did in her earlier poems. Conjugal bliss has helped her to forget her unhappy love-affairs of the past. In the vocabulary she uses, there is a dearth of words for pleasure; now she tends to choose religious words instead of sensual ones:

وصلاة لله تقطر حبــــا              طهرتها يد الدموع الغزار

(And a prayer to God dropping love, purified by the hand of plentiful tears.)

The conflict of heart and mind in Nāzik’s poems indicates her inner conflict between trammelled desire, with love as a pure and spiritual experience, and unrestrained lust, with love as a purely sexual experience. The monk’s failure to lead Thais to a sinless life stands as a parable of her frustration in finding happiness in religious experience, let alone as a cure for her physical and sexual imponderables.

THE STORY OF THE FALL OF ADAM AND EVE IN NĀZIK’S POETRY AND FRANCE’S NOVEL THAIS:

The story of the fall of Adam and Eve is referred to in Nāzik’s poems and France’s novel; in Ādam wa Hawwā' of Ma'sāt a1-hayāt [st. 1], Nāzik refers all sin and punishment back to the earliest possible point of reference -- Adam’s (not Eve’s incidentally) sin and God’s punishment of Adam. She does not approve of God’s punishment of Adam and, even less, of the continuation of that punishment on Adam’s descendants; God’s curse on Adam and Eve entails of necessity His curse on humanity:

حسبها اننا دفعنا إليها                ثمن العيش حيرة ودموعا

أي ذنب جناه ادم حتى               نتلقى العقاب نحن جميعا

(It is enough that we have paid it [life] the price of living bewilderment and tears. / what crime did Adam commit that we all should pay the penalty?)

This reminds us of Tāhā’s attitude towards God’s punishment of the sinners in Tāyīs al-jadīdah (the new tayis) [1. 11]:

أترى معاقبتي على قدر                 لولاك لم يكتب ولم يتح؟!

(Do you think I should be punished for a fate, which, but for you, would not have been recorded or permitted.)

She regards Adam as the principal sinner despite the fact that Muslims interpret the Qur’anic verses [127-121] of Sūrat Tāhā:

فقلنا يادم ان هذا عدو لك ولزوجك فلا يخرجنكما من الجنة فتشقى ....

فوسوس إليه الشيطن قال يادم هل أدلك على شجرة الخلد وملك لا يبلى ...

فآكلا منها فبدت لهما سواتهما وطفقا يخصفان عليهما من ورق الجنة

(And we said: 'O Adam! this is an enemy to you and your wife, so let him not get you both out of Paradise, so that you will be in misery . ... / But Satan whispered evil to him. He said, ‘O Adam! Shall I lead you to the tree of Eternity and to a kingdom that never decays?' )

as meaning that Adam and Eve both disobeyed God at the same time. Nāzik believes that Adam was more responsible than Eve. On the other hand, she minimizes Adam’s sin because she believes Adam’s sin is preordained: God intended him to sin. She wishes that God had not punished him so severely; his sin was not so grave that he and his descendants should be punished. His punishment is out of all proportion to the offence.

In Thais, France like Nāzik, highlights the fact that God was responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve; but unlike Nāzik be believes that Eve was the original sinner. In the dialogue between Paphnutius, Zenothemis and Dorion, Thais’s guests, Dorion compares the Judaic with the classical mythology; the gods of both are ignorant and liars. He compares the story of Adam and Eve to an episode in the war of Pallas Athene against the giants. He believes that God intentionally chose Eve to be more sensitive than Adam and allowed Adam to have more intelligence than Eve:

"Iaveh much resembles Typhoon, and Pallas is represented by the Athenians with a serpent at her side. But what you have said causes me considerable doubt as to the intelligence or good faith of the serpent of whom you have spoken. If he had really possessed knowledge, would he have entrusted it to a woman’s little head, which was incapable of containing it? I should rather consider that he was like Iaveh, ignorant and a liar, and that he chose Eve because she was easily seduced, and imagined that Adam would have more intelligence and perception."⁽²¹⁾

In the first version of Ughniyah li-’l-insān (a song to man), (1) her revision of Ma'sāt al-hayāt, she deals with these concepts in a slightly different way. She modifies the earlier poems, joining them up into one long poem, considering the concepts from different angles and adopting attitudes indicative of a greater maturity.

In this version, her attitude changes; now she believes that Adam and Eve share the sin. At this stage, too, her faith in God has weakened; she considers Him to be unjust for punishing them excessively. She concentrates on God’s punishment of Adam and Eve more than on the sin. Again she treats Eve’s sin as inevitable since God found it necessary for initiating the process of human reproduction, but still she wishes that it had not occurred.

At the end of the section of Adam and Eve in Ughniyah li-’1-insān (1) [st. 61 & 62], she describes them, after the fall, walking ashamed in the bare fields:

كيف ألقيت راسك الحلو في يا                        س على صخرة ونحت طويلا

...................................

                               *       *        *       *

وعلـــى بعد خطوتين حنــــا ا                       دم في صمته الرهيب الحزين

(How is it that you have laid your sweet head despondently on a stone and moaned for a long time? / .... / * * * / And there, two steps away, Adam stood with bowed head, in his awesome and sorrowful silence.)

  The themes of Adam’s and Eve’s sins and God’s punishment play a much less prominent part in the second version of Ughniyah li-’l-insān (2); she concentrates on them only in two poems and in the rest focuses on another theme, that of the quest for happiness. She repeats the first three lines of Ma'sāt al-hayāt in this version, and changes the wording of the fourth line. For Instance, she subsitutes the phrase أو لم يكف (Is it not enough that .... ) for حسبه (it is enough) in the fourth, fifth and sixth lines, and alters much of the phraseology, while preserving the same basic sense. She introduces new topics in the remaining stanzas, at the same time retaining some of the earlier ones; for Adam’s grief and torment she substitutes references to the luxuriance of his former, eternal, dwelling-place and his purity therein. The world into which he has been expelled now appears to her specifically as a prison, whereas earlier it had been more generally a place of darkness and wretchedness, to which a so called merciful God consigned the weak.

Ādam wa Hawwā' appears, in this version, as an independent poem, but this time with the title Ādam wa firdawsuh (Adam and his Paradise). It is similar to the poem which appears in Ughniyah li-'l-insān (1); the number of the stanzas remains the same, and the same attitude towards Adam’s sin is maintained. She reveals herself as having become more religious. Her attitude towards Adam’s sin is now closer to what it was in Ma'sāt al-hayāt, with one significant difference; formely she was certain that his punishment was excessive, whereas now she seems more doubtful.

Although she read Milton’s Paradise Lost In 1945, as part of her English course at college, and then in 1950 while preparing for her M. A. in Literary Criticism in America, her representations of Adam and Eve are much more dependent on the Qur’an than on Mi1tons poem. Her reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost motivated her to write a poem on the same subject as a means of covertly expressing her political view of the second World War and the damage it caused to the world.

EVE, PROMETHEUS AND CHRIST:

Prometheus is alluded to in Nāzik’s poetry only once, implying the themes of sin, sacrifice, and punishment. Her intention is to evoke an atmosphere that is wholly Islamic. Hence her avoidance of any overt reference to Prometheus.

Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is admired by a number of Arab writers as a potent political symbol of long-suffering defiance of tyranny. Shelley believed himself to be living at a time of political reaction. Prometheus, on one level of his poem, expresses Shelley’s belief that in such a period the spirit of beneficent revolution must be maintained despite suffering and oppression, that the hope of a new world must be kept alive. Some Arab poets seem to have found in Shelley’s poem an analogue to their own situation.

In Ughniyah li-’l-insān (1) [st. 59 & 60], Nāzik abhors God’s punishment of Eve, as Shelley abhors Jupiter’s punishment of Prometheus, when he stole the fire for the sake of his people. Her sympathy for Eve is more explicitly expressed, and, eventually, Eve appears as a martyr. Eve’s action is transformed into an altruistic, Promethean act of moral heroism:

إيه حواء كيف عوقبت بالنفـ                 ــي ولولاك ما عرفنا النورا

أنت يامن بعت الخلود باحزا                ن لياليك واشتريت الشعورا

                                *       *       *

الخطايا التي اقترفت ستبقــى                شعلا في وجودنا وضيــــاء

كخطايا الرب الذي سرق النا              ر لعـبـاده ونــال الشــقـــــــاء

 ( O Eve! Why were you punished with exile? when, but for you, we should not have known the light [of knowledge], / -— you who sold eternity for the sorrows of your nights and bought feelings. / * * * / The sins which you committed will remain flames and lights in our existence, / like the sins of the Lord who stole fire for his worshippers and gained misery.)

Like Zenothemis in Thais, Nāzik believes that Eve’s sinful action was positive rather than negative, because it enlightened her perception. Zenothemis, answering Dorion, believes that the abundant fruit of the tree of knowledge was given to Eve in order that she might be aware of the knowledge of God:

"She freely listened to him, and allowed herself to be led to the tree of knowledge .... This tree was covered with leaves which spoke all the languages of future races of men, and their united voices formed a perfect harmony. Its abundant fruit gave to the initiated who tasted it the knowledge of metals, stones, and plants, and also of physical and moral laws; but this fruit was like fire, and those who feared suffering and death did not dare to put it to their lips. Now as she had listened attentively to the lessons of the serpent, Eve despised these empty terrors, and wished to taste the fruit which gave the knowledge of God. But as she loved Adam, and did not wish him to be inferior to her, she took him by the hand and led him to the wonderful tree." ⁽²²⁾

Nāzik, unlike the other Arab Romantics, infrequently refers to Christ, probably because Christ as a symbolic figure does not fit into her mythological frame of reference. She refers to him twice in her ^CUyūn al-amwāt (the eyes of the dead) [st. 10] in Ma'sāt al-hayāt (1), and again in her al-Harb al-^Calamiyyah al-thāniyah (the second world war), in Ughniyah 1i-’l-insān (a song for human being) (2) [st. 21].

In ^CUyūn al-amwāt [st. 10], Christ’s punishment is as unjust as Prometheus’s:

ما الذي رامه المسيح لكي يجــ                ــزى بما كان؟ ما الذي كان منه؟

أيها العالم الذي اقترف الذنـــ                  ــب أما آن أن تكفر عنه

(What did the Messiah want in order to be made the compensation? What became of him? / O world who committed the sin! Is it not time for you to atone for it.)

In the first act of Prometheus Unbound [Act 1, 1. 18-20 & 31-33], Shelley identifies Prometheus with Christ. Prometheus was chained to a mountain, and Christ to a cross:

Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame

Of thine ill tyrranny, and hung not here

Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain ..

Nāzik’s preference is for mythological figures that were, to a large extent, still unfamiliar to her audience.. The figure of Jesus, on the other hand, does not allow of much manipulation or interpretation. By his very nature as a religious figure, he disqualifies himself from inclusion in Nāzik’s pantheon.

THE JINNIYYAH AND THE SUPERNATURAL CREATURES:

The Jinniyyah in Nāzik’s poetry plays the roles of many supernatural creatures; like Nāzik, France employs many supernatural creatures to describe his character and the landscape. The common names in Nāzik’s poetry and France novel are as follows:

THE SERPENT AND ADAM AND EVE:

In Ādam wa Hawwā' of Ma’sāt al-hayāt, the Jinniyyah is disguised in serpent form; both creatures are associated with sins. Nāzik repeats the first stanza of Ādam wa Hawwā' as the beginning of the appropriate section. She sympathizes with Eve, wishing that she had not met the serpent or touched the tree of knowledge. She wishes that she had remained ignorant. because ignorance is almost a blessing:

أي ذنب جنـــته حواء؟ مــــاذا              عرفت من ثعبانـها المشئوم

ليتــــها لـــــم تمس دوحتها قط              ولم تصب للجنس المسموم

ليتها لم تحس بالشــــــر والخيـ              ر ولــــم تدر للتــمرد طعما

ليتها حافظت على جهلها المطـ             ـبق ما دامت الغباوة نعمــى

(What sin had Eve committed? what did she know about her ill-omened serpent? / Would that she had not touched the large tree at all, and had not aspired to the poisoned fruit! / Would that she had not perceived knowledge of good and evil and had not known the taste of rebellion! / Would that she had retained her all-encompassing ignorance, as long as ignorance remained a blessing!)

In this poem, Nāzik asserts that ignorance is better than knowledge. This may derive from the last line of Gray’s Ode on a distant prospect of Eton college [st. 10]:

                No more -- where ignorance is bliss,

              ' Tis folly to be wise.

In Thais, France believes that the presence of the serpent is inevitable:

"On the contrary, the serpent with golden wings, which twined its azure coils round the tree of knowledge, was made up of light and love. A combat between these two powers -- the one of light and the other of darkness -- was, therefore, inevitable."⁽²³⁾

CAIN AND ABEL:

In Qābīl wa Hābīl (Cain and Abel) of Ma'sāt al-hayāt [st. 3], and Ughniyah li-’l-insān (1) [st. 77], she implies that war began with Cain’s murder of his brother Abel; this too is part of mankind’s inherited punishment. It may be that she is thinking particularly of civil war, in which brothers kill one another:

أين هابيل؟ أين وقع خطى اغـ              ـنامه في الجبال والوديـــان

ليــس منه إلا ضــــريح كئيب              شاده في العراء أول جـــان

(Where is Habil? Where is the sound of his sheep’s tread on the mountains and in the valleys? / There is nothing of him but a melancholy shrine built by the first criminal in the open air.)

In stanza 72 of Ughniyah li-’l-insān (1), she refers to Cain’s jealousy, which led him to kill his brother:

لم يشاهد قابيل تقتله الغيــ                   ــرة يمشي في نقمة محمومة

في يديه سكينه الحاقد المســ                ــموم في مقلتيه طيف جريمة

(He did not see Qabil being killed by jealousy, walking with fevered resentment, / the knife of the poisoned, rancorous one in his hands and the phantom of crime in his eyes.)

In Ughniyah li-'l-insān (1) [st. 79-82], she refers to Abel’s curse on Cain; she prophesies that this will continue throughout coming generations:

 استرح انت, نم دع القاتل الا                ثم يسكر على نشيش الدماء

لعنات القتيل لن تعرف المصـ                ــت غــــدا تستبد بالاحيــاء

                                 *        *        *

لعنـــــات تظل تصــــرخ بالثأ                ر وتبقى تحز في الأعصاب

..................................

                                   *        *         *

.................................

إنها اللعنة القديــمة أبقـــــت                 في عروق الأبناء نبض الجريمة

(Have a rest! Sleep, and let the sinful killer intoxicate himself on the bubbling of the blood. / The curses of the slaughtered one will not know silence tomorrow, tyrannizing over the living. / .... / * * / .... / Curses that will continue crying for revenge, and continue cutting into the nerves. / It is the old curse which perpetuated the pulse of the crime in the veins of the sons.)

In Thais, Zenothemis describes God as jealous and responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve and the persecution of Cain:

"The triumphant Iaveh kept Adam and Eve and all their seed in a condition of hebetude and terror .... He made men unjust, ignorant, and cruel, and caused evil to reign in the earth. He persecuted Cain and his sons because they were skilful workmen ... He was the implacable enemy of science and beauty, and for long ages the human race expiated, in blood and tears, the defeat of the winged serpent."⁽²⁴⁾

MEDUSA AND CAIN:

Medusa, in Nāzik’s mythological matrix, has much in common with Adam and Eve and even Abel. God’s curse on Adam and Eve is a mythological equivalent to the curse of Medusa’s eyes. In stanzas 85-95 of Ughniyah li-’l-insān (1), she equates Medusa with Abel -- both are victims, not killers:

وعيون العدل الصريع مع الامــ                    ــوات بين الدماء والأشلاء

من رآها استحال صخرا أصما                     ميت الحس خادر الأعضاء

(And the eyes of justice cast down together with the dead among the blood and the remains. / He who sees them is turned into solid rock, dead of feeling and numb of limbs.)

In Khurāfāt (fables) (1948) [st. 1], the footfall of the cautious killer is an allusion to Cain as a killer of his brother. In this stanza, she includes Medusa’s curse in her treatment of Cain

قالوا الحياة

هي لون عيني ميت

هي وقع خطو القاتل المتلفت

(Life, they said, / Is the colour of a dead man’s eyes; / it is the foofall of the cautious killer.)

The 'eyelashes tied to stone' in stanza 8 is an allusion to Medusa’s eyes which turn every thing she sees Into stone:

قالوا العيون

................

ووجدت أجفانا وليس لها بصر

وعرفت أهدابا شددن إلى حجر

...............................

عمياء عن غير الشرور وان تكن تدعى عيون

وعرفت الافا وأعينهم صفائح من زجاج

زرقاء في لون السماء, وخلف زرقتها دياج

(The eyes’ said they ..... and I found eyelids with no sight1 / and I recognized eyelashes fastened to a stone. / .... / Blind except to evil, although called eyes. / I recognized thousands of people whose eyes were plates of glass; / they were blue like the colour of the sky, but behind their blueness was darkness.)

In Ustūrat ^Caynayn (the myth of two eyes), she again talks about her lover’s eyes. In stanza 9, the eyes of Nāzik’s lover are similar to those of Medusa’s:

وإنها كما روى آخرون,

بقية من أعين آفله:

عينا (ميدوزا) افرغ الساحرون

ما فيها من قوة قاتله

(And that it is as others have told, / remains of fading eyes: / the eyes of Medusa, which the magicians have emptied / of their fatal power.)

This is the only stanza in which Medusa is explicitly named in Nāzik’s poetry. She might have read Shelley’s On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery:

                 Its horror and its beauty are divine.

            Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie

                     Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,

           Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,

           The agonies of anguish and of death.

                                                            [st. i]

           Yet it is less the horror than the grace

                 Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone;

                                                           [st. ii]

        Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow

              And their long tangles in each other lock,

                                                          [st. iii]

Nāzik and Shelley focus on the effect of Medusa’s magic gaze, which turns everything into stone, althoguh Shelley’s treatment is somewhat more sensitive and imaginitive than Nāzik’s.

In stanza 2, Nāzik’s lover’s eyes are described as an incense-filled temple, replete with oriental worship:

عينان لون نابض ساخن

شيء من الشرق لذيذ الفتور

وفيها العراف والكاهن

ومعبد مخدر بالبخور

(Two eyes are a vibrant, hot colour, / a deliciously languid thing from the East; / the diviner and the soothsayer are in them, / and a temple stupefied with incense.)

In the fourth stanza, she continues her imaginative interpretation of the secrets of the eyes, seeing in them a door to the lost Utopia:

عينان أم عوالم شاسعة؟

وبؤبؤ أم دعوة للرحيل؟

باب إلى يوتوبيا الضائعة

ومعبر ينهي إلى المستحيل

(Are they eyes or vast worlds? / Is it a pupil or an invitation to depart? / A door to the lost Utopia, / a passage leading to the impossible?)

MEDUSA AND NESSUS:

Nāzik does not employ the name of Nessus; she only alludes to him once in Khurāfāt (fables) (1948) [st. 1]. The poisoned shirt in this poem is an allusion to Nessus’s shirt, which stands as a symbol to suggest that death is the inevitable end of life, like Nessus’s shirt, which is a source of misfortune from which there is no escape:

أيامها المتجعدات

كالمعطف المسموم ينضح بالممات

(Its wrinkled days are / like the poisoned coat exuding death.)

Keats and Shelley do not refer to Nessus in their poetry, whereas Byron does. Byron refers to Nessus three times throughout his poetry: once in The Morgante Maggiore [1. 570]: "As Nessus did of old beyond all cure" and twice in Don Juan [Canto 11, 1. 508 & Canto 16, 1. 83]: "the most infected And Centaur Nessus garb of mortal clothing," And on our sofas makes us lie dejected ...." and "May sit like that of Nessus, and recall"

THE JINNIYYAH AS A DEMON:

In Ughniyah li-'l-insān [st.. 191], Nāzik describes the Jinniyyah as one of the daughters of the demons:

وهي تلك الجنية الفظة الوحــ              ــشية القلب من بنات السعالي

(She is that disgusting and wild-hearted Jinniyyah born of the daughters of female demons.)

In Khurāfāt (fables) (1948) [st. 1], she presents Medusa (= the Jinniyyah) as a 'numbing-eyed demon':

أحلامها بسمات سعلاة مخدرة العيون

وراء بسمتها المنون

(Its dreams are the smiles of a numbing-eyed demon; / and behind its smile lies death.)

The Jinniyyah is as cruel as Nāzik’s lover; both of them resemble demons. Nāzik’s association of her lover with the demon may derive from Coleridge’s 'her demon-lover' In Kubla Khan [1. 15-16]:

       As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

      By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

The demons are used to suggest the evil deeds of the people of Alexandria in Thais:

               "Be accursed, temple of demons! Lewd couch of the Gentiles, tainted pulpit of Arian hersey, be thou accursed!" ⁽²⁵⁾

the monk apostrophizing Alexandria. Another example of France’s use of the demon as a symbol of evil is his description of the punishment of sinful people:

"There, in a livid light, the demons tormented the souls of the damned. The souls preserved the appearance of the bodies which had held them, and even wore some rags of clothing. These souls seemed peaceful in the midst of their torments."⁽²⁶⁾

THE SERPENT AND ARES:

In Ughniyah li-’l-insān (1) [st. 98-100], Nāzik introduces into her matrix Ares, the Greek god of war, to act as another mythological analogue of war. As a god of war, Ares symbolizes wars caused by the political leaders who force innocent people to go to war. Her references to Ares comprise suggestions of crime and sin; she may have in mind the dictatorship of the Iraqi leaders in the time of the monarchy. Ares is connected, in Nāzik’s scheme of imagery, with the executioner, both being responsible for the destruction of young lives. She pictures Ares as a serpent coiling round innocent people:

أين أين المنجى؟ وكيف تنام االر            وح في ضجة الضمير المهان؟

أي نــــوم يذوق راحته الجــــلا              د؟ هل للذنوب مــــن نسـيان؟

                         *      *      *

يا حبال الجلاد لفي على الاعــــ             ــناق أفعى الذنــوب والآثـــام

.....................................

                        *       *       *

اجمعيها مــن كـــل عمر طوته              كف (اريس) وهو ما زال غضا

(where, where shall I escape? and how can the soul sleep in the noise of the humiliated conscience? / The comfort of what sleep does the executioner taste? Is there any forgetfulness for sins? / O ropes of the executioner! wrap round the necks the snake of sins and offences / .... / Collect them from each age held in Ares’s hand, while it is still fresh.)

Shelley employs similarly the serpent and the snake ambivalently to suggest either deceitful evil or revolutionary energy. In Queen Mab [Part iii, 1. 6o-63], the human conscience is pictured as a snake that allows no rest:

The slumber of intemperance subsides,

And conscience, that undying serpent, calls

 Her venomous brood to their nocturnal task.

Shelley links the snake with malice and tyranny in Queen Mab, in the section on Falsehood and Vice [Vice, 1. 11-21]:

While the snakes, whose smile even him defiled,

In ecstasies of malice smiled:

They thought ‘twas theirs, -- but mine the deed!

Theirs is the toil, but mine the meed--

Ten thousand victims madly bleed.

They dream that tyrants goad them there

With poisonous war to taint the air:

These tyrants, on their beds of thorn,

Swell with the thoughts of murderous fame,

And with their gains to lift my name

Restless they plan from night to morn:

In The Revolt of Islam [1. xxxiii], the battle between the eagle and the snake symbolizes imperial power at war with revolutionary energy:

 ‘Such is this conflict -- when mankind doth strive

      With its oppressors in a strife of blood,

Or when free thoughts, like lightnings, are alive,

          And in each bosom of the multitude

Justice and truth with Custom’s hydra brood

Wage silent war; when Priests and Kings dissemble

In smiles or frowns their fierce disquietude,

When round pure hearts a host of hopes assemble,

The Snake arid Eagle meet -- the world’s foundations tremble!

THE SERPENT AND THE LABYRINTH:

In al-Uf­^Cuwān (the serpent) (1948), the Biblical serpent is parallel to Nāzik’s unavoidable sins. She describes her sins as a disgusting serpent in line 28, as a ghoul [29], as an eternal nightmare [57], and as a giant [74]. Nāzik imagines herself chased by the serpent; she has entered the Labyrinth in order to escape, but all her attempts are in vain. Although she is aware of the effect her sins have on her future, she has continued to sin. When the serpent overtakes her, she is unable to do anything but lament the ultimate loss of her already broken hope In the darkness of the blind Labyrinth [St. 1, 31 & 32,  St. 2, 1. 72-74].

In her introduction to Shazāyā wa rarmād (splinters and ashes) (1949), she explains what the symbol of al-Uf^Cuwān means to her --the unknown, mighty power by which human beings can feel psychologically pursued. This pursuit can take the form of a collection of memories, of regret, of a repulsive habit, of a terrifying image which cannot be forgotten, or of the soul, with its weakness and aberrations.

The Labyrinth makes its appearance in the second stanza:

انه (لابرنث) سحيق

ربما شيدته يد في قديم الزمان

لأمير غريب الطباع

ثم مات الأمير .. وأبقى الطريق

لأكف الضياع 

 ( It is a deep 'Labyrinth' , / perhaps built of old by a hand / for a strange-natured prince. / Then the prince died .. and left the path / for the hands of destruction.)

In her notes on Shazāyā wa ramād, Nāzik describes the Labyrinth as:

كلمة إغريقية الأصل, معناها بناء ذو مسالك معقدة وأبواب لا حصر لها متصلة بعدد كبير من الممرات والدهاليز والأقباء, بحيث إذا دخله إنسان لم يملك الخروج منه. وقد استعملت هذه اللفظة في قصيدة (الأفعوان) اسما لطريق شيده (أمير غريب الطباع. ثم مات الأمير .. وأبقى الطريق..) وربما كان باعث كلمة أمير في ذهني, اقتران كلمة –لابرنثوس- بشبه حكاية أسطورية تتعلق بتاريخ مصر القديم فقد حكي عن هيرودوتس انه حين مر بمصر رأى بناءا غريبا هائل الضخامة أشبه بلغز كبير محير, من دخله لم يجد مخرجا منه, شيده احد ملوك الأسرة الثانية عشرة ومن يدري؟ لعل الملك الذي شيد هذا البناء أراد ان يتخذ منه مخبأ لا يدركه فيه (أفعوانه) الخاص.

 ( A word of Greek origin, a building of complicated paths with innumerable doors joined with a large number of corridors, halls, and vaults. When a person enters it he cannot escape. I used this term in al-Uf^Cuwān as a name of a path built by 'a strange-natured prince. Then he died . . . and left the path . . . '   ; Perhaps my motive in using the word 'prince' is the association of the word 'Labyrinthus' with a kind of mythological tale about the ancient history of Egypt. It is said that when Herodotus passed through Egypt he saw a strange, immensely huge building which resembled a large and baffling puzzle. Anyone who entered it was unable to find a way out. It was built by an Egyptian monarch of the twelfth dynasty. Who knows? Perhaps the monarch who built this building Intended to use it as a refuge in which he could not be caught by his own 'serpent'.)⁽²⁷⁾

Nāzik considers the Labyrinth as a way to escape from sins [1. 46-49]:

أسمع الصوت:

   (سيري فهذا طريق عميق

يتخطى حدود المكان

لن تعي فيه صوتا لغمغمة الأفعوان

(I hear the voice: / "Walk, for this is a deep path, / crossing the borders of the place / in which you will not be aware of any sound of the serpent’s muttering. /  It is a deep Labyrinth.")

In The Witch of Atlas [st. lviii], the Labyrinth is an Intricately arranged building:

           within the brazen doors

of the great labyrinth slept both boy and beast,

Tired with the pomp of their Osirian feast.

In Lines written among the Euganean Hills [1. 96], it takes the form of  a complicated maze of streets:

Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies, --

 A peopled labyrinth of wails,

Amphitrite’s destined halls …

In Queen Mab [Canto v, 1. 216-19], it is used to invoke notions of mystery and secrecy, a repository of crimes:

All human care accompanies its change;

Deserts not virtue in the dungeon’s gloom,

And, in the precincts of the palace, guides

Its footsteps through that labyrinth of crime …

In Don Juan [Canto vi, st. xxviii, 1. 223], Byron associates its        intricacy with the complications of love:

          So let us back to Lilliput, and guide

       Our hero through the Labyrinth of Love

       In which we left him several lines above.

In Endymion [Book iv, 1. 630], it suggests a place of refuge:

Into a labyrinth now my soul would fly,

But with thy beauty will I deaden it.

In Lamia [Part ii, 1. 52-4], it is described as a prison. Already enslaved by Lamia’s enchantments, Lycius wonders:

How to entangle, trammel up, and snare

Your soul in mine, and Labyrinth you there

Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?

Nāzik may model her perception of her own enslavement to a deceitful, delusive lover on Keats’s Lamia; Lycius is bound by love to the illusury serpent woman. In her chapter "a1-shi^Cr wa 'l-mawt" in Qādyā al-shi^Cr al-mu^Casir,⁽²⁸⁾ she summarizes Lamia’s story and its implication:

أما قصيدة (لاميا) فهي تنتهي بمعانيها اللاشعورية المكتنزة إلى ان التفكير يقضي على الحياة عندما يحاول ان يقتل العاطفة: لقد كانت (لاميا) أفعى تحولت إلى فتاة جميلة بقدرة سحرية, غير أنها كانت مخلصة في حبها للطالب (ليسيوس) عاشق الشعر والفلسفة, فبنت له قصرا مسحورا جدرانه من الموسيقى. وفي يوم الزواج, خلال دعوة صاخبة العطر والموسيقى والألوان, يدخل (ابولونيس) أستاذ الفلسفة يحدق في (لاميا) تحديقه ثابتة طويلة تكشف عن حقيقتها الخيالية وتهدم الجدران الموسيقية للمنزل, وإذ ذاك تصرخ لاميا وتتلاشى .... غير ان النتيجة التي انتهى إليها (ليسيوس) هي الموضوع الهام بالنسبة لكيتس ذلك ان (لسيوس) قد مات حالا عندما فقد حبيبته المسحورة, وسدى حاول (ابولونيس) إنقاذه. وقد كان هذا سر كيتس أيضا.

(The poem Lamia brings its unconscious buried meanings to the point of thought’s destroying life when it tries to kill passion: (Lamia) was a snake which was turned by magical power into a beautiful girl, but she was sincere in her love for the student Lycius, the lover of poetry and philosophy. She built for him a magical palace the walls of which were made of music. On the wedding day, during a reception laden with scent, music and colours, Apollonius, the master of philosophy, enters and fixes a firm, long gaze upon Lamia, which reveals her imaginary status, and destroys the musical walls of the dwelling. At that moment Lamia cries out and vanishes …. But the end that Lycius comes to is an important theme to Keats: Lycius has died immediately upon losing his magical beloved. Apollonius has tried to save him in vain; this was also Keats’s secret.)

THE JINNIIYYAH AND THE SIRENS:

In Nidā' ilā 'l-sa^Cādah [st. 44], the Jinniyyah is surrounded by the spider, the sirens and the snakes:

في خفايا مغمورة عنكبوت الــ                      ــشر ألفى فيها سريرا مريحا

وركاب (السيرين) آوت إليها                        والثعابين أثقلتها فحيحا

(In submerged secret places in. which the spider of evil found a comfortable throne, / to which the groups of sirens repaired, and which the serpents oppressed with hissing.)

Siren occurs 7 times in Byron’s poetry; in Don Juan [Canto 3, 1. 284-7], for instance, the siren stands as a symbol to suggest sinful pleasure:

             Is that life allows the luckiest sinner;

Pleasure (whene’er she sings, at least)’s a siren,

         That lures, to fly alive, the young beginner …

In Nāzik’s poetry, the Sirens are related to the Jinniyyah, and thus to Thais (see above). In France's Thais, they are referred to by Paphnutius when remembering the temptations of Alexandria:

" 'There, then,' he said, ‘is the delightful spot where I was born in sin; the bright air where I breathed poisonous perfumes; the sea of pleasure where I heard the songs of the sirens,"⁽²⁹⁾

THE SPIDER AND THAIS:

In Unshūdat al-ruhbān (the ode of the monks) [st. 17 & 20], the spider is employed as a symbol of evil. It represents Thais and perhaps Nāzik’s lover because they both are evil, strong and exert an Inexorable Influence on all around:

ذلك العنكبوت ذو الأرجل الغظـ                  ــة هل منـــه مهرب أو ملاذ

انه مـــــــن دمـــائــهم يتغــــذى                  وهو من قلب أمســـــهم أفلاذ

                               *     *     *     *

ذلك العنكبوت كــــم عاد وجها                 عكستــــه للراهبين الــكؤوس

انه وجهها, أينســــــون؟ هذي                  ربـــة الدير, هـــــــــذه تاييس

(Is there any escape or refuge from that spider with disgusting legs? / It feeds on their blood, and 1t is pieces of the heart of their yesterday. / * * / How many times has that spider returned as a face reflected to the monks in their chalices? / it is her face, can they forget? This is the mistress of the monastery, this is Thais.)

In Sālāt a1-ashbāh (the prayer of the ghosts) [st. 7], Buddha, the god, is presented as a spider to suggest the negative side of god:

من البرج, حيث يد العنكبوت

تشير لنا في سكون

(From the tower, where the hand of the spider / points to us In silence.)

THE GIANT FISH:

Nāzik’s fear of sin in La^Cnat al-zaman (the curse of time) [st. 4, 5, 7, 8, 9], is symbolized in the image of a dead fish floating on the waves of the river. The death of the fish arouses her fear of the end of her relationship with her lover. She believes that the dead fish is sent as a warning to stop sinning:

        لأيا وتبينا الحركة

        ثمة وإذا جثة سمكة 

طافية فوق الموجة ميتة والشاطئ في إشفاق

       وصرخت: رفيقي أين نسير؟

       لنعد, فالجثة همس نذير

       أرسلها عملاق شرير

       إنذار أسى ودليل فراق

(In the end we recognized the movement / there; the corpse of a fish / floated on the waves dead, and the seashore was in sympathy (with us). / I cried out: " O my friend, where are we going? / Let us return, for the corpse is a whispered warning, / sent by an evil giant -- a warning of distress and a sign of parting.")

  The fish grew bigger, grew at last to enormous proportions, a potent image of the frenetic augmentation of her fears [st. 9]:

ومشينا لكن الحركة

تكبر تكبر حتى عادت في حضن الموجة كالعملاق

(And we walked, but the movement / continued to follow us, and the fish / grew and grew, until it became like the giant in the bosom of the wave.)

The giant fish in this stanza calls to mind the giant fish in Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea:⁽³⁰⁾

" Then the fish came alive, with his death in him, and rose high out of the water showing all his great length and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to hang in the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a crash that sent spray over the old man and over all of the skiff."

In the last two stanzas, she emphasizes the effect of their sin; they feel ashamed of themselves. This echoes Adam’s and Eve’s feelings after the fall in the first version of Ughniyah li-'l-insān [st. 61]. In La^Cnat a1-zaman, they are chased by the fish with the bewitching eyes. On one occasion, nature is in sympathy with them [1. 8-9]:

حتى وجه القمر السحري غشاه أسى وظلام محاق

             وتلاشى مبسمه البراق

 (Even the face of the magical moon is veiled with depression and moonless darkness; / and his glittering mouth has vanished.)

It participates in their sorrows. On an other occasion, it mocks them like the fish [st. 11]:

حتى الأغصان المشتبكه

عادت تشبه عين السمكه

وتروع خطانا المرتبكه

والأنجم عادت كالأحداق

(Even the tangled branches [of the trees] / came to resemble the eye of the fish / and frighten our confused steps, / and the stars became like eyes.)

The image of the two lovers chased by the fish is parallel to the image of Nāzik chased by the serpent in al-Uf^Cuwān. The curse of the eyes of the fish recalls the curse of God on Adam and Eve, which continues on their posterity, Cain and Abel (see above).

THE GHOSTS AND THE GHOULS:

In Salāt al-ashbāh [st. 3], the procession of the guards and the ghosts moves through dark paths, which look like ‘crawling serpents’. She associates of the ghostly procession with the serpents:

تلوت حواليهم ظلمات الدروب

أفاعي زاحفة ونيوب

وساروا يجرون أسرارهم في شحوب

 (The darkness of the lanes twisted around them — / crawling serpents and fangs —— / and they walked, palely dragging their secrets.)

The ghosts in the first stanza of La^Cnat al-zaman, suggest the turbid past life and loves of the two lovers:

والأشباح الغامضة تجوس الظلمة في الآفاق

(And the obscure ghosts exploring the darkness on the horizon.)

The confused ghosts of their previous lovers, with their perfidious eyes, in the fifth stanza, no. longer follow them angrily or jealously, and the ghouls of the past no longer haunt them:

      لا فيها أشباح حيرى

      تتبعنا غاضبة غيرى 

     ذات عيون تقطر غدرا

     في الليل, ولا فيها أنفاق

لا فيها هاوية تسكن فيها الاغوال, ولا أنفاق

      لاشيء سوى القمر البراق

(There are no confused ghosts / who follow us angrily and jealously / with eyes dripping perfidy, / at night, nor are there any underground passages, / no abyss in which the ghouls live, and no underground passages —- / Nothing but the brilliant moon.)

Nāzik’s and her lover’s sinful pasts known by God (the principal guardian of all human beings) are represented in stanza 4 when the two ghosts are seen by a guard:

رأى حارس شبحين

يسيران لا يدركان متى كان ذاك وأين؟

(A guard saw two ghosts / walking unconscious of when and where [they walk].)

The guard takes the two ghosts to the great Brahma’s temple, wherein 'Buddha prays for the people whose eyes do not die' [st. 5]. They are brought with their secrets and sins, asking Buddha for forgiveness. They all suggest the pasts of the two poets, which linger in their thoughts despite their efforts to get rid of them:

صدى موكب الحرس المقترب

يدق على كل باب ويصرخ بالنائمين

فيبرز من كل باب شبح

هزيل شحب,

يجر رماد السنين,

يكاد الدجى ينتحب

على وجهه الجمجمي الحزين

 (The echo of the approaching procession of the guards, / knocking on every door and shouting at the sleeping people, / and a ghost appears from every door -- / thin, pale, / dragging the ashes of the years. / The darkness is about to bewail / its sad face, a skull with no flesh.)

The guards knocking on the doors of the sleeping people in Nāzik’s poem reminds us of Tāhā’s Ayyatuhā 'l-ashbāh (O ghosts!) [st. 1, 1. 1 & st. 2, 1. 1]:

لم أقبلت فــــي الظلام إلـــي؟                  ولماذا طرقــت بابــي ليلا؟

....................................

                              *     *     *

اتركيني في وحشتـي, ودعيني              في مكانــي بوحدتـــي مستقلا

(Why have you come to me in the darkness, and why did you knock at my door by night? ... / *  *  * / Leave me in my alienation, and leave me in my place, independent in my loneliness.)

The two ghosts confess their sins to Buddha; they complain about the spider-man, and blame Time, which turns them into slaves and prisoners and forces them to sin:

أتينا نسحب أسرارنا الباهتة

أتيناك, نحن عبيد الزمان

وأسراه نحن الذين عيونهم لا تموت

أتينا نجر الهوان

ونسألك الصفح عن هذه الأعين ألمذنبه

(We have come to you dragging along our pale secrets; / we have come to you, we -- the slaves / and the prisoners of time, we whose eyes do not die -- / have come, trailing degradation, / and we ask you to forgive these sinful eyes.)

The theme of time and the eternal misery of the ghosts recurs in al-^CĀm al-jadīd (the new year) (1950):

يا عام لا تقرب مساكننا فنحن هنا طيوف

من عالم الأشباح, ينكرنا البشر

ويفر منا الليل والماضي ويجهلنا القدر

ونعيش أشباحا تطوف

نحن الذين نسير لا ذكرى لنا

لا حلم, لا أشواق تشرق, لا منى

................................

نحن العراة من الشعور, ذوو الشفاه الباهتة

الهاربون من الزمان إلى العدم

.................................

نحيا ولا نشكو, ونجهل ما البكاء.

ما الموت ما الميلاد ما معنى السماء

             *   *   *

..................................

نحن الذين لهم عروق من قصب

بيضا أم خضرا نحن بلا شعور.

(Oh new year! Do not come to our dwelling-places, because we are here phantoms / from the world of the ghosts; human beings deny us; / the night and the past flee from us, and fate is ignorant of us; / and we live as ghosts that wander. / We are those who walk with no memory, no dream, no longings that shine, no desire / . .... / We are bare of feelings, with pale lips, / the ones who run from time to nothingness / .... / We live without complaining, and we know not what weeping is, / what death is, what birth is and what the meaning of the sky is. / *  *  * / .... / We are those who have veins of reeds, / white, or green; we have no feelings.)

The two poems exude the same atmosphere as T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men [st. i-iv]:

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpieces filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

                  * * *

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

                 * * *

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man’s hand

                * * *

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In his comparison between Nāzik’s and Eliot’s poems, Cachia refers to the similarities between Nāzik’s al-^CĀm al-jadīd and T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men:

"You will notice the dislocations, the short, sharply shifting images; you will notice also the condemnation of that 'flight from time to nothingness' which a Romantic might on the contrary have celebrated."⁽³¹⁾

The similarity between Nāzik’s and Eliot’s poem

" is no accident, for the contemporary Arab poets are closely acquainted with Western literary movements and freely acknowledge the influence of many masters, and among these none has had so far reaching an effect as T. S. Eliot."⁽³²⁾

The ghosts in Shelley’s The Past [1. 7-9], have the same function as that of Nāzik’s Jinniyyahs -- they are revengeful:

Forget the dead, the past? O yet

There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,

 Memories that make the heart a tomb ….

VENUS AND ADONIS:

In Roman mythology, Venus is the goddess of love, desire, grace, and charm.⁽³³⁾ 'Ishtār, the counterpart of Venus, is the chief goddess in the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon, and the virgin mother-sister of Tammūz, the counterpart of Adonis. In modern Arabic poetry, Venus is very often replaced by 'Ishtār. Examples of this are to be found in al-Sayyāb, in Madīnah bilā matar (a city without rain), and in al-Bayyātī in Qasā'id hubb ila ^CIshtār (love poems to ^Clshtar) where he has ^Clshtār four times and ^CAshtarūt once.

Unlike the other Arab Romantic poets, Nāzik has Venus rather than ^CIshtār. In Marāyā 'l-shams, (the mirrors of the sun) [st. 3] in her later collection Yughayyir alwānah 'l-bahr, she refers to Venus for the first time. She is fascinated by the notion of the birth of Venus from the sea:

وتولد عندي القصيدة

كمولد فينوس من زبد البحر طافية مثل ورده

(And the poem is born in me / like the birth of Venus from the foam of the sea, floating like a rose.)

The worship of Adonis was practised by the Semitic peoples of Babylon and Syria. The Greeks borrowed it from them, as early as the seventh century before Christ:

" It is not so much a pure Greek name as a Semitic or Greek-Hebrew one. Ancient Hebrew adon means 'lord' and was translated thus to refer to God in the Old Testament by the English writers of the Authorised Version of the Bible."⁽³⁴⁾

In modern Arabic poetry, Adonis is replaced by Tammuz:

" Tammūz, the god of fertility to which the movement is related, is one of the central symbols around which have evolved a considerable number of works by distinguished modern poets, such as Khalīl Hāwī, ^CAlī Ahmad Sa^Cīd, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Jabrā Ibrahim Jabrā and Yūsuf al-Khal."⁽³⁵⁾

In Madīnat al-Sindibād (the city of Sinbad) -- a political poem written against ^CAbd al-Karīm Qāsim, al-Sayyāb’s feelings are veiled In symbols and myths. In this poem al-Sayyāb regards the period of the Monarchy in Iraq as a period of drought and barrenness. When the Iraqi Republic was established, he sympathized with it, but the new Iraqi government frustrated him. To him, the advantages of the Iraqi republic in the time of Qāsim did not last long. It was as short as spring.

Sarbarūs fī Bābil (Cerberus in Babylon) [st. 1] is another political poem against Qāsim; in this poem, Qāsim is compared to Cerberus who looks for the buried god, Tammūz. Tammūz symoblizes the Iraqis who were tortured by Cerberus (Qasim):

ليعو سربروس في الدروب

في بابل الحزينة المهدمه

............................

أشداقه الرهيبة الثلاثة احتراق

يؤج في العراق –

ليعو سربروس في الدروب

وينبش التراب على إلهنا الدفين

تموزنا الطعين,

يأكله: يمص عينيه إلى القرار,

يقصم صلبه القوي, يحطم الجرار

بين يديه, ينثر الورود والشقيق.

(Let Cerberus howl in the lanes, / in sad, destroyed Babylon. / .. .. / His three horrible jawbones are a flame, / that blazes in Iraq -- / Let Cerberus howl in the lanes, / and dig up the earth, looking for the buried god, / our stabbed Tammūz, / to eat him: to suck out his two eyes from the roots; / to break his strong spine; to smash the jars / before him; to scatter the roses and anemones.)

Nāzik treats Venus and Adonis separately. Her references to Adonis, I think, do not have a political implication as in al-Sayyāb’s poem; she more likely had in mind Shelley’s Adonais. Imitating Shelley, Nāzik refers to Keats as Adonis, the mythical character who symbolizes beauty, premature death, and fertility; these symbols are encapsulated in the brightness that he would have shed on life if he had lived.

In Ka'ābat al-fusūl al-arba^Cah (the melancholy of the four seasons) [st. 35], like Shelley in Adonais, Nāzik laments herself and Keats’s death by referring to Adonis:

إي أدونيس آه لو عشت في الار                ض فعاش السنا ومات الظلام

(O Adonis! Oh, if you had continued to live on earth, brightness would have lived and darkness would have died.)

In stanza 36, Nāzik associates the image of Adonis with sublimity and magical perfume, which are qualities of poetry:

آه لو دمت يا ادونيس للار                     ض وأبقيت عطرك المسحور

(Oh, if only the earth still had you, O Adonis! and you had perpetuated your enchanted perfume!)

In the fifth and the sixth stanzas of Unshūdat al-abadiyyah she reveals her feelings towards Keats’s and Tchaikovsky’s deaths; her ode to Tchaikovsky reflects her ode to Keats in the similarity of her treatment of the common themes:

آه لو كنت عشت مثلك في الما                ضي وأبصرت وجهك العلويا

(Oh, if only I had lived like you in the past, and seen your sublime face.)[st. 5]

آه لو بعت كل عمري بيوم              شاعري يراك فيه وجودي

 (Oh, if only I had sold my whole life for one poetic day on which my being might have seen you.)

Venus occurs twice in Keats’s poetry, 13 times in Shelley’s, and 19 times in Byron’s (see tables 3-6). In Keats’s Endymion [Book iii, 1. 1009-12], for instance, Venus is referred to as the goddess of love:

He could not bear it -- shut his eyes In vain;

Imagination gave a dizzier pain.

' O I shall die! sweet Venus, be my stay!

Where is my lovely mistress? Well—away!

I die -- I hear her voice -- I feel my wing -- '

In Byron’s Don Juan [Canto 1, 1. 438-440], Venus, the goddess of love appears with Cupid, god of love, in the same line:

               As sweetness to the flower, or salt to ocean,

  Her Zone to Venus, or his bow to Cupid

In Thais, France describes Thais as an imitator of Venus and other mythological characters:

" Sometimes she Imitated the horrible deeds which the pagan fables ascribe to Venus, Leda, or Pasiphae."⁽³⁶⁾

Thais is described as Venus many times; she is called so by Nicias, when he warns Paphnutius of her power:

" 'Beware of offending Venus,' replied Nicias."

" She is a powerful goddess; she will be angry with you if

         you take away her chief minister.' .... 'Beware of

          offending Venus; her vengeance is terrible."⁽³⁷⁾

Keats and Shelley employ Adonis; Byron does not refer to Adonis at all (see tables 3-6). In Keats’s Endymion [Book iii, line 917-919], Adonis is represented as well-disposed to lovers:

E'en in the passing of thine honeymoon,

Visit thou my Cythera: thou wilt find

 Cupid well-natured, my Adonis kind.

In Scene from 'Tasso'[1. 10], Shelley associates Venus and Adonis with poetry:

'If I am Venus, thou, coy Poesy

Art the Adonis whom I love, ….

THE JINNIYYAH, DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE:

In Nidā' ilā 'l-sa^Cādah [st. 36], the Jinniyyah portrayed as the mistress of the countryside is an allusion to Demeter in Greek literature, the great earth goddess, or the earth mother. She had a daughter named Proserpine, Pluto’s wife, queen of the realms of the dead:

وسواهم يظنها ربة الريــ                  ــف وبنت الذرى وأخت الوهاد

(Others think that she is the mistress of the countryside and the daughter of the hills and the sister of the lowlands.)

She is also portrayed as the daughter of the dust, which is an allusion to Persephone (= Proserpine), Demeter’s daughter. Demeter lost her happiness when Pluto took her daughter to live, with him in the underworld for a half of the year, returning to earth for one half of the year. Persephone was the symbol of the rebirth of the crops in spring after their 'death' in winter, and as such she featured centrally In many sacred rituals. Demeter’s tragedy was forever renewed; her daughter was brought to her for the allotted time, and then taken to the world of the dead again.⁽³⁸⁾

Byron uses Ceres as the Roman Goddess of corn and harvests in Don Juan [Canto 2, 1. 1351]. Keats and Shelley prefer the Roman names, Ceres and Proserpine, to the Greek, Demeter and Persephone (see tables 3 & 4).

THE JINNIYYAH AND CUPID:

Love in Nāzik’s poetry is represented by mythological characters, such as Cupid, who signifies psychological blindness and inevitability, gives his victims happiness and misery; he shoots indiscriminately so that no one can avoid his arrows.

The Jinniyyah of happiness in al-Bahth ^Can al-sa^Cādah (looking for happiness) [st. 8] is linked with Cupid and Psyche; Nāzik does not refer to Psyche because, I think, she employs the Jinniyyah to play the role of Psyche. She concentrates on Cupid because he, as god of love, is very important to her theme. In this poem, she loves Cupid’s arrow because it inspires herself and others with happiness:

وهي حينا في الحب يلهمها سهـ                 ــم كيوبيد قلب كل محب

(She is sometimes in love, shot by Cupid’s arrow into the heart of every lover.)

In ^CInd al-^Cushshāq ( among the lover) [st. 14], she admits that the effect of Cupid is inevitable, so that complaint is futile:

هكذا قد قضى عليه كيوبيــ                   ــد فمــــاذا تفيد شكـواه؟

(Cupid has condemned him in this way, so what is the use of his complaint.)

In stanza 18, the poetess sympathises with Cupid’s victims who languish in misery:

سل كيوبيد عن شقاوة صرعا                ه ماذا يلقون من تعذيب

(Ask Cupid about the misery of his victims and the torture they endure.)

In stanza 24, she is too weak to avoid him, despite her great effort:

أنضبي واطردي خيال كيوبيــ                ــد وحسب الغرام هذه الضحايا

(Exhaust and drive away the phantom of Cupid! These victims are enough for infatuation.)

The Jinniyyah’s counterpart here is Cupid; the third feminine person singular in this stanza is the Jinniyyah, who, like Cupid, is inevitable. Cupid in this stanza is associated with love and imagination (= poetry), because love leads to poetry -- the product of imagination.

Keats’s Cupid appears most often in Endymion in the second book, lines 791-6, Cupid suggests purity and love:

                                no bosom shook

With awe of purity, no Cupid pinion

In reverence vailed, my crystalline dominion

Half lost, and all old hymns made nullity!

But what is this to love? O I could fly

 With thee into the ken of heavenly powers,

In the fourth book [1. 978-81], he is associated with love and youth:

And said, in a new voice, but sweet as love,

To Endymion’s amaze: 'By Cupid’s dove,

And so thou shalt! and by the lily truth

Of my own breast thou shalt, beloved youth! '


Cain's curse also occurs in Shelley's Adonais [st,xvii]:


                                                    the curse of Cain
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!

THE THEME OF GOLD:

Like the English romantic use of the word,. Nāzik’s employment of the word 'gold' is ambivalent -- good and bad. On occasion, she treats gold as a precious thing as in Suwār wa tahwīmāt amām adwā' a1-murūr [1. 11] and shajarat al-qamar [st. 4]:

" مسامرنا الذهبي وساقي صدى زهرنا"

" وساكب عطر السنابل والورود في شعرنا"

("The golden nightly entertainer, and the saki of the echo of our flower";  / "and the power of the perfume of the spikenard and the roses in our poetry.")

The symbol of gold in this poem suggests poetry, which is as precious as gold.

Elsewhere, she treats it as a corrupting power because it encourages its owner to be materialistic as in Salāt ilā Blāwtus; ilāh al-dhahab.

MIDAS:

Nāzik uses the myth of Midas to symbolize materialism. Seeking gold is a great curse, according to her. In stanza 28 of Salāt ilā Blāwtus, she asks the Jinniyyah to tell the story of Midas’s wish to become rich:

حدثيهم عن ذلك الملك الغا           بر (ميداس) كيف كان مصيره؟

أين ساقته شهوة الذهب العمـ          ـــياء ماذا جنى عليه غروره

(Tell them about that ancient king, Midas. What was his fate? / Where did the blind lust of gold drive him? What crime did his vanity bring him?)

In stanzas 29-32, she describes Midas’s wish to turn every thing he touches into gold. These stanzas echo the general theme of gold in romantic poetry, and are parallel to Act 1, in Mary Shelley’s Midas, when Midas asks Bacchus to give him the golden touch:

Let all I touch be gold, most glorious gold!

Let me be rich! and where I stretch my hands,

(That like Orion I could touch the stars!)

Be radiant gold! God Bacchus, you have sworn,

I claim your word, -- my ears are quite forgot!

In stanza 33, she goes on telling the Jinniyyah to broadcast the story of Midas and the effect of gold on his character:

حدثيهم وكيف ذات مساء         كان (ميداس) لاهث المقلتين

يلمس الكنز في انفعال جنوني        وفي كفه لظى شفتين

(Tell them how one evening Midas’s eyes were panting, / fingering the treasure in a fit of madness, and in his hand the Flame of two lips.)

The scene in this stanza reminds us of the beginning of Act 2 of Midas. Midas enters a splendid apartment in the palace, holding a golden rose in his hand:

            

               Gold! glorious gold! I am made up of gold!

               I pluck a rose, a silky, fading rose,

               Its soft, pink petals change to yellow gold;

               Its stem, Its leaves are gold and what before

               Was fit for a poor peasant’s festal dress …..

Midas’s anxiety for gold is comparable to the prince’s desire to see Rapunzel who lives in the tower. Midas and the prince are hurt because of their attempts to reach their goals.

Nāzik refers to Midas throughout the last twenty-two stanzas [st. 28-49]. Midas’s great love of gold prevents him from loving the stars, clouds, seas, mountains or flowers. He wishes that even the cheeks, the eye-lids and the lips of the Jinniyyah would turn into gold. This suggests that Midas was not really in love with the Jinniyyah but only with her wealth as a companion of the god of gold [st. 31, 32, 33].

When Midas is cursed by the gold he asks for the curse to be lifted, but it is too late, because everything has been changed into gold, including the river in which he tries to wash his sin away. In stanzas 44-48, Nāzik reproaches Midas for his selfishness, and mocks him because he is deluded by his greed and pride:

إيه مايدس, أيها الملك الاحـ                    ــمق ماذا جنيت؟ أي غرور؟

....................................

                                    *   *   *   *

فاشرب الآن خمرة الندم البا                    رد وإسكر بحلمك الذهبي

( O Midas, you who are the foolish king! What have you gained? What pride! / .... / “ * * / So drink, now, the wine of cold regret, and be intoxicated with your golden dream!)

Keats and Byron seldom refer to Midas; Midas appears once in Keats’s poetry [in lines 10-11 of If by dull rhymes our English must be changed]:

Misers of sound and syllable, no less

Than Midas of his coinage, ….

and once in Byron’s poetry [ in stanza xv of The Age of Bronze]:

               Or turn to sail between those shifting rocks,

The new Symplegades -- the crushing Stocks,

              Where Midas might again his wish behold

             In real paper or imagined gold.

Midas does not occur in Shelley’s poetry, although the theme of gold is dominant in his poetry. He describes gold as a God worshipped by people, especially the rich and the governors.

PLUTUS:

Nāzik does not refer to Plutus, the god of gold, except in the title of Salāt ilā Blāwtus. In stanza 5, she may allude to him when she employs the word معبودنا الذهب (the adored Gold) to indicate that she and other people worship the god of gold. Plutus appears only in the title, thereafter being identified, perhaps, with:

1) الشيخ (the old man), الصامت الغريب الطباع (the silent and strange tempered), الأعرج البطئ الخطى (the lame, slow-stepped), العاجز الكفيف (the disabled), [st. 20,22]

2) الصبي(the lad), الوافد المجهول(the unknown envoy), الطيف الكريم (the generous phantom), رب التمنيات (the lord of wishes) [st. 20, 21, 37, 38, 39].

In stanza 34, Nāzik portrays the god of gold as a boy with golden tresses coming from the visionary world. Midas is frightened when the phantom boy greets him [st. 37]; he is amazed as to where that phantom boy has come from:

أي باب قادت خطى الوافد المجـ               ــهول؟ هل جاء من شقوق الجدار؟

 (Which door guided the steps of the unknown envoy? Has he come from the cracks of the wall?)

The 'unknown envoy' and the 'generous phantom' appear in stanzas 38 & 39:

وأجاب الطيف الكريم: "أنا أمـ                  ــلك تحقيق كل حلم جميل

                                   *   *   *   *   *

أنا رب التـمنيـــات شفاهـــي                      تملك المستحيل والأبعاد

(The generous phantom answered: " I possess the fulfilment of every beautiful dream; / I am the lord of wishes; my lips possess the impossible and remote dimensions.")

This reminds us of Silenus in most versions of the myth of Midas. In Mary Shelley’s Midas [Act 1, 1. 56], it is Bacchus who rewards Midas for his hospitality:

                 Choose your reward, for here I swear your wish,

                      Whatever it may be, shall be fulfilled.

In stanza 21, the blind man may be an allusion to the prince who tried to save Rapunzel:

ذلك العاجز الكفيف الذي يمــ             ــنح من لا يرى كنوزا ضخاما

(That disabled and blind one who bestows great treasures on him who cannot see.)

The word 'gold' is very important in Shelley’s poetry; it also has two ambivalent senses -- good and bad. In Queen Mab, Part ii, line 204-8, Part v, line 61-3, 90-7, 169-71 and 189-91, it suggests evil. In this poem, Shelley presents gold and wealth as a curse on human beings, especially statesmen and priests:

            But wealth, that curse of man,

 Blighted the bud of Its prosperity:

Virtue and wisdom, truth and liberty,

Fled, to return not, until man shall know

           That they alone can give the bliss

……………………………..

But in the temple of their hireling hearts

Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn

All earthly things but virtue.

……………………………..

Leaves nothing but the sordid lust of self,

The grovelling hope of interest and gold,

Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed

Even by Hypocrisy.

                               And statesmen boast

Of wealth The wordy eloquence, that lives

After the ruin of their hearts, can gild

The bitter poison of a nation’s woe,

………………………………….

That all within it but the virtuous man

Is venal: gold or fame wilt surely reach

The price prefixed by selfishness, to all

But him of resolute and unchanging will;

………………………………….

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe

Is turned to deadliest agony, old age

 Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,

Shelley believes that the wealth which oppresses humanity, the gold that grew from fields of blood, is an evil that can be counterbalanced by the generation of liberty through regeneration of thought.

Gold, on the other hand, may suggest beautiful colour as in Lines written among the Euganean Hills [1. 143]:

              Quivering through aerial gold,

            When the beams are fled which steeped its skirts

or happiness as in Epipsychidion [1. 428]:

        Draw the last spirit of the age of gold ...

Also Keats has an ambivalent attitude towards gold. In Isabella [1. 108-112], he talks about gold in a negative sense:

             In torched mines and noisy factories,

        And many once proud-quiver’d loins did melt

              In blood from stinging whip; -- with hollow eyes

           Many all day in dazzling river stood,

To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.

By contrast, he employs the symbol of gold to suggest poetry in On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer [st - 1]:

             Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

                  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

                  Round many western islands have I been

           Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

poet, in this poem, is a traveller, an explorer, voyaging …… islands, discovering the realms of gold: he hears on his travels about Eldorado, the city of gold.

In Thais, France’s attitude towards gold is positive; he describes Alexandria as the golden city, according to the Greeks’ description:

" Keeping along the left arm of the river and through a fertile and populous districts, he reached, in a few days, the city of Alexandria, which the Greeks have surnamed the beautiful and the golden."⁽³⁹⁾

ELDORADO AND PACTOLUS:

Eldorado is a city of gold, and Pactolus is a river, which is turned into gold, when Midas, the greedy king, touches it. The former is alluded to frequently in Nāzik’s poetry, and the latter rarely. Both are alluded to in Salāt ilā Blāwtus. Nāzik may have borrowed the elements of the scenery of Salāt ilā Blāwtus from Coleridge’s fragment Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream. The atmosphere of Salāt ilā Blāwtus is similar to that of Coleridge’s poem. The sacred river Alph is recalled in Nāzik’s poem as the river of gold. Nāzik’s introduction to the poem recalls the introductory lines of Kubla Khan:

          In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

               A stately pleasure-dome decree:

        Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

         Through caverns measureless to man

         Down to a sunless sea.

         So twice five miles of fertile ground

        With walls and towers were girdled round:

       And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

        Where blossomed many an incense - bearing tree;

         And here were forests ancient as the hills,

        Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

        

         But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

          Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

             A savage place! as holy and enchanted ….

At the begining of the poem, Nāzik uses the pronoun 'we' to indicate that the issue of materialism is universal rather than personal; people of different generations have almost the same attitude, they expect material benefits from love and marriage; men prefer to love and marry rich women, and women rich men; they are sharing the journey in quest of the temple of the god of gold in the city of gold. The city of gold is an allusion to Eldorado. In the first six stanzas, the difficulties of the journey are described with various images; she emphasizes that men adore gold; they seek out the desired spring throughout the ages; they have been deluded by the legend of the golden river (= Pactolus):

هكذا يممــوا إلـــى الشرق آلافا                  جيــاعـــا للمنبــع المزعـــــوم

ضللتـهم أسطـــورة عـــن مكان                 خلف بعض الجبال في حضن واد

حيث يجري نهر من التبر مسحو               ر طوت ســـره صخــور الوهاد

(And in this way, thousands of starving people went Eastward to the desired source, / misled by a myth of a place behind some mountains in the bosom of a valley / where flows an enchanted river of gold, whose secret the stones of the low lands enfolded.)

In stanza 8, Nāzik gives the river the power to change everything into gold. In fact, Midas’s hand has the power to change everything into gold, not the river itself; she either forgets, misunderstands the situation in the original myth, or modifies the story for a poetic purpose. All the natural elements in the valley, in Nāzik’s poem, are turned into gold and silver by the magical power of the river:

قطرة منه تمنح الكف لمسا            ذهبي التأثير في الاشياء

والزهور التي تحف بشطيه           شظايا كواكب بيضــــاء

(A drop of it gives the hand a golden touch on things, / and the flowers which surround its two seashores are the fragments of white stars.)

Midas’s life turns into misery, and he realizes that he has been deluded by his greed; he asks the god of gold to forgive him. When he goes to the river to wash his sins away, the river turns into gold as soon as he touches it; the curse of the god of gold on Midas is so strong that even when he wants to wash his sin away the curse is not at the end.

The golden river in Nāzik’s poem reminds us of the river which turns Into gold when Midas touches it to wash away the curse of gold In Mary Shelley’s drama Midas [Act II]. When Zopyrion pours the water on Midas’s hand, the water becomes gold:

           But how is this? the water that I touch

          Falls down a stream of yellow liquid gold,

          And hardens as it falls. I cannot wash –

In stanza 12, she describes the golden animals of the city:

ومكان الفراش تسرح أطيا                  ر رقاق تبرية الأبــــــدان

ومكان القطيــع تحــيا وعو                  ل مترفات فضية السيقان

(And instead of butterflies delicate gold bodied birds roam, / and instead of the herd, luxurious mountain goats with silver legs live.)

Nāzik defines Eldorado in "Hawāmish wa ta^Cqībāt" (Margins and Comments), in Yughayyir alwānah al-bahr (the sea changes its colours):⁽⁴⁰⁾

عنوان قصيدة قصيرة للشاعر الأمريكي ادغر الن بو  Poe يبحث فيها الفارس الشجاع طوال حياته حتى يشيب عن مدينة الأحلام فلا يجدها و (الدورادو) هي المدينة المنشودة.

(It is the title of a short poem of the American poet Edgar Allan Poe, in which the brave knight looks for the city of dreams all his life, until he becomes old,, yet he does not find it. Eldorado is the desired city.)

Edgar Allan Poe wrote a poem entitled Eldorado. The word Eldorado is the poem’s refrain. The theme of looking for Eldorado in Poe’s poem is parallel to Nāzik’s theme of looking for gold in Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st. 11]. In stanza 11, she uses the word بلادا  (a country) alluding to Eldorado:

من خيالاته يصوغ على الافــ                     ــق قلاعـــا فضية الأبـــواب

وبلادا وديانها تنبـــت التبــــــ                     ــر مكان الأشجار والأعشاب

(From its imaginings it makes silver-doored castles on the horizon, / and a country whose valleys grow gold instead of trees and grass.)

In Poe’s poem, Eldorado is the goal of a journey that can never end [st. 2]:

           But he grew old,

           This knight so bold,

     And o’er his heart a shadow

           Fell, as he found

          No spot of ground

     That looked like Eldorado.

In Nāzik’s poem, on the other hand, the city of gold is found by the people who seek it.

Eldorado is referred to In Suwār wa tahwīmāt amām adwā’ al-murūr (images and tales In front of the traffic lights) (1974) [1. 42]; she speaks about the effect of the traffic lights on her emotions, revealing her hatred of the red light because it ends her dream [1. 2], and makes her impatient [I. 11]. At the end of the stanza, she describes the red light as superior to the yellow light; she hates it because it delays her happiness and keeps the city of gold far away:

يا عقلا مبحوح الفكرة يؤوي شللا

خرب موجات وحقولا أسطورية

غيب (الدورادو) ورباها الذهبية

عن عيني وطواها في ارض سرية

اسكنها زحلا

يافرحة من يقدر أن يصلا

(O mind hoarse of thought that accomodates paralysis! / It has destroyed waves and mythical meadows / and has banished Eldorado and its golden hills / from my two eyes and wrapped them in a secret land, and made them live in Venus. / O happy is the one who can arrive!)

Pactolus is referred to in Byron’s The Age of Bronze [st. xv]:

       

        That magic palace of Alcina shows

          More wealth than Britain ever had to lose,

          Were all her atoms of unleaven’d ore,

          And all her pebbles from Pactolus’ shore.

ELDORADO AND UTOBIA:

As an idealist, Nāzik signifies by Utopia a perfect society which does not exist in reality but in dreams. She uses Utopia to refer to an idyllic state, much in the same way that English poets, including Keats, use the word Arcadia. She knows that Utopia does not belong to Greek mythology; it was a coinage of Sir Thomas More in the 16th century. She notes this in her definition of Utopia, but stresses that her Utopia does not have any relation to More’s :⁽⁴¹⁾

كلمة إغريقية معناها (لا مكان) استعملتها للدلالة على مدينة خيالية لا وجود لها إلا في أحلامي, ولا علاقة لهذه المدينة بيوتوبيا التي تخيلها الكاتب الإنكليزي توماس مور في كتاب ألفه باللغة اللاتينية سنة 1516 ورسم فيه صورة سياسية إدارية للجزيرة المثلى كما يريدها هو, قياسا على جمهورية أفلاطون.

(It is a Greek word which means "nowhere". I used it to suggest an imaginary city, which has no existence but in my dreams. This city has no connection with the Utopia which was imagined by the English writer, Thomas More, in a book written in Latin in 1516. He sketched his own idea of a political and administrative image for the ideal island, on the analogy of Plato’s Republic.)

Is Nāzik’s Utopia the product of her acquaintance with More’s and the like? Utopia, I think, represents for Nāzik a political ideal; it is the natural outgrowth of her lifelong devotion to her nationalistic hopes that all the Arab countries may become one, like any beautiful and happy land. She represents Utopia as an idyllic region to which the imagination retreats from the painful realities of the world. Thus Nāzik’s political theme is disguised in the allegory of Utopia. It has much in common with Jerusalem as it is imagined by Blake, or the various golden cities of love, freedom, and justice imagined by Shelley in, for example, Laon and Cythna.

Nāzik’s Utopia has many associations: in Yūtūbyā 'l-dā'i^Cah (the lost Utopia) [st. 3], it is associated with the eternal light:

ويوتوبيا حيث يبقى الضياء                ولا تغرب الشمس او تفلس

(And Utopia is where the light is, and where the sun does not set.)

In Yūtūbyā fī 'l-jibāl (Utopia in the mountains) (1948) [st. 1& 2], Utopia is presented in the image of a village situated in a mountainous place in the North of Iraq:

تفجري يا عيون

بالماء, بالأشعة الذائبة

تفجري بالضوء, بالألوان, فوق القرية الشاحبة

............................

تفجري بالجمال

وشيدي يوتوبيا في الجبال

يوتوبيا من شجرات القمم

(Burst forth O springs, / with water, with evancescent rays. / Break forth with light, with colours upon the pale village / .... / Burst forth with beauty, / and build Utopia In the mountains. / Utopia is made of the trees of the peaks.)

تفجري جارفة كالرياح

تفجري في الغروب

وشيدي يوتوبيا من قلوب

(Burst forth driving like the winds; / burst forth in the sunset, / and build Utopia from hearts.)

purity as in stanza 2 of Yūtūbyā fī 'l-jibāl:

تفجري بيضاء فوق الصخر

لونا وضوءا يتحدى كل رجس البشر

(Burst forth white on the rocks / -- a colour and a light that challenges all the filth of humanity.)

like other famous cities, notably Troy and Camelot, Nazik’s Utopia is built by music as in stanza 1:

تفجري باللحون

.................

ومن خرير المياه

يوتوبيا من نغم

(Burst forth with melodies, / .... / and from the murmuring of waters, / Utopia is made of melody.)

   This recalls Coleridge’s dome of pleasure in Kubla Khan [l. 29]:

           That with music loud and long,

            I would build that dome in air,

To Nāzik, Utopia is the symbol of eternal Beauty and eternal Spring:

تخيلته بلدا مـــــن عبير           على أفق حرت في سره

........................

                      *    *    *

هناك يظل الربيع ربيعا           يظلل سكان يوتوبيا

(I imagined it a land of fragrance on a horizon of whose secret I knew nothing. / .... / * * / There spring remains spring shading the inhabitants of Utopia.)

It is comparble to Arcadia as It appears in the poetry of Keats and the Romantics. Arcadia in Keats’s Endymion [Book ii, 1. 985-992] is never a city, it is a region of perfect natural beauty offering its Inhabitants a life of leisured, comfortable and pastoral activity:

        ….. Dear maiden, steal

         Blushing into my soul, and let us fly

        These dreary caverns for the open sky.

         I will delight thee all my winding course,

        From the green sea up to my hidden source

       About Arcadian forests; and will show

       The channels where my coolest waters flow

        Through mossy rocks ….

Utopia in Nāzik’s poetry is comparable to Poe’s Eldorado; it never exists in real life. In Yūtūbyā 'l-dā'i^Cah [st. 1&2], Utopia is a country belonging to the heart and mind; it is a place to be visited in dreams, not in reality:

ويمضي شعوري في نشوة               يخدره حلـــــم يوتوبيا

                              *    *    *

ويوتوبيا حلم فـــي دمـــي                 أموت وأحيا على ذكره

(And my feelings continue ecstatically to numb the dream of Utopia.  / * * *  / And Utopia is a dream in my blood; I die and live with its memory.)

PACTOLUS AND LETHE:

Pactolus in Salāt ilā Blāwtus has a similar function to that of Lethe in Ustūrat nahr al-nisyān (the myth of the river of oblivion). Both are associated with sin and forgetfulness. In Ustūrat nahr al-nisyān (the myth of two eyes) [st. 1&2], Nazik knows very well that Lethe Is a river of forgetfulness in the netherworld of Greek and Roman mythology, yet she wishes it existed in reality to wash her sins and sorrows away:

ليت نهر النسيان لم يكن وهما                  صورته أحلامنا لأســـانا

                                       *    *    *

ليته كان ليت أخبــــاره حـــق                  لننسى ما كان أو مــا يكون

ونعيش الأحرار مـــن قيد بلوا                  نا ويعفو عنا الغد المجنون

(If only the river of oblivion was not an Illusion, which our dreams portrayed to our depression. / *  *  * / If only it existed, if only it was true that we could forget what was and what will be, / or that we could live free from the chain of our problems and that mad tomorrow could forgive us.)

When she determines to forget her sins, she remembers Lethe; she alludes to it in Ughniyah 1i-'l-insan. (1) [st. 173] and describes it as a spring in which we can wash away grief and despair:

ذلك النبع بعد هذا السرى العطــ                     ــشان بعد الصراع بعد الجراح

لو لمســناه لو غســـلنا بــــه كــل                   أســـانا ويأســــنا الملــتـــاح

(If only we could touch that spring and wash our grief and our despair after such thirsty walking, after conflict, after wounds, / if only we could touch it, if only we could wash away with it all our grief and our scorching despair.)

LETHE AND AL-KAWTHAR:

In lines 86-8 of Suwar wa tahwīmāt amām adwā' al-murūr (Images and reflections infront of the traffic lights), Nāzik refers to Lethe in its adjectival formليثيا  to describe the yellow signal of the traffic light because it signals the end of her waiting: the yellow sign implies forgetfulness of the past because it puts an end to waiting:

يا دهليزا (ليثيا) أخصب في الظلماء وأقمر

يا وله العاشق يحلم في ألظلمه

ويحس الليل المنسدل الأستار سواقي كوثر

( O lethean corridor which has become fertile and moonlit in the darkness! / O amorous rapture of the lover who dreams of darkness, / and feels the falling curtains of night as Kawthar's streams.)

Here, Lathe is parallel to the river al-Kawthar, one of the rivers of Paradise. All the rivers of Paradise flow into حوض الكوثر (the Kawthar basin); it is also called Nahr Muhammad; it is referred to in the Qur’an [Sura cviii]:

(1) إنا أعطيناك الكوثر (2) فصل لربك وأنحر (3) إن شانئك هو الأبتر

([1] We have granted you al-Kawthar. [2] Therefore turn in prayer and sacrifice to your Lord, [3] for he who hates you, he will be cut off [from future hope].)

The connection between Lethe and al-Kawthar is purity. The difference between the two rivers is that the former runs in the underworld, according to Greek mythology; and al-Kawthar runs in Paradise, according to the Muslims. In Greek mythology, Lethe is a river in the underworld. The dead who went to Hades drank its waters, and in doing so they forgot their former 1ives.⁽⁴²⁾ In the Qur’an, the river al-Kawthar belongs to the pure, sincere devotees of God. In The Glorious kuran; Translation and Commentary, ^{(43) C}Abdallah Yūsuf ^CAlī defines al-Kawthar:

" Kauthar: the heavenly Fountain of unbounded grace and knowledge, mercy and goodness, truth and wisdom, spiritual power and insight, which was granted to the holy prophet, the man of God, and in some degree or other, to all men and women who are sincere devotees of God. That Fountain quenches the highest spiritual thirst of man: it confers overflowing benefits of all kinds."

Al-Kawthar, as a fountain, perhaps recalls the 'secret fountain' of the witch in Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas [st. 1]:

       A lady-witch there lived on Atlas’ mountain

       Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.

To Bloom, the fountain and well can mean as many things as does the biblical phrase 'water of life,' employed so repeatedly and so differently.⁽⁴⁴⁾

" Fountains or wells may be used figuratively for the source of anything; more specifically for a source of inspiration within the mind, or .... for the source of life itself."⁽⁴⁵⁾

Grabo, quoted by Bloom , offers another interpretation of the 'secret fountain':

" Of the witch, living in her cave by a 'secret fountain', we can say for the moment no more than that she is associated with some stream of divine energy: whether the creative energy of nature, the divine energy of intellect, or that which is but another name for the energy of the intellect, the fountain of beauty"⁽⁴⁶⁾

Lethe is very often referred to in Romantic poetry. Keats refers to Lethe seven times; four times in a nominal form as in Ode on Melancholy [st.1]:

       No no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

          Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine:

Ode to a Nightinagale [st. 1]:

         My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

         My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

    Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

         Or minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk ….

and Lamia [1. 81]:

       Whereat the star of Lethe not delayed

        His rosy eloquence, and thus inquired ….

Keats also uses the word three times in adjectival form (see Isabella [st.1ii1, 1.436 & st. 1xi, 1.484) and Hush Hush [st. ii, 1.11]).

Shelley refers to Lethe four times; once in nominal form, as just one of the rivers of hell (see Laon and Cythna [Canto x, st. xvii, 1.9]); three times in adjectival form (see Laon and Cythna (Canto v, st. x1ii, 1.1-2), Rosa1ind and Helen [1.409] and Triumph of life [1.463]).

Byron refers to Lethe fifteen times; seven times in nominal form. Examples of this are: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage [Canto 3, 1.450], Don Juan [Canto 4, 1.32 & Canto 10, 1.335). He refers to Lethe eight times in adjectival form, as in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage [Canto 1, 1.813], Don Juan [Canto, 4, 1. 29, Canto 15, 1. 29].

THE COMBINATION OF DIFFERENT RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL CHARACTERS:

Nāzik mingles Christian and Islamic characters, and eastern and western myths, in order to highlight the common characteristics between these cultures and religions.

(A    Indian: Buddha and Brahma

As Nāzik does not believe that there is any incompatibility between Islam and Christianity, so neither does she accept any incompatibility between Buddhism and Hinduism. In Salāt al-ashbāh [st. 1], she places the statue of Buddha in the Brahman temple:

تململت الساعة البارده

على البرج, في الظلمة الخامده

ومدت يدا من نحاس

يدا كالأساطير يحركها بوذا في احتراس

يد الرجل المنتصب

على ساعة البرج, في صمته السرمدي

(The cold clock moved hesitantly / on the tower in the quiet darkness, / and stretched out a hand of copper -- / a hand like myths, a hand which Buddha moved carefully -- / the hand of the man set up on the clock of the tower, in his eternal silence.)

In the second stanza, the sinners sing a hymn to Buddha and a song to the hand of the statue. Here Buddha is treated as a god. whereas it seems the statue is put on a lower level, being manipulated, sometimes at any rate, by Buddha. In fact, the copper hand is now moved by the statue itself calling them to prayer anew.

In the sixth stanza, Buddha prays for the sinners, and watches them silently:

يصلي الذين عيونهم لا تموت

ويرقبهم ذلك العنكبوت

على البرج مستغرقا في سكوت,

(He prays for those whose eyes do not die, / and that spider watches them / on the tower, immersed in silence.)

In the seventh stanza, Buddha is a again treated as a god, this time implicitly, in the symbol of the spider, whereas the hand of the statue has now become a definitely malignant force:

 (ننام, وننسى يد الرجل العنكبوت

( على ساحة (ساعة؟) البرج. تنثر فوق البيوت

(تعاويذ لعنتها الحاقده

( حنانك بوذا, على الأعين الساهدة

( ودعها أخيرا تموت.

 (We sleep and forget the hand of the spider-man,   /   on the courtyard of the tower, scattering / the spells of its spiteful curse on the houses. / oh Buddha! Have mercy on the sleepless eyes, and let them die at last.)

 (B   JEWISH AND ISLAMIC: A BRAHAM, HAGAR AND ISHMAEL:

Nāzik’s combination of Jewish and Islamic characters is not direct. She concentrates on the story of Abraham, Hagar and their son Ishmael, without referring to Sarah, who is very important in this story. She refers to the cruelty of the Jewish soldiers, the descendants of Sarah, towards the Egyptian soldiers, the descendants of Hagar. She associates Hagar and Ishmael with the Egyptian soldiers in Sinai, implying that the enmity of the Jews to the Arabs originated from the time of Abraham. As Hagar was ill-treated by Sarah, so the Egyptians are oppressed by the Israelis, and as God sent water for Ishmael, so he does for the Egyptian soldiers. The devotion of the Egyptian soldiers, who have been fasting during Ramadan and are left in the desert thirsty and hungry, asking God to send them water and food, reminds her of the devotion of Hagar. The soldiers’ voices recall the pitiful voice of Ishmael. In place of the ram, miraculously sent by God to save Ishmael, there is water sent by God to preserve the Egyptian soldiers in the desert. At the time for breaking the fast they found no water. They prayed to God to send them water:

وليس من شاة هنا فما الذي سننحر

وليس من شجيرة تظللنا وتثمر

وليس من سحابة تمنحنا رشاشها وتمطر

ويهتف الصوت الحزين:

أين قد تركنا؟ وفيم إبراهيم؟

ويختف خلف التلال شخص إبراهيم

وهاجر باكية والطفل إسماعيل فوق صدرها

 (Arid there is no lamb here; what shall we kill? / And there is no tree to give us shade or fruit, / there is no cloud to give us its showers and it rains. / Then the sad voice calls: / Where did Abraham leave us? And where is Abraham?” / and Abraham hid behind the hill. / Hagar was crying with the infant Ishmael was at her chest.)

The hostility to established religion, the tendency to assume the hypocrisy of religious leaders, is dominant in Nāzik’s poetry. But in her later poems, she becomes an orthodox Muslim. She supports the Egyptian soldiers in al-Mā' wa 'l-bārūd (Water and powder) (1974). In this poem, she talks about the Egyptian/Israeli war of October, 1973. To her, God is great because 'he does not lie nor does he delay his mercy'; he helped the fasting Egyptian soldiers: 'Jews, at God’s command, throw a heavy bomb, and, trench, split open in the depths of the earth here, and, water, burst forth in streams which water the thirsty people'.

(C   ISLAMIC AND CHRISTIAN -- MUHAMMAD AND MARY MAGDALEN:

In her association of the Christian saint -- Mary Magdalen -- with the Islamic ideal Muhammad, Nāzik refuses to differentiate between the two religions; in her scheme of things they are one and the same. An example of this is her Zanābiq sūfiyyah li-'l-rasūl (Mystical lilies for the Apostle) [st. 4], in which she combines religious figures -- Mary Magdalen and Muhammad -- from two different religions, Christianity and Islam:

يا لاعبا في الضباب, يا عطش المجدلية

(O Player in the fog! O thirst of the Magdalen .)

In "Hawāmish wa ta^Cqībāt" (margins and notes) on Yughayyir alwānah al-bahr,⁽⁴⁷⁾ Nāzik identifies Magdalen as:

هي مريم المجدلية التي ورد ذكرها في الإنجيل, وكانت في أول حياتها امرأة خاطئة وقد تجمع الناس ليرموها بالأحجار, فردعهم المسيح عليه السلام قائلا: من كان منكم بلا خطيئة فليرمها بحجر وقد كانت كلمته هذه عميقة الأثر فسرعان ما انتبه كل من حمل حجرا إلى أن له خطايا وذنوبا تمنعه من رجم المجدلية. وقد أدى هذا الموقف من الرسول النبي عيسى بن مريم إلى أن المجدلية تابت توبة عميقة عن خطاياها وأوزارها وزهدت حتى أصبحت قديسة ومتصوفة. وأرجو أن يكون واضحا إنني في قصيدتي زنابق صوفية للرسول إنما أشير إلى المجدلية القديسة في عطشها إلى الله سبحانه, بعد توبتها, اما المرأة الخاطئة فلا وجود لها بين صور قصيدتي.

 (She is Mariam al-Majdaliyyah (Mary Magdalen) who is referred to in the New Testament. She was a sinful woman earlier in her life. When people gathered to stone her, Christ (peace be upon him) prevented them, saying: "Let whoever of you is without sin cast a stone at her" [cf. st. John, Chapter 8]. What he said had a profound effect on them, and quickly every one who held a stone realized that he too had faults and sins that prevented him from stoning al-Majdaliyyah. This attitude on the part of the apostle and the prophet ^CIsā (Jesus) the son of Mariam (Mary) resulted in al-Majdaliyyah’s sincere repentance for her faults and sins. She became an ascetic and eventually a priestess and a Sufi. I hope it is clear that in my poem Zanābiq sūfiyyah li-’l-rasūl, I refer only to al-Majdaliyyah the priestess, in her thirst for God (to whom be praise), after her repentance. The sinful woman has no existence among the images of my poem.)

Actually, Mary Magdalen, the repentant sinner, acts as a veil through which Nāzik expresses her own recovery of orthodox religious belief.

In Thais, the repentance of the Greek courtesan, Thais, is compared to that of Mary Magdalen:

    "Others meditated in the shade of the tamarisk trees; their white hands hung by their sides, for, being filled with love, they had chosen the part of Magdalen, and performed no work but prayer, contemplation, and ecstasy. They were, therefore, called the Marys, and were clad in white."⁽⁴⁸⁾

D)   EASTERN AND WESTERN:

(1) SHAHRAZAD, DIANA AND NARCISSUS:

Nāzik combines myths from different cultures, such as Shahrazād from the tales of the Arabian nights, and Diana and Narcissus from Greek mythology. An example of this is Yūtūbyā 'l-dā'i^Cah [st. 4]:

هنالك حيث وعت شهرزاد            أقاصيص غنت بها ألـــف ليله

وحيث ديانا تسوق الضياء             ونارسيس يعبد في الشمس ظله

(There where Shahrazād was aware of the tales of the thousand nights, / and where Diana drives the light and Narcissus worships his shadow in the sun.)

In this poem, Narcissus adores his shadow in the sun, rather than his reflection. In I stood Tip Toe upon a Little Hill [1. 163-174], Keats gives more details of the Narcissus myth, which are close to the original:

           What first inspired a bard of old to sing

           Narcissus pining o’er the untainted spring?

           ………………………………………….

            And on the bank a lonely flower he spied,

           A meek and forlorn flower, with naught of pride,

           Drooping its beauty o’er the watery clearness,

           To woo its own sad image into nearness ....

In "Li -'l-qāri' " (for the reader) in her collection Shazāyā wa ramād, Nāzik recalls the story of Narcissus:⁽⁴⁹⁾

زهرة النرجس. في الأساطير اليونانية القديمة إن نارسيس كان شابا فاتنا شديد الغرور بجماله, فعاقبته الآلهة على كبريائه بان جعلته يعشق صورته, بعد أن رآها منعكسة في ماء بحيرة صافية ذات يوم. ثم رقت له فحولته إلى الزهرة التي ما زالت تحمل اسمه.

(The Narcissus flower. In the ancient Greek myths Narcissus was a charming youth, very proud of his beauty. The Goddess punished him for his pride by making him fall in love with his own image, after seeing it reflected in the water of a clear lake one day. Then she had pity on him and turned him into the flower that still bears his name.)

2)    NAHAWAND AND RAPUNZEL:

In Salāt ilā Blāwtus, the Jinniyyah and Nahāwand play the same role -- Midas’s daughter -- although, originally they come from different cultures; they both live with Midas in his castle; and they both constitute allusions to Rapunzel. Nahāwand (originally Nahāwand is a name of a river in Persia) and Rapunzel are the victims of their fathers in this poem. Rapunzel was taken away by a witch, and locked up in a tower in a forest, because her father had stolen thyme from the witch’s garden for his wife. The witch swore to imprison his daughter in a tower when she was in her twelfth year. The sin of Nahāwand’s father, Midas is Greed. Midas wishes every thing he touches to be turned into gold. When he touches his daughter, she becomes a golden statue:

و (نهاوند) إبنتك العذبة الجذلـ                  ــى ستغدو في لحظة تمثالا

(And [Nahāwand], your sweet and happy daughter will become a statue in a moment.)

The allusion to Nahāwand is not indigenous to the myth of Midas, in which he had no daughter at all. Nahāwand is treated as Midas’s daughter for emotive purposes.

The association of Nāzik’s Nahāwand with a sad music is comparable to that of Gibrān in al-Majmū^Cah al-kāmilah li-mu’allafāt Gibrān al-^CArabiyyah (the complete collection of Gibrān’s Arabic works).⁽⁵⁰⁾ Gibrān describes al-Nahāwand as: "the sound that comes from .... the sad soul .... the sighs of the despondent person ..." and Nāzik associates Nahāwand with sad music as in Rihlah ^Calā awtār al-^Cūd (a trip on the strings of the lute)[st. 3]:

أنا والعود لحون ولهى واستغراق صلاه

ينحدر اللحن نهاوندا, وصبا, ويكاه

(My lute and I are confused melodies and immersion in prayer; the melody flows like Nahāwand, and the east wind -- woe to it!)

In her note on this poem in Yughayyir alwānah al-bahr, she defines Nahāwand as:⁽⁵¹⁾

أحد مقامات الموسيقى العربية الرائعة الجمال وانا مغرمة به ولذلك يرد ذكره في شعر هذه المرحلة من حياتي.

(One of the most wonderful and beautiful of Arab musical modes, with which I am infatuated; that is why it is mentioned in the poetry of this stage of my life.)

Nahāwand is a name of a river in Iran. In Wa yabqā lanā 'l-bahr (and the sea remains to us) (1974) [st. 5], she refers to Nahāwand as a river:

ومثل زبرجد نهر النهاوند في قعر حزني

(The river of Nahāwand in the vale of my sadness is like chrysolite.)

In Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st. 25-26], Nāzik arabicizes the European image of Rapunzel; she changes the colour of her hair from blonde to brown to reflect her own image and reveal her own attitude towards love and marriage. The imprisonment of the Jinniyyah, Rapunzel and Nahāwand in the tower recalls the isolation of eastern women from men; she is alone in the tower of sorrow waiting for somebody (her prince) to let her out of the tower of isolation. She asks the Jinniyyah (=Rapunzel) to let down one of her magical tresses so that the lovers of gold will use it as a ladder to climb up the tower to reach her:

ارسلي يا طويلة الشعر يا سمــ                     ــراء إحدى الجدائل المسحوره

وارفعي الهائمين بالذهـــب البر                     اق من هذه الوهــــاد الكسيره

(Let down one of your magical tresses, Oh long-haired one! Oh brown one! / And lift up the lovers of the glittering gold from these fractured low lands.)

She modifies the original story of Rapunzel by making the god of gold live with the Jinniyyah instead of Rapunzel. The latter and the Jinniyyah are the same character in stanzas 23-27; they may suggest Nāzik herself. The lovers of gold may imply Nāzik’s lovers and the admirers of her wealth and poetry: Nāzik, as a rich and famous poetess, has found that the men who propose to her are not real lovers because they love only her wealth and talent. Although she is aware of their intention, she wants to rescue and warn them. In stanza 26, she gives herself two choices by asking Rapunzel to rescue them from the danger of material love by telling them about the fate of those who seek out gold and forget spiritual things. In stanza 27-28, she asks the Jinniyyah to tell the stories of her lovers who died for the sake of gold:

وأعيدي على الجموع أقاصيــ                     ــص عن الهالكين من عشاقك

(And repeat to the multitudes stories of those of your lovers who have perished.)

She asks her to tell once more the story of Midas as an example to prove what she says about the fate of greedy lovers. She joins the myth of Midas with the fairytale of Rapunzel, perhaps to help her argue political Issues; the greedy king, Midas, represents the Iraqi greedy governors in the time of the Monarchy; the victim, Nahāwand, represents the Iraqi people, who were the victims of the governors.

 (E) GREEK AND ROMAN:

Like the English poets Nāzik uses Greek and Roman names interchangeably; in Salāt ilā Blāwtus (a prayer to Plutus) [st. 13], she refers to Vulcan, the Roman god of natural and uncontrolled fire, as a Greek name:

من تراث الإغريق شيدها (فل                كان) في اعصر مطمورة

(From the Greek inheritance, Vulcan built it secretly from of old.)

Shelley, in Prometheus Unbound, has 'Jupiter' rather than 'Zeus', in a Greek context, despite his good knowledge of Greek and Latin.

CONCLUSION:

Studying Nāzik’s mythological, fictional and religious references and allusions, we find that most of the elements of her mythology seem to derive from the poetry of English Romantic poets, mainly Shelley, Keats and Byron, and the novel of Anatole France, Thais. Shelley’s mythological characters, especially the witch, have a very distinctive impact on Nāzik’s mythology and fiction. Most of her characters are combined in and represented by the Jinniyyah. Nāzik’s religious characters derive from her study of the Islamic and other religions, and her fictional characters from children’s literature. Mythical and fictional names occur frequently in her early poems, especially in the three versions of Ma’sāt al-hayāt; they are less frequent in her later poems where she concentrates on religious characters rather than mythical and fictional ones.

The main theme in Nāzik’s mythological and fictional poems is that of looking for happiness. The Jinniyyah stands as a symbol of God, who is responsible for happiness and sorrow, for bad things and good things. Like France’s Thais and Shelley’s witch, Nāzik’s Jinniyyah has relations with many male and female mythological, fictional and religious characters, supernatural creatures and things.

The most frequent mythological name in Nāzik’s poetry is Utopia; it does not occur in Keats’s poetry, but it is parallel to Arcadia. It occurs only once in Shelley’s and Byron’s poetry. The mythological references do not neccessarly occur with similar frequency in the poetry of the four poets (see table 6). Greek mythological names are more frequent in Nāzik’s poetry than Roman ones; the Greek names are: Adonis, Ares, Apollo, Hyacinth, Olympus, Siren and Thais; the Roman are: Aurora, Cupid, Diana, Venus, Vica Pota and Vulcan; the common names in Greek and Roman are: Endymion, Labyrinth, Lethe, Medusa, Midas, Narcissus and Plutus.

She follows the forms of mythological names which occur in English or in French literature; for Instance, she pronounces Diana as دايانا Dāyānā following the English form, and Narcissus as نارسيس  Nārsīs following the French one. Like the English Romantics, such as Shelley, she uses the Greek and Roman names interchangeably , occasionally forgetting the distinction, as in her reference to Vulcan as a Greek name. She uses mythological personages commonly used by the English Romantic poets, such as Adonis, Apollo, Aurora, Cupid, Diana, Endymion, Medusa, Midas, Narcissus, Olympus, Plutus, Venus, and Vulcan (see table 2).

She may allude to mythological figures by name without explanation, as in her reference to Vulcan and Vica in Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st.13&14], She occasionally refers to mythological names with explanations, as in her definition of Aurora in Ughniyat al-'insān [st. 113] and her definition of Plutus in the title of Salāt 'ilā Blāwus; ilāh a1-dhahab (a prayer to Plutus, the god of gold), and of Demeter as the mistress of the countryside as in Nidā' ilā 'l-sa^Cādah [st. 36]. She may refer to myths in the titles of her poem, as in Yūtūbya 'l-dā'i^Cah (the lost Utopia) and Ughniyat Tāyīs. She sometimes devotes a whole poem to a certain myth, such as Ustūrāt nahr al-nisyan, Ustūrāt ^Caynayn and Shajrat al-qamar. She sometimes alludes to them periphrastically, such as her allusion to Endymion as the lover of the moon. She may allude to them metonymically, such as her employment of the poisoned shirt as an allusion to Nessus.

From table (8 & 9), we find that some of Nāzik’s other cultural allusions, such as Adam, Christ and Eve, occur in Keats, Shelley and Byron; Magdalen in Keats and Byron; Abel, Buddha, Moses, Muhammad and the Sphinx in Shelley and Byron; Eldorado in Shelley; Abraham and the Griffin in Byron.

She combines Qur’anic concepts with those of other religions, as in her treatment of the statue which is set up on the tower of Brahman’s temple as a parallel to the Mu’adhdhin, who calls people for prayer in Salāt al-ashbāh, In her later poems, she reverts to being an orthdox muslim, as in al-Mā' wa 'l-bārūd, in which she reveals, her support for islam and her opposition to the Israelis, not to Judaism.

She borrows names from different religions and cultures (see table 7):

1) From Indian tradition, she takes Brahma and Buddha.

2) From the Hebrew Christian and Islamic traditions, she takes Eve, Cain, Abel, Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael, Moses, Jesus, Mary Magdalen, Muhammad, Rābi^Cah al-^CAdawiyyah and al-Kawthar.

3) From fairy tales, she takes two figures only, the sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel. She arabicizes these two European names. She treats Rapunzel as an eastern woman in Salāt ilā Blāwtus, and she conflates the sleeping Beauty with the Houri (= the jinniyyah) in al-Amīrah a1-nā’imah.

4) From classical Arabic poetry, she takes the names of ^CUdhrī, poets and their lovers, such as: Qays and Layla, Jamīl and Buthaynah, Tawbah and Layla al-Akhyaliyyah. From Arabic history, she borrows ^CAd and Thamūd, Hārūn, al-Mu^Ctasam and Salāh al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī (see table).

5) From the Arabian Nights, she borrows Shahrazad.

6) From Egyptian culture, she borrows Semiramis and the Sphinx.

7) From American literature, she borrows Hiawatha.

8) From Spanish culture, she borrows Eldorado..

She often combines eastern and the western myths together, such as:

1) Utopia with Shahrazād in Yūtūbyā 'l-dā'i^Cah [st. 4]

2) Shelley’s witch with the ancient Arab ^CUdhrī poets in Nidā’ ila 'l-sa^Cādah [st. 41].

3) Shahrazād, Diana and Narcissus in. Yūtūbyā al-dā'i^Cah [st.41]

4) Nahāwand and Rapunzel in Salāt ilā Blāwtus [st. 47].