“LOVE, WINE, SODOMY . . . AND THE LASH”
The Lyric Poetry of Abu Nuwas
“When my eyes roamed his cheeks as if grazing
In the Gardens of Eternity, he said to me,
‘Your gaze is fornicating with me!’ I replied:
‘Then my tears will give it the lash above
and beyond the legal prescription.’ ” (D. iv, 196)
“I have exhausted the expression of a lover’s grievance ...
I have turned the horizons of speech inside out ...” (D. iv, 144)
The love poetry (Ar. ghazal) of Abu Nuwas ranged in tone from the sublime to the ridiculous. While he is often remembered for a bawdy register of poetry that could shatter all literary strictures of decorum, his chaste love poems at their finest can be deemed second-to-none in the Arabic tradition. Like much of his verse in other genres, because he composed so prodigiously, a lot is cast from a purely conventional mold. Yet even here a certain poise and mastery is shown, and these poems should in any case be judged according to a combined prosodic and linguistic aesthetic that is almost entirely impervious to (anything but the most ingenious) translation. All these lyric poems – the marvelously original and the quite ordinary – were in fact also songs, as “lyric” of course connotes, and did not require, in each and every case, distinctive explorations of theme or sentiment. However, across well over 500 poems and fragments of erotic verse, there are indeed numerous images of either extraordinary delicacy or striking, at times seemingly irrepressible invention.
Two Traditions of Love Poetry – A Sketch
By the dawning of Abbasid times in the mid eighth century, Arabic love poetry had developed in two, some argue three, principal ways. Disengaged and separated from a complex, multi-themed and ritualized pre-Islamic ode (qasida), it evolved in the seventh century into two “independent” genres: (1) ‘udhri, or chaste and “platonic”, and (2) ibahi, or sensual and erotic, love poetry. They were both, however, quite dependent on a common stock of descriptive imagery and certain standard motifs (for instance, those of the bestiary of love: the gazelle-like aspects of the paramour).
‘Udhri takes its name from the Banu ‘Udhra, an Arab tribe from a valley in the northern Hijaz most associated with this kind of expression. Ibahi in Arabic simply means “permissive”. ‘Udhri poetry proper, which is essentially a phenomenon of the desert, was relatively short-lived – though it had a far-reaching influence through the ages upon Arabic courtly love; the chaste verse of al-‘Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf (d. 808), favorite of Harun al-Rashid, assumed the mantle of the ‘udhris in the Abbasid capital, Baghdad. Ibahi poetry, associated principally with the Meccan dissolute ‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘a (d. 712), is a poetry of seduction. Though certainly more urbane than ‘udhri verse, it is not yet entirely urban. Some of the more memorable narrative-poems are set in the desert, in a Bedouin context.
There had been some precedents for the intensity of ‘udhri poetry in pre-Islamic Arabia. But it was nevertheless essentially distinctive in several respects. The influence of Islam can be felt in the language and imagery of the new genre (assimilating religious practice into a quasi-spiritual enterprise), and even more significantly in its changed perspectives of time and reality. The ‘udhri poet was an introspective individual; he had a subjective view of the world which he observed through the filter of his love and suffering. The outer world, according to the way he viewed its landscape and fauna, was internalized in psychological harmony with him. The poet devoted himself faithfully and exclusively to one beloved, thus his name is seldom mentioned without evocation of his female counterpart: Jamil-Buthayna, Majnun-Layla, Kuthayyir-‘Azza, et al.
When love was blighted by time and separation, the pre-Islamic poet had tended to “cut the ropes of affection” (to cut his losses in an heroic posture); the ‘udhri poet, by contrast, projected his love into the future opened up by the new religion: toward death and, of course, far beyond it.
The ibahi poet too had precedents for some essential features in both early and late pre-Islamic verse. The philandering ‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘a modeled himself partly on Imru’ al-Qays (fl. early sixth century). ‘Umar’s animated poem in which he describes a nocturnal visit to his beloved’s tribe (stealing into her tent, spending the night and oversleeping, and having to escape the encampment at dawn draped in a woman’s robes, trailing them behind him to erase his tracks), expands upon a short passage in Imru’ al-Qays’s Mu‘allaqa (“Suspended Ode”), one of the archetypes of the ancient corpus.
Abu Nuwas was a product (in very schematic terms) of this essential dichotomy of love poetry. Like the verse of the highly influential Bashshar ibn Burd (d. 784) before him, his ghazal was an alloy of the various tones and registers in which he was no doubt apprenticed during his literary schooling. Since he is better known for his licentious verse (which in its most depraved mode is scarcely “love” poetry at all), it is worth surveying briefly, as we do in the next section, the possible idealism of his expression. Quite apart from adept allusions to ‘udhri style and technique, pointed references to ‘udhri poets themselves are numerous: we find across poems ‘Urwa ibn Hizam, lover of ‘Afra’, Jamil ibn Ma‘mar, lover of Buthayna, and Qays ibn Dharih, lover of Lubna listed almost prosaically. The pre-Islamic proto-‘udhri Muraqqish “the Elder”, lover of Asma’, is mentioned in the same spirit. These references pay lip-service to a certain kind of acute sensibility and create a sense of literary heritage and pedigree.
The range of registers in Abu Nuwas is complemented in an important way by the fact that he composed homoerotic as well as heterosexual poems. In the editorially permissive recension of al-Isfahani there are over 450 homoerotic poems (Ar. mudhakkarat), a figure that is something of an exaggeration: al-Suli considers some of them falsely attributed and others to belong in the category of mu’annathat (poems written about women). Often they are in fact poems in which the paramour apostrophized or described might be of either gender. This highlights the ambiguity of gender in much classical Arabic love poetry, a feature with its roots in the earliest extant corpus; Abbasid poets could toy deliberately with this elusive facet of gender.
Even in poems where there is an underlying physical sensuality, the description often forms a tissue of sublime imagery. A “gazelle” might thus be
Created not of clay, like mankind, but rather of musk and other assorted perfumes, brought up in Paradise (Jannat al- Khuld) in the company of black-eyed Houris. (FP, 109)
The beloved is other-worldly and somehow literally angelic, or a statue fashioned to be worshiped in the mihrab (“prayer niche”).
And when not quite angelic the poet’s object of affection may yet be of a preternatural sensibility, physically injured by the merest glance or menacing pointing of a finger
... which almost drew blood from a cheek, exquisitely formed from silver (D. iv, 381)
The beloved has the powers of Solomon to call upon birds that approach him submissively. Powers of enchantment are conveyed otherwise through a paradox peculiar to music: the singer-lover, imbued with a balanced sense of dunya and din (the material and spiritual worlds, respectively), has complementary powers both to move and to still: to sway the body of the rapt listener with song and, by the same token, to instill an inner quiet and calm.
Within this realm of the ethereal is the assimilation of language, and even a certain kind of spiritual experience, from religion – a feature of love poetry with roots in the ‘udhri tradition. The darling described in the following poem is barely of this world; he is a gazelle whose
... Eyes deal out among the people their allotted time
... Even [the mystic prophet] Khidr would answer his prayer
And ransom himself for him;
... His place in the next world
Must resemble his place in this;
If we were ever to deny God
We would worship him instead;
It suffices for me that the darkness of night
Envelops both him and me. (D. iv, 150–51)
Assimilated from religious language in a distinct way is any one of numerous adaptations of the Muslim testimony to God’s unity – variants of an erotic tahlil.4 The following example (the final tercet of a poem) is burlesque and warps the idealistic tone of the preceding lyricism:
... When he appeared I thought him to be like the crescent moon5
And called out, “My Lord (and your Lord), O God!”
He asked, “Do you then see a crescent moon?” I replied,
“If you are not [physically] that, then you are its very sense.”
Beauty had inscribed upon his forehead,
“I testify that there is no comely one other than him” (D. iv, 370)
One must read vigilantly to gauge fully the poet’s tone. Even from a setting that is awkward for the poet, as on one occasion when accused of seducing his sweetheart’s messenger, he manages in fulsome denial to salvage sentiment worthy of true love:
... If I flirted with your messenger, the fingers of the Grim
Reaper will never clinch my soul!
Sweet one! Love for you possesses me; I cannot have
Two hearts – One preoccupied, the other one blithe. (FP, 33)
Yet one can spot a mote in the eye of pure affection. Observe the ending of the next poem (which develops the pre-Islamic motif of the beloved’s apparition before the poet in his sleep – the captivating notion of the “Tayf al-Khayal”):
Our two night-spirits meet up when we sleep
And union is established as before.
Sweet balm of my eyes! Why are we wretched
While our spirits experience rapture?
Kind to me in sleep, if you wished
You could complete the kindness when awake;
We are two lovers who enjoy narcotic bliss
Yet who are always angry come morning!
Dreams are deceptive in this way
... But they do sometimes tell the truth. (D. iv, 347)
There is a discreet change in tone, a twist even, in the final hemistich: a possible turn (away from suffering) is implied that has both earnest and playful potential. In this respect it is typical of Abu Nuwas; he could derail complacency in ways that were either scandalously graphic or almost, as here, imperceptibly slight.
And the expression of profound feeling, although alluring, can be enigmatic; no more so than when Abu Nuwas steals a look into his sweetheart’s face and glimpses his own. Is it the beauty of a burnished complexion that is suggested? Or the threat of violence, a prying glance being caught and returned at the poet’s expense? Or, less menacingly, the promise and dawning of reciprocated affection? Our failure to grasp perfectly, despite being captivated by an image, is fitting. In Abu Nuwas’s poetry inability to understand is only ever imputed to others. However, this is distinct from lacking powers of description which he contrived intermittently to admit to: “I’ll let my imagination describe him since my tongue is flagging.” He adds with a frivolous lack of precision, “Only So-And-So and Joe Average (fulan al-fulani) could fail to love him.” In the most arresting formulation of this kind he wrote: “When it comes to describing him tongues trace their lineage to impotence and failure”. Here the inability to delineate is meant to evoke not human failing but a quasi-numinous ineffability: the poet contemplates a sacred darling produced from ethereal light.
Inching Towards Frivolity and Lust
Abu Nuwas once praised the divine hand that fashioned a youth from silver. The hyperbole is at first strained, for the argentine aspect of beauty is not original in this kind of lyric verse. However, what marks the poet’s creativity is the way the first line engenders the third (of a three-line fragment): the agent shifts from God as divine silver-smith to the leering poet who is now cast in the role of dyer: for it as if his amorous speech tints with color the cheeks of this youth. In the implied chronology of the fragment (from creation to youthful blush), and within the genre of the poetry, this is an exquisite finishing touch.
There is, of course, frivolity in the intensity of the image. Often the threshold which separates (or merges) the two poetic tempers is reified in a kiss: “I do not wish to take you to bed, or any of that, // All I desire is to speak with you, and to sip and kiss.” The most original conceit in this respect is that of a kiss as the outward manifestation of an inner meaning:
I saw the boy in the darkness and embraced him –
O would that this kissing could last!
I kissed him while asleep, if only the true interpretation (ta’wil)
Of this had emerged when I was awake! ... (D. iv, 240)
The loaded Arabic word ta’wil (used for early scriptural interpretation) renders the consummation of physical desire equivalent, effectively, to the inner meaning of Quranic verses. True love, or sex, becomes apparent with exegesis. Typically, the final line (here the last of only four) sheds most of the affected coyness about what the poet is after: “How lucky the one who can land a kiss upon him; – or garner that which his trousers hold.” When refused a kiss by a young man on another occasion, the poet berates him for begrudging him so little yet spraying his honeyed spittle so generously upon the walls (sic); the youth replies that he would grant the poet a kiss if he could be satisfied with just that, but he adds: “We know what you want”.
His ghazal could be chaste, decorous, loving, sincere, and intensely emotional (– and mockingly intense: weeping upon the banks of the river Tigris watching a loved one depart by boat he once claims to have raised the water level!). But to be convinced of this solemnity one has to turn a blind eye to the way he could simultaneously undermine this tone. Abu Nuwas often tried to break down the decorum of others in poems braced by chastity but bursting with physical desire. The extreme end of the scale was that of unmitigated obscenity (and profanity). In this respect Abu Nuwas was part of a school of poets with origins in some pre-Islamic verse and elaborated into a veritable sub-genre among poets of Kufa in the mid-ninth century. This is the third genre of love poetry. We already know that Abu Nuwas was apprentice in Kufa to Waliba ibn al-Hubab, one of the arch figures of this group. Risqué elements of poetry are often wrapped within a larger narrative that cushions the shock effect, or even accentuates it as some structural punch-line but shows it in this way at least to be part of a considered craft. Extravagant sexual obscenity for its own sake tends to be a feature of biting satire (where it is indeed common), but there are some examples that are also quite gratuitous in the poetry of mujun, for example the occasion, “celebrated” in verse, when the poet met up with four prostitutes who each in turn sung the qualities of her own pudenda: “My vagina is like a split pomegranate and smells of ground amber. How lucky the one who gets me when I’ve shaved!”
His relationship with ‘Inan, the renowned “singing-girl” (qayna) and one of the women he was infatuated with in Baghdad, was often both acerbic and crude without any hint of complex; he once appealed to her:
Have you yet to find pity for a man yearning,
Who would be satisfied with just “a small drop” from you?
She replied:
Is it you that you mean by this?!
Be off with you! Go and masturbate!
At which he quipped:
If I do this I fear
You’ll be jealous of my hand! (FP, 29)
The Psychology of Master and Servant
“I fast at your anger and
Breakfast at your pleasure” (D. iv, 152)
The poet-lover as servant or slave is the predominant image conveying the power relations in this poetry (Abu Nuwas could go as far as saying: “I am to him always like soles are to the shoe!”). Accumulatively this general idea provides the background for, and helps to set up, a game of seduction whereby the tables are sometimes turned. Abu Nuwas’s poetry is replete with kaleidoscopic contrasts. It gives a sense of apparently endless variety with limited elements: moods and themes coil around each other in diverse, sometimes antithetical configurations, managed with either abrupt or discreet transitions. Such toying can engender a taut psychological dynamic or cohesion, as illustrated in the relationship between the two halves of a six line poem about attitudes to people and the psychology between two men: (Note. The abrupt change of grammatical person, “him” ➔ “you”, is known in Arabic as iltifat and is a feature of the syntactical independence of the single verse.)
I wanted to rebuke him for his meanness
But then, seeing him and seeing the people [around us],
I no longer consider it fitting;
There is not even a valid point of comparison!
When I compare you with people
I see they are nothing but pigmies and apes.
* * *
So be proud, my prince, full of arrogance and conceit,
Scowl and wear a frown upon your face;
Pay no attention to people and spare them no thought,
Do not even raise your head to them
And treat me exclusively any way you will;
Give me your spurning drink, shun me with every breath!
(D. iv, 242)
The poet constructs a special place for himself with his darling, importuning him for a monopoly on his scorn. Only in this sardonic way does he feel a cut above the rest while yet a plaything to his princely sweetheart. Acoustically this is a poem that jeers with snarling sibilants at society at large (al-naSa, Sa’ighan, qiStu miqyaSa, qiStu-ka wa-l-naSa, naSnaSa, wa-Stakbiran, ‘abbaSa, al-naSa, raSa, khuSS-ani, bi-ma Shi’tahu wa-Saqqini hajraka anfaSa). Such sustained use of onomatopoeia, in which sound and semantics coalesce, is a characteristic effect of the poet.
One of the most original and eccentric of Abu Nuwas’s poems elaborates the theme of poet maltreated by his darling in a brutal narrative. It is preserved variously in the chapters of homoerotic and heterosexual ghazal by al-Isfahani and al-Suli, respectively; al-Isfahani’s hunch has the edge:
My lover ignored me until, after I had
Crossed the flatlands between some mountains
And had started into an empty desert
Wasteland that was bathed in mirages,
He covered my eyes with a blindfold,
Bound my legs with a tethering rope
And said, “Do not quit this spot –
I will protect you against any gossip.”
I replied, “If this happened in my home town,
Dwelling of maternal uncles and paternal,
They would be witnessing my own demise
– I had never anticipated such a death!” (D. iv, 299)
This cruel (and erotic?) act of desertion is obscure, though it conveys unmistakably the austerity of an imbalanced relationship between two lovers. It is clear that one player, the poet, is prey to the control and domination of the other – the beloved (or “hibb” here in Arabic). There are some barely tangible literary resonances that are formalistic and thematic, and also part of the social history of classical Arabic poetry. The desert is bleak and menacing; it is barely described yet the atmosphere of desolation is palpable and betrays a negative investment in this kind of landscape that is something of a piece with Abu Nuwas’s often derisory view of Bedouin wastelands. The urban environment is no paradise either, though: here it is the site of lethal gossip – indeed this may be the poem’s principal object of attack. However, even this judgment does not inhibit a sense of the narrative intimating at a death-in-love. In this regard it becomes a somewhat febrile and delirious love poem. It further contains an image perhaps deliberately evocative of a ritual aspect of pre-Islamic Bedouin burial practice, to wit, the tethering of a camel to its dead owner’s grave. If this effect is intentional, this is burlesque parody – and, given the discrepancies in tone between early heroic poetry and this erotic travesty of it, it emerges as a very wry way of saying how much poetry has (or should have) developed and moved on since its pre-Islamic origins. These details are all inconclusive and are, in one respect, simply intended to retard an anachronistic view of the scene depicted as an act akin to some modern sexual practices (though, admittedly, the notion is hard to suppress altogether: it would be rash to state categorically that Abu Nuwas is not setting himself up here as some kind of “sex slave” in a play of “bondage”).
In the sphere of emotions which could trap the poet, fear and submission go hand-in-hand. Fear of the sweetheart’s scorn, certainly; but also real terror, for that is what is evoked in the cultivated reference of the following line: “He said to me, his hand in mine after harsh recriminations // ‘Do you love me?’ I replied to him, ‘Is fear not better than love?’” This requires a gloss. When the brutal and sanguinary Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (b. 661), asked a man who had kept his company for a while, “Do you love me?” he replied, “Is fear not better than me loving you?” As al-Isfahani explains dryly in his commentary to the Diwan, “You obey the one you fear more than you do the one you love.”
Young men assembled,
Sterling coins at the count
To whom chance time delivered me
“Sunday is close,” they said; so I ambled to the promised location
And was the first to arrive
Dressed like a preacher, in full-covering robes
Kept fast by a plaited cord.
When they had purchased what they wanted,
Eager to slake their desire,
I approached and offered: “I’ll carry this stuff;
I have the necessary saddle bags:
My ropes are sturdy, and I am brisk and dependable.”
“Take it,” they said, “You seem to be what you claim (fa-anta anta),
And we’ll reward you according to your efforts.”
So I advanced in their company
And was told to climb with them [to the spot we were making for];
There vessels were unveiled for them (like wives exposed for the first time)
While a bird warbled in a melancholy strain.
I skipped up to the glasses, and polished them,
Leaving them like dazzling snow;
My dexterity impressed the beardless young men
(Though with my skill I intended no good for them);
I served them without respite wine mixed with water
– It was as warming and bright as kindled fire –
Until I noticed their heads incline,
Bent and crooked with drunkenness
And their tongues tied and heavy,
They now either slept or reclined;
I got up trembling to have sex with them
(All those who creep stealthily tremble [at the thought]!);
Their trouser-bands stymied my pleasure [at first]
But then, with subtle art, I untied them
To reveal each man’s quivering backside
Oscillating supply like a green bough.
O for this night which I spent enraptured
In continual enjoyment and excess,
Making from this to that man,
Screwing whomever I could find in the house
Until the first one awoke and got up
Feeling bruised at the thighs;
Then I rose with fear to wake up the others,
Saying: “Do you feel the same thing as me?
Is this sweat we’ve all been stained with?”
They said: “It looks more like butter.”
And when I saw them now alert
I went off to relieve myself;
And when the majlis came to life anew
I joined them, as the cups passed briskly around,
Draped in the finest colored robes,
All spanking new;
I was asked: “Who are you?” And replied: “Your servant;
From whom you need fear no rude behavior.”
Then I sang a love song, captured by the mood:
“O would that Salma discharged her vows.” (FP, 60–62)
The song evoked in the final hemistich is apparently incongruous and hard to gauge in translation, misplaced here beyond the normal cultural orbit of this kind of archaic and traditional verse. The point of its inscription is that, despite its brevity, it strikes a clamorous chord of lamenting and elegiac love poetry. It represents a genre and tenor of poetry which is anathema to the one spun out in Abu Nuwas’s sexual drama of disguise and recognition. The effect is a bit like inserting a line from Wagnerian opera into a Vaudevillian song: Abu Nuwas holds horseplay up for comparison with the earnest, and even tragic, love of archaic legend (and which, in early Abbasid times, was still the predominant contemporary taste). The extent of the poetic discrepancy, and the chasm that separates what “the servant” claims about himself and the abuse he has visited upon his “masters”, shines a glaring light upon the obtuseness of men who have failed to grasp what has been done to them. It is just one instance of where the tables of “slave and master” are turned.
The psychology of master and servant is quite different in a poem we might entitle The Rescue of Hafs’s Pupil, a narrative that transforms stock themes and motifs into a unique drama of cameos. Hafs ran a school for boys in Kufa.
I caught sight of a figure
Who irradiated disdain.
He was sitting on a prayer rug
Surrounded by slaves;
He threw a glance at me,
Hunting with his eyes.
That was in Hafs’s schoolroom
– How lucky is Hafs!
“Take him away”, Hafs said,
“I find him too silly;
He has not stopped skiving
Since he began to study.”
Silk robes were stripped from him
And a striped garment,
Then they “terrorized” him with molly-coddling
Castigation, without even a stick;
Then my sweetheart cried out:
“Sir! I’ll not do it again!”
I said, “Forgive him, Hafs;
He will be good
At reciting poetry, and study,
And what-have-you.” (D. iv, 194)
Castigation is a double-edged theme and part of the erotic tension of the piece in which, with perfectly pitched understatement, chastisement-and-leniency or servitude-and-domination, swap roles with each other.
“Reveal your feelings to him,
Tenderly ...
Then let Satan break him” (FP, 68)
Abu Nuwas often reworked the kind of contrary sentiments implicit in this callous goading, contradicting himself within the imaginary span of a single day (or night) and cultivating this for literary effect in short dramatic narratives. The role of the Devil (Ar. Iblis) as pimp, expressed tersely above, is treated more expansively in other poems. In the following we find clear reference to the original moment of Iblis’s perversion, as treated in the Qur’an – his refusal to prostrate himself before Adam.
Incensed and enraged,
You have watched malevolently upon mankind;
You waxed proud when prostrating yourself anciently
And split from the flower of those who bowed with you
When you said, “I cannot abide to bow down, Lord,
To a type you have created from clay!”
You were jealous, for you were formed from smokeless fire
[And were] master of the created realms;
So you gave yourself over exclusively to pimping
And strive to string fornicators and sodomites along. (FP, 55)
Satan Agonistes. Two of the most developed “satanic”6 poems sustain animated scenes of considerable length. They are highly charged dramatic and antagonistic dialogues pitting dissoluteness against self-denial. One affects pious contrition, the other brandishes religiosity as a threat. But in the end both are of a piece with the poet’s own brand of poetic mischief. Al-Suli rejects the authenticity of the first; the authorship of the latter is in even greater doubt. However, they both undoubtedly smack of the poet’s genius and are irrevocably part of his tradition: posterity has fairly perceived their creative affinity with “Abu Nuwas” (as a cultural persona).
When my sweetheart began to spurn me
And his letters and news stopped coming,
I called upon Iblis and said to him
Privately, shedding tears by the bucket:
“Do you not see I am ruined?
– How weeping and sleeplessness have emaciated my frame?
And how my ardor has intensified? Acute worry,
Anxiety and passion have almost killed me ...
All for obeisance to you: I have fulfilled your wishes without compromise
And scorned those things you despise;
But if you do not now graft love upon
My darling’s heart – as you are so capable –
I will never more recite poetry or hearken to song,
Nor will inebriation be the sap of my limbs;
Rather, I will recite the Qur’an incessantly,
Rising early to study it well into the night;
I will account for myself each year [before God], striving toward [His Meccan] Sanctuary
And set aside savings of virtuous deeds!”
* * * * *
Not three hours passed from that time
Before my darling came to me contritely
Seeking my affection and company
(So preferable to his previous scorn!)
What happiness after sorrow!
– At which my heart almost ruptured;
What grace and bounty! – enormous to me
Though to Satan it was a mere trifle. (D. iv, 216–7)
The Faustian theme is inverted: the poet imposes himself compellingly (and sarcastically) upon the Devil, with no hint of Mephistophelian mediation. Little real virtue is displayed here, of course; rather we encounter the momentum so typical of the poet’s lyric narratives: the contrived movement from abstinence, if only as a looming hazard (fancifully and obliquely contrived), to consummated physical desire. There is tension followed by a release of that tension in a vigorous ending. This dynamic frequently has the feel of a stalling, perceptibly drawn out, from which the poem recovers in an accelerated and brisk finale.
The movement from resistance to surrender, from fettered desire to gratification, is at first glance utterly absent from the second of the two poems (see below). In the majority of cases in his lyric poetry, when Abu Nuwas affected to don a mantle of piety he was posturing transparently; this poem pretends to be a rare exception. We gaze upon the poet’s sincerity as through a glass darkly, straining to see what is obscured by the tantalizing ambiguity of a dream:
I slept until dawn, and all the while Iblis
Antagonized me, tempting me to sin.
I saw him climb high into the stratosphere,
Then fall chased by a star;
He tried to “listen by stealth” [to the Divine Assembly],
But he was soon cast down by a pelting of stones.
He then said to me as he fell, “Welcome to a man
Beguiled by his penitence!
What do you say to a well-rounded virgin,
Adorned with heavy breasts,
Whose thick, black hair flows sumptuously upon her shoulders,
Like a cluster of grapes?”
No! I answered. “What then of a beardless youth
With quivering, full buttocks,
One like a virgin behind a silk screen,
But with a chest unadorned by jewels?”
No! “Then a boy who sings
And plays music delightfully?”
No! “So you deem yourself resolute
In all such things I have spoken of?
Yet I have not lost hope of your return,
Despite yourself, you fool!
I am not Abu Murra if you do not rescind;
You would be naïve to think so. (D. v, 184)
Abu Murra (“The Bitter One”) was the byname of Iblis, as in English one says Old Nick. There are several Qur’anic allusions in these “satanic verses”. Reference to rebellious demons being chased from the heavens by shooting stars, as described in Islamic scripture, is easy to detect. But there is also, and more essentially, allusion to the dialogue between God and Iblis in Surat al-Hijr (Q. 15: 32–42) in which the fallen angel asks for respite until Judgment Day to lead man astray: “I shall deck all fair to them in the earth, and I shall pervert them all together.” Here one such diabolic temptation is enacted, with the lurking menace of its success in the poem’s aftermath (and upon the poet’s awakening).
Fear of Women and Other Anxieties
The figurative imagery of the sea was often employed by Abu Nuwas to express, and to exaggerate for effect, a fear of feminine sexuality. The sexual anatomy of women posed a physical threat as menacing as the turbulent deep and his preference for men was, or came with time to be, articulated as a form of salvation. But his humor may have been decidedly wry, as it was his own failures, in one or two instances, that seem to have fomented this kind of misogynist invective.
He once flirted, probably before 803, with a Barmecide servant-woman from the palace; she was a ghulamiyya whom the poet addressed in verses that were like “knots of magic” (an image alluding to Sura 113 of the Qur’an). After wine, at the taking of which the young maiden balked, desire turned sour (in the last four lines of the poem): “When we got together I found myself in the middle of a large sea ... I cried out to a young man, ‘Save me!’ And he came to my aid, my foot having slipped into deep waters. ... If he had not thrown me a rope, I would have fallen to the bottom of this sea. After this I swore never again in my life to ride the sea like some marauder; I would travel only upon the backsides [of men].” A comparable horror influenced the poet’s attitude to those around him: “I will not go into my neighbor’s wife, but rather my neighbor’s son.” He chastised one lady in particular with a tirade of bigoted obloquy: “I will have nothing of menstrual ‘flowers’ nor sell a gazelle for a hare ... I will not insert my hand into the cranny for fear of scorpion or snake.”
While at times he pretended to psychological revulsion, at others Abu Nuwas was scarcely more than clowning around; he may well simply have been laughing at himself all along on account of heterosexual misadventures. He was at his most facetiously self-deprecating after suffering from impotence, which may have resulted on one occasion from the horror of a sexual proposition:
She looked at me from behind her mask,
And watched me in an unsavory way;
I drew off her veil and lo, an old woman
Who had dyed her parting black!
She flirted with me for a long while
Addressing me with words of passion;
She tried to make “Abu Nizar”, my member, stand up
But this will not happen before the crow turns grey.
* * *
How can the old woman’s desire to be screwed be fulfilled
When my penis will not even stand for nubile [maidens]?
It is now crooked and curled upon its two ends
... Like a handwritten “dal” (FP, 105)
The image of the crow is one of several common expressions for saying “never” in Arabic. The letter dal is the Arabic equivalent of Latin “d” and morphologically it has the shape of a small inverted “c”, though slightly more angular. The image the poet is painting here is simply that of something that is not straight or erect: the old woman’s brazen flirtation disgusts the poet, so he claims. But the poet may be posturing, hiding (ironically, because he broaches the matter at all) the more uncomfortable fact of his impotence. We can conjecture the latter on the evidence of another, much longer poem. The opening line is offbeat and memorable, borrowing and warping erotic poetry’s own special kind of antagonism:
My penis has started to shun me;
The story behind this is that
I was in a garden of the Caliph’s “Palace of Eternity” ... (FP, 80–81)
At the very outset an ephemeral wilting member and “eternity” are placed dispassionately side by side – as a kind of ironic signature. The poem proceeds as a long narrative. After sustained description of the floral garden an account is given of a botched seduction. The wine-servant (saqi), a customary object of desire, was handsome “in the Barmecide fashion”. The effect was radical: “When I saw [this boy],” the Hakamite tells us, “I said to my penis, whose eyes were shedding tears of sadness: ‘If you fail me here I will spend a torrid night!’” To pursue his objective the poet employs a common tactic, waiting for his prey “to be assailed by the messenger of sleep”: “I waited patiently and when he had reclined on his side I stole up to him like a scorpion scuttling at angles, creeping along my stomach. I then penetrated his trousers (sirwal) right up to the flesh. But I was so excited that I misplaced my spear and he felt the jab in his back. He got up, perplexed at my act of cowardice. He was now on top of me and I called out from under him, cursing profanely. My forehead was pouring drops of sweat like dew, and when I managed to escape his clutches, he threw an apple at my face. It hit me right in the tooth. And so it was that I left empty-handed and deprived, and my penis stood laughing, saying (when the fault was all his) ‘So it is when one acts according to conjecture!’”
That the poem is bawdy is as clear as its lewd and comic canvass. It is also tinged lightly with religious profanity in the physical and verbal scuffle of the denouement; the apple striking the poet’s tooth in the third line from the end evokes the Prophet Muhammad breaking a tooth at the Battle of Uhud. Is this encounter then a burlesque rewriting of Holy War? If the effect is intended, it is done in radical counterpoint since “conjecture” (zann) in the Qur’an, and other Islamic literature, is the baleful and dangerous antithesis of yaqin, “certain knowledge” of (and blind faith in) religious truth.
Impotence may not actually be physiological here, but there is the ridicule of sexual failure. Real impotence appears to be what the poet once wished upon himself in a three line fragment that is as striking as it is baffling (at first):
I am struggling against my eyes,
My heart and my penis;
Would that for these eyes I had others
And another heart in place of my own,
And instead of my penis that of an old man
Who can remember the days of ‘Ad. (FP, 59)
‘Ad were a pre-Islamic Arabian tribe mentioned in the Qur’an as an example of a people destroyed by God for crying lies to their prophet. Theirs is legendary and ancient history. The Methuselean “sheikh” imagined by Abu Nuwas would presumably, given his age, be sexually abstinent. This then is the dignified and physiologically imposed self-control which in a moment of apparent remorse the poet desired for himself; in fleeting regret he would be impotent for dignity.
“Sweet basil is bound to be plucked.” (FP, 67)
Abu Nuwas liked to posture as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Once, having donned the attire of a pious man, he announced his abandonment of degenerate behavior and headed for the company of a faqih (religious scholar). But it was not any legal opinion that attracted him in the scholar’s work, rather the fact that he was a “lord of beardless youths”. Fathers entrusted the education of their sons to this respectable tutor in order to evade, as irony would have it, the influence of reprobate men. Abu Nuwas remarked dryly, it was as if they were fleeing from the heat of battle into the very clutches of death: “I was like a spouse to [these boys] when they were learning their lessons!” He asked sardonically in another poem: “When did you ever see a wolf entrusted to tend the sheep?!”
The most extraordinary example of sexual marauding is described in the following narrative:
Among carousers [strewn around by the effects of drink] I spotted one awakening;
He stole up to the saqi while the household slept
[And] pierced him with something like a viper – silent predator of a snake,
inflicting wounds beyond remedial incantation;
He prized open the boy’s ass with the edge of his “sword”,
Then pierced him to the hilt with the head of his “lance”.
As he leaned upon his victim, inclined to one side and bent over,
He kept silence while he screwed, eyes cast down –
I said to him: “No holding back, now!
Show pity and compassion only where fitting!
Squeeze his balls gently. He is quiet because he likes it
... And has been longing to be screwed!
If he were not awake his penis wouldn’t be standing, and he wouldn’t
– while you fucked him – hold his legs together so tight.” (FP, 71)
Nothing crowds the poet’s view, least of all his lewd imagination; he plays here the part of a voyeur upon a scene in which he more normally pretends to an active role. Is this poem an example of galling and unsightly self-justification, given the poet’s own antics elsewhere, or is this just candor and realism? Besides the literary point of such variations upon a theme, we can wonder naïvely here (and indeed in general) why pleasure and enjoyment – if that is what they are – are couched in such violent imagery. Is this really simply part of the psychology of love and sex – of love, that is, when it is unmasked as lust. And whose enjoyment is it really that is given expression to here? The poet’s prancing imagination in fact seems to taste its own vicarious pleasure, while offering a prurient thrill to a still larger audience of decadent reprobates (mujjan). The subject of this poem is not in fact unique; it is the amplification of a reasonably common theme: the lapses of self-possession and hints of dissolution after a boy’s (or a woman’s) refusal and restraint, recorded in poems of callous seduction: “I said: ‘Come, let us blend the good with the unseemly!’ He refused, then played for time ... then let me have the reins.”
I wrote to my darling with lacrimose [ink] upon my cheek:
“O the heat of separation!”
He gestured with his fingers, “We understand [the message]
But there is no way for us to meet.” ... (D. iv, 265)
This writing metaphor is of a piece with the closing, and somewhat prosaic, apostrophe: “Oh Jeem and ‘Ayn before Fa’ and Ra’ which complete the name” – Ja‘far. Broadly, this kind of reference to script and orthography is common in Abbasid poetry. (In pre-Islamic poetry there had been references to epigraphic marks along desert itineraries and to the mutable traces of campsites likened to effaced writings in the sand – in contrast with their immutable underlying message.)
The poetry of Abu Nuwas suggests that he sent and received numerous letters. Some would seem to have been genuine love letters, taking the form of poems written for the occasion. Others were simply brief messages or missives. They exhibit varied extremes of sentiment. On the one hand, he could write soliciting a letter in unctuous mood, asking Janan to erase each word of her own writing with her saliva so that when he read it and licked it with his tongue he would be receiving a remote and vicarious kiss. On the other hand, he could seduce her messenger.
There are other aspects to “letters” in his verse, which appear largely to have been occasioned by flirting with the young men of the secretariat. A quite common motif in the poetry of mujun is the figurative description of penetration. Sex (with a young soldier, in this case) is depicted thus
The letter “lam” is inscribed in his “meem”,
Healing him from the effects of death (FP, 132)
“Lam” is the Arabic letter “l” and has a similar form to the Latin “l”, with a cursive lower stroke that arcs downwards and to the left; it is the most erect of the Arabic letters and the connotations are obvious. “Meem” is the letter “m” and takes the form of a circle (in certain hands this tends to be small enough to merge as a black dot); the letter has a dipping tail only when it stands alone or at the end of a word. In this line, and others like it, it is clearly the form of a medial “meem” that is intended. The idea of a “lam” inserted within a “meem” is scarcely impenetrable when we consider two men – or a man and a woman – having sex, and needs no gloss. In other poems the letter ha’ (“h”) may be a variant for meem. And in one particularly prurient poem the meem of a young secretary “throttles the lam which it encompasses”; Abu Nuwas may often have been gratuitously anatomical but there is also much realism in his descriptions and so, with the scant evidence he offers, one cannot help but suspect that the boy in question was younger than he should have been. The value judgment, partially anachronistic, is implicit in the physicality of the image. It may appear gallingly cynical that the poet should portray himself as the victim of an act of violence, but he would have been the first to be conscious of the cynicism. This is humor laced with dark poetic mischief, and there are some inevitable table-turns of roles: further along in the poem Abu Nuwas has a membrum that could “hamstring a she-camel”. This is to say, he was hardly ever convincing as the victim of sexual violence.
Variant reference to letters lies in the following, the rude climax of a poem. The scene evoked, half veiled in metaphor, still leaves little to the imagination:
... When the tawny wine had taken hold of his mind
On this dark and tenebrous night
He bowed his head ...
And I spent the night wakeful;
If you saw this, my friend – a meal
To top all others –
And how my “pen” was cleaving a “kaf”
Into his pale “parchment”,
You would be watching a man
Gobbling meat hunted within sacred precincts.
When the boy awoke and saw what looked like
Marrow on the tips of the fingers
He said: “You did it! ...” (FP, 80)
Since hunted within a “haram”, this “meat” is illicit. The letter kaf is tall, sloping and sharply angled in two principal strokes (when medial); it is one of the more visually prominent and majestic in the Arabic alphabet. The word akkal, translated here as “gobbling”, lays acoustic stress on this letter which is doubled here. The ironic effect of the word thus lying adjacent to the metaphor of the previous line would not have been lost on the poet (even if, conceivably, it were not originally calculated).
In the following two lines about a boy from the secretariat there are other connotations in mention of other letters. Their significance is less obvious: “He spread the parchment upon his lap, beginning with ya’ and sin (“y” and “s”); // at [the sight of his] handwriting one’s breath felt as if constricted between a waw and nun (“w” and “n”).” This requires some exegesis. Ya and sin are the eponymous Qur’anic “mystical” letters of “Surat Ya Sin” (Sura 36). They are the opening letters of this chapter of the Qur’an; the boy is thus clearly practicing Qur’anic calligraphy and causing those who look upon him in thrall to be short of breath, as if confined in the narrow space between the unjoined letters waw and nun. These letters occur both in verse 6, ghafilun,7 and the final verse, 83, of this sura: ... wa-ilayhi turja‘un. The latter phrase refers to death and God, “to Whom you return” (FP, 119); the allusion may thus serve to evoke the poet giving up the ghost as a result of gazing upon the skill of this boy – skill inscribed as a metaphor for his physical splendor.
“Is it not considered grave among all who pronounce God’s unity
That a Christian faun should torture a Muslim?
If it were not for the threat of Hellfire
I would worship ‘Isa ibn Maryam instead of God.”
(D. iv, 320–21)
In Arabic the words for “cross” and “dear” or “beloved” are morphologically identical and share a rhyming consonant: salib and habib – a neat mnemonic aid to one of the most salient aspects of Abu Nuwas’s erotic poems: the desire he celebrated for young Christian acolytes who served in the monastic wine taverns of Iraq. Inevitably, he made use of this rhyming couplet on one occasion in lines of playful doggerel:
By Jesus, the Holy Ghost,
And by your veneration of the Cross (salibi)
Halt when you come near us
And say Hello, my dear! (habibi) (FP, 129)
There is much more than this in the Diwan. Across numerous lyric poems, which in most cases blend the bacchic and erotic registers together seamlessly, Abu Nuwas demonstrates quite detailed knowledge of Christian scripture, practice and belief, as well as some aspects of its pastoral hierarchy. Subjects range from reference to the two Evangelists, John and Luke; the Psalms and Palm Sunday; the Nativity; and the icons and iconography of Mary and the Resurrection. He even expressed admiration for Christian architecture – the marble blocks and pillars of a Christian monastery or church. A trip to Masarjasaya, a monastery outside Baghdad, was once dearer to him than pilgrimage to Mecca.
Inevitably the imagery can be at variance. Sometimes the object of his fascination “babbles in a foreign tongue”. Yet other times he is supremely eloquent; in a poem whose cohesive structural syntax is that of comparison (“The kiss of the wine when the jars prostrate themselves around it in prayer, in a house of pleasure ... [lines 1–2 ➔ line 11] is more lovely to me than spring encampments and barren wastes”), a “gazelle among the Christians ... spills words when he speaks that are like pearls breaking from their string”.
His most famous Christian poem is set in the close vicinity of a monastery where he observed worshipers on their way to Mass. It is short (7 or 8 lines in different recensions) yet one of the gems of the Diwan: a vivid tableau that finds its focus in an image of the Eucharist, simultaneously representing both the sublimation and disclosure of true desire. Though the context is Christian, it is cross-laced with discreet Qur’anic references. The underlying agenda is profane – superficially it depicts nothing less than a Muslim’s apostasy – yet it is far from obscene:
My body is racked with sickness, worn out by exhaustion:
My heart smarts with pain searing like a blazing fire!
For I have fallen in love with a darling whom I cannot mention without
The waters of my eyes bursting forth in streams.
The full moon is his face and the sun his brow. To the gazelle
Belong his eyes and his breast.
Wearing the belt of the non-Muslim (zunnar), he walks to his church;
His god is the Son, so he said, and the Cross.
O I wish I were the priest or the metropolitan of his Church! No, I wish
That I were the Gospel and the Scriptures for him!
No, I wish that I were the Eucharist which he is given or the chalice from
Which he drinks the wine!, No, I wish I were the very bubbles of wine!
So that I might obtain the benefit of being close to him and my sickness,
Grief and cares be dispelled!
(FP, 130–31; trans. Montgomery, 1996)
The poet would fall in with the religion of the boy and become its dearest symbols. Yet this is devotional idealism only thinly camouflaging consuming physical desire; for all that the imagery is compellingly sacred it expresses no more, in the end, than delirious hope for an intoxicating kiss. It is, as Montgomery (1996) has written in his fine commentary on this poem, “an allusion to one of the highpoints of the Arab erotic experience, the imbibing of the beloved’s saliva which is as potent and sweet as wine.”
* * * * *
It is a noticeable paradox of literary history that a rich and abundant corpus of poetry celebrating wine developed in early Islamic society despite the Qur’an’s ban of its consumption. In later periods, by the eleventh century, it became possible to excuse wine in verse as a purely symbolic figure of mystical expression; and there has been a tendency in modern times to project this kind of symbolism back onto the earliest canon of Bacchic poetry. But this is – on the whole – an anachronism. If Abu Nuwas was a mystic he kept the matter remarkably well hidden from his contemporaries and immediate entourage.
Wine in classical Arabic poetry was a legacy of the pre-Islamic canon. The poets of the Jahiliyya (“The Age of Ignorance”) celebrated wine as a minor theme in their complex, multi-part odes (qasidas). Wine was a theme subordinated to a number of poetic registers, but principally: self-vaunting poetry (Ar. fakhr) and erotic poetry (Ar. nasib and ghazal). It was also in reality a rare commodity. Though there was some local Arabian production of wine in the Hijaz, notably at al-Ta’if, it was on the whole imported from Syria and Mesopotamia, and was therefore considered luxurious. There are scenes described of poets making for a wine merchant’s ramshackle stall and spending irresponsibly both their earned and inherited wealth. This was an act both of heroic recklessness, analogous with physical audacity on the battlefield; and it was a gesture of consummate generosity at one’s own expense. The early poets also compared, in detailed pictorial vignettes, the saliva of their loved ones to wine and honey (which were often in practice mixed together). These vignettes could be longer than the erotic passages in which they were set, displacing the image of the beloved. Wine in this sense could console frustrated love. But it tended to be as true of wine as it is of love that its enjoyment in pre-Islamic poetry was set in the poet’s past as a nostalgic memory.
In the Islamic period wine survived as a theme within the compound ode (qasida). However, it also, from the very beginning of the seventh century, became disengaged from other themes and developed into a separate genre – the genre which Abu Nuwas perfected, imparting to the wine song (khamriyya) a broad repertory and a literary quality and sophistication on a par with any of the other genres. Disengaging the theme of wine from the qasida was in some sense liberating. It gave wine the room to expand its own repertory of descriptive and narrative themes. But it also removed some of the formality imposed by the more formal compound genre (which came to be associated with the protocol-conscious panegyric – see Chapter 3). Wine became a medium of liberated expression, giving voice to verses of religious profanity, hedonism and licentiousness. These became especially apparent in the early eighth century (e.g., among the so-called dissolutes, or mujjan, of Kufa) but there are some notable earlier examples. Abu Mihjan al-Thaqafi (d. c. 637) was the first poet to challenge Islam in a rakehell posture (of which he later repented, also in verse).
Of course, wine also survived as a theme because it was consumed. It was tolerated by the ruling elite largely for the elite in restricted milieux where it neither challenged nor imperiled the religious and political order. The profane poetry of the sort we have read above, and will read below, may have stretched this tolerance to the limit; but that this tolerance never snapped irreparably in early Islamic society suggests the poetry was then less accessible to the public at large than it is in most regions today. Wine was associated in its production and sale with Christian monks, Jewish merchants and Zoroastrians. The wine poetry of the Abbasid period is a corpus full of both fantasy and realism; the latter gives us much valuable information on the viticulture of the day: the locales of production and consumption; the appliances used for drinking; the types of wine (principally from date or grape juice); the habits of drinking (e.g., wine was nearly always mixed with water and often drunk in the early morning); the variety of people involved, i.e., clients, merchants, servants and entertainers. These have all been discussed in detail in Jameleddine Bencheikh’s Poésies Bachiques d’Abu Nuwas: Thèmes et Personnages. Some literary aspects of these poems will be concentrated on below. Any reader of the wine songs of Abu Nuwas should have a sense of their mock-heroism; their sometimes rash antinomianism; and the way they assimilate the language of religious experience in a game of parody blended in with some genuine anxiety. The selections and commentary below are influenced by these three aspects (discussed in a famous study by Andras Hamori) and the related facets of his wine poems outlined in Chapter 1: (i) the varied coupling of erotic and Bacchic themes; (ii) two complementary views of time; (iii) the rhetoric of antagonism and contention; and (iv) the ambiguity of apology, contrition and repentance.
In a famous line of poetry from the early Umayyad period Humayd ibn Thawr asked (referring to the spectral owl-like bird that was believed to appear on the grave, especially of those murdered and unavenged):
Will the ghostly screech of Umm Awfa call to me
Once I am but bones and a tomb?
Similarly, in imagining of a time after death, the more cheery ‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘a wrote:
I wish that I, when my death draws nigh,
Might smell what lies between your eyes and mouth,
That the water with which I am purified
Might be compounded of your marrow and your blood
And that Sulayma might lie beside me in death,
Whether in verdant heaven or in hell
Abu Mihjan al-Thaqafi wrote a line of equivalent sentiment, not about his sweetheart but about wine:
If I should die, bury me by a vine
Whose roots after death may slake my bones’ thirst
It is evident from these examples that wine and love were susceptible of similar treatment, influenced by developments in society made possible by Islam: a vivid sense of life after death. The feckless Umayyad poet-cum-caliph Walid ibn Yazid (d. 744), whose moral delinquency is said to have hastened the collapse of his dynasty in the mid-eighth century, shows another facet of erotic bacchism; in a famous fragment he reworked the Qur’anic image of poets drifting deliriously (scilicet, from passion) in “every Wadi” (Q. 26: 226):
How I wish today that
My share of life’s provisions
Was a wine on which to squander
My earnings and inheritance;
That, infatuated with it, my heart might drift
In every dry river valley.
These lines are mock-Qur’anic but also mock ‘udhri. Taking into account all the above excerpts we see that both licentious love and its chaste counterpart came to be felt in the eroticism of wine poetry. The following lines by Abu al-Hindi, an early contemporary of Abu Nuwas, are modeled on the amorous exploits of Imru’ al-Qays; we are at first taken in by the metaphor of embrace until it transpires that the poet has been fantasizing about sipping wine:
I remember smelling a diffusion of musk from a cheek
Whose fragrance wafted towards us;
So I made my way to see her, when her relatives were asleep
In the early morning and the curtains had not yet been thrown aside to
Reveal her ...
I kissed her on the bed; she had the fragrance
Of a perfumist’s stone-pounder.
A man who drinks her gives his money away generously
When the Saqi passes her round in the middle of the night ...
Below Abu Nuwas apes the excessive devotion of the ‘udhris without even a hint that this is parody, unless parody lies in the very excess:
Do not reproach me over wine, my friend,
Do not scorn me with a frown for drinking;
Merciful God has decreed a love for her of me
And of those with whom I pass the time;
My heart has fallen for her, and this passion has made me think little
Of spending upon her all the valuables I own;
I have become insane for [this] delicate virgin
Who is excessively violent in the glass and headstrong.
You would consider her cup in the mixing to be decked out
In the headdress of a bride;
She rends the veil of one’s heart, provoking
Innermost secrets to be divulged. (D. iii, 188–9)
Failed Cross-Wooing and an Orgy
The affective intensity of the last piece is rare. The great majority of Abu Nuwas’s wine poems are driven by a quest for pleasure, the sense of which could be accentuated by playing his hedonist’s compulsion against the melancholy of ancient poetry. The erotic prelude of the pre-Islamic (and later Islamic) qasida was mournful and nostalgic (see Chapter 3). Abu Nuwas may well have liked the original poetry but he is famous for mocking the inane aping of its desert imagery and, in his lyric verse, for writings that diverged, often provocatively, from its sorrowful tone.
Below is a poem which is in fact fonder of the ancient poem it alludes to than it is derisive, for its author was one of the two or three most significant forefathers of the wine song as an independent genre:
Quick to your morning drink and delight yourself, my man!
Defy those who boorishly fault your love.
Throw off all shame and amuse [those] that are sad;
Follow them around wherever they go.
May the light-hearted libertine experience joy
And an easy life and obtain the good things!
May it rain upon a gathering of youths with whom I carouse,
Among whom there is no idiocy!
This one is for that one just as this one and this other are for that:
A gathering all in order, its rope of union utterly intact.
How noble they are, and how noble a singer is Nu‘m,
For Nu‘m’s singing is proverbial,
A slender girl who sings to us accompanied by a moving lute:
“Say farewell to Hurayra for the riders are about to depart!” (D. iii, 256)
It is typical of Abu Nuwas to create a narrative cameo of the drinking scene in which a songstress is depicted reciting a poem to music; many khamriyyat end this way, quoting a recognizable line of lyric poetry from the pre-Islamic, Umayyad or even Abbasid canon. Here he quotes the first hemistich of Qays ibn Maymun “al-A‘sha’s” “Suspended Ode” (Mu‘allaqa). Al-A‘sha (a sobriquet meaning the Night-blind) was a late pre-Islamic wandering poet famous for his long and sophisticated panegyrics. It is said that he almost converted to Islam in 629 but fell just short of the act, dissuaded at the last minute upon finding out, already on route to visit Muhammad, about the Islamic proscription of wine. He died soon after the aborted trip, a fact regretted in medieval commentaries, galled at the fact that salvation had slipped through his fingers.
Let us now first of all show the “intertextual” connection between the poems of al-A‘sha and Abu Nuwas clearly and schematically, before commenting on related themes. Al-A‘sha’s Mu‘allaqa begins:
Hemistich 1: Say farewell to Hurayra for the riders are about to depart;
Hemistich 2: But can you suffer to say farewell, my man?
Abu Nuwas’s poem begins and ends:
Hemistich 1: Quick to your morning drink and delight yourself, my man!
Final hemistich: “Say farewell to Hurayra for the riders are about to depart”
The first line of the older poem provides the beginning and end of the later one. But is this nothing other than a well crafted tribute to an admired literary predecessor? There is something more to the relationship between the two poems represented physically, as it were, in the inversion between the two elements they share: al-A‘sha’s
hemistich “a” ➔ hemistich “b”
gives Abu Nuwas’s
(evocation of) hemistich “b” ➔ final hemistich “a”
The inversion is a deliberate symptom of the contrastive thematic relationship between the two poems; that is, the energy and exuberance of Abu Nuwas’s poem may form a deliberate counterpoint to the solemnity which infiltrates the revelry of al-A‘sha’s long nasib. Al-A‘sha restrains his exuberance and that of his companions – an irresponsible quest for pleasure – in order to augur for rain:
Can you see the cloud which I have been watching?
The lightning is like firebrands around its edges ...
Pleasure did not distract me from it as I watched it,
Nor the delights of the cup or other heavy matters.
I said to my drinking companions at Durna after they had become drunk,
“Augur for rain!” Yet how can a drunkard do so?!
Abu Nuwas understood these lines, but his cameo narrative has not yet reached that point in time when responsibility will make a man sober; his central line is thus:
May it rain upon a gathering of youths with whom I carouse! ...
There is not yet a hint of temperance here; indeed, the sentiment precedes the most succinctly decadent (if not entirely graphic) image in the poem:
This one is for that one just as this one and this other are for that:
A gathering all in order, its rope of union utterly intact.
With the vague demonstratives “this” and “that” Abu Nuwas is not so much being mealy-mouthed as acknowledging the inspiration of his tutor, Waliba ibn Hubab of Kufa, who had written in a cheerful poem “This one kisses this other one, and this one here kisses that other!”; it is something of a motif in Arabic literature, as indeed – in world literature – is its very contrary; to wit, the poignantly humorous scene of frustrated “cross-wooing” depicted by al-A‘sha in his melancholy nasib:
I was infatuated with her, and she with another man;
That man with another woman – not her!
A young girl was in love with him but he had no desire of her,
While she had a cousin who was dying for love of her, in a wretched state;
Another young girl fell in love with me, but she did not suit me.
Thus did love come together, all of it insane!
Ben Jonson, for one, transposed this elegantly in Every Man Out of His Humour: “... the argument of his comedy might have been of some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke’s son, and the son to love the lady’s waiting maid; some such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near and familiarly allied to the times.”
The religious penitent, characterized standardly as a scrimping miser because of his abstemiousness, feels death to be near and the Hour of Judgment looming after it. His piety is a fear based on an eschatological – Islamic – view of time. The hedonist questions time borrowing the imagery of the ancient poets who felt its passing represented in the abandoned traces of former camping grounds. Often, the Bedouin poet would ask the effaced marks of an encampment where its inhabitants or his loved one have gone (Ubi sunt ...?). No answer ever comes from mute rocks, which is as good as an answer for Abu Nuwas: it is useless to question time – far more useful to drink in spite of it. These comments explain the next poem and, to some extent, the one after.
Stop at the abode of the departed,
And cry if you are melancholy;
Ask the abode,
“When did your residents leave?”
We have asked
But it refuses to reply.
– O Daughter of the Sheikh, give us drink this morning!
Why do you linger so?
A lissome sap runs through you,
Now make wine flow through us.
We only ever drink,
Be certain of this,
That which is anathema
To the draught of the pious.
Turn the wine away from a miser
Who has found religion in frugality;
Time begins to drag on for him
So he fears the Hour approaching. (D. iii, 316–17)
In the next poem two kinds of desolation are seemingly incongruously juxtaposed: the painful remembrance of love in a desert wasteland and the forswearing of wine. It is the quality of the poetry throughout (the deft handling of ancient motifs, in part one, and the exquisite description of wine, in part two) that persuades a man forsworn from drinking to abandon his resolve. In this sense the poem is rhetorical.
Whose are the remnants at this place where the riders alight,
Buried away, traces effaced, all but enduring hearthstones
Of dark and somber hue?
It is as if melancholy doves have gathered at this dwelling,
Strangers of an evening, without a nest to go to;
– The abode of a woman [I once knew] whose saliva
Was sweet and whose touch was soft.
Yet she was unjust! Emaciation is visible on my face
While [in my mind] her face is preserved from decay.
* * *
Through many [such] a desert in which the wind,
Blowing through the contours of the land,
Produces a variety of obscure and clear language,
I have urged my pedigree mount on
Until her eyes were sunken and her belly emaciated.
* * * * *
And I said to one who has forsworn wine, “Have a morning cup;
One should not make religious oaths [to abstain] from such things!”
A fresh wine unvisited by the death-dealing Fates,
For she has passed years in her jar, and years upon that;
The heirloom and legacy to a people from a people destroyed,
Inherited by children from those who had been children before them;
Those who have survived obtained a final spark of life from it.
A wine both frisky and quiet [when mixed with water],
As if lines of Himyarite or Persian appear on its surface,
Which, with time, become almost intelligible,
Amid freshly picked narcissi which
To our eyes are themselves eyes, though they differ in their shape:
Yellow in place of black, with white lids.
* * *
When [the man forsworn] heard my description
He gave up his [abstemious] stance, calling me back;
At which I said, “Here’s a friend who was stubborn at first
But then gave in!”
For he believed my opinion about wine, may God condone his
Whenever he opines well. Opinions are indeed various! (D. iii, 305–8)
There is one noticeable connection in the imagery across the two distinct parts of the poem: the wind in the desert produces a sound like an unintelligible language while the bubbles on the surface of the wine seem, with time, almost as decipherable as writing. Wine is more meaningful. (The description of such bubbles gave rise to pictures of astonishing inventiveness, none more so than when the poet imagines he sees an ancient griffon pulling on its reins. In reality the bubbles may suggest something far more prosaic: that the wine had not properly fermented.)
We discern the same function of rhetorical description in Abu Nuwas’s most famous (and often bowdlerized) khamriyya where the sublime picture of a luminous wine undercuts a philosopher’s condemnation of its consumption.
Do not scold me for it tempts me all the more,
Cure me rather with the cause of my ill –
A pale [wine] whose house is not visited by sorrows
Which imparts joy even to the rock that touches it;
Received from the palm of one with a cunt,
Dressed as one with a penis,
Whose lovers are two: fornicator and sodomite.
She brought the wine jug on a dark night
While her face emitted a bright light,
Casting pure wine from the lip of the jug –
A sedative for the eye to behold;
More gentle than water, which ill suits her delicate [essence] –
Water is too coarse to blend with her;
But if you were to mix light into [the wine],
It would blend well and generate a multitude of lights;
She was passed around among men by whom Fate was humbled,
Men afflicted by Time only as they pleased.
For her do I cry, not the spot at which
Asma’ and Hind once alighted;
No tent is set up for Durra,
No camels or sheep are to roam around her!
* * *
Tell him who would claim philosophy as part of his knowledge:
“You have learned some things, but much more escapes you;
Do not deprive [me] of God’s forgiveness, if you yourself
Would abstain from sin;
To deprive me of this would be a blasphemy.” (D. iii, 2–7)
Asma’ and Hind are proverbial names of loved ones in the antique nasib; Durra, by contrast, was the servant-girl of Abu Nuwas. Wine is a sensuously feminine entity (“whose house is not visited by sorrow”, unlike the proverbial Asma’ or Hind), and “she” is described in such a way as to blend in with the cross-dressed ghulamiyya: light irradiates blindingly from both.
The poem is famous in medieval texts for the first line and the last two which are directed against the Mu‘tazilite theologian Ibrahim al-Nazzam. Among the tenets of Mu‘tazilism is that there can be no divine forgiveness for grave sins (Kaba’ir), only for relative misdemeanors (Sagha’ir).
The luminosity of wine occupies less space but is more significant in the following ...
Dialogue with a Jewish Taverner
Remember true friends whose mounts I led
To a taverner’s house, arriving at midday;
His “zunnar” girdle told us he was not a Muslim,
So we thought well of him though he thought ill of us;
We asked, “Are you of the religion of Christ, the son of Mary?”
At which he turned away from us and uttered some foul words;
[No he was] a Jew who appears to love you
Yet secretly harbors betrayal;
We asked, “What is your name?” He replied, “Samuel;
However, I am known by the “Kunya” Abu ‘Amr (“Father of ‘Amr”)
Though I have no son of that name!
An Arab “Kunya” has done me no honor,
Nor filled me with pride, or given me high rank,
But the name is light and has few letters,
And is not burdensome like others.”
So we said to him, admiring the grace of his speech:
“You speak eloquently, so do as well with the wine that you serve us!”
He turned away, as if to shun us,
Now looking at our legs now at our faces,
And said, “By God! Had you alighted upon someone other than me,
We would have rebuked you; I will excuse you [now] and be Generous!”
Then he brought out an oily, golden wine
To which we could not help but prostrate ourselves;
We had set out [on our foray] with the intention of spending three days,
But we had such a good time that we stayed a whole month!
A band of good-for-nothings, the likes of which you will never see,
Though I was one of them, neither innocent nor empty of blame;
When the time for prayer drew near, you would see them
Ask for more wine so that it might pass them over in a drunken state! (D. iii, 130–32)
The zunnar was a girdle or sash worn by Christians and Jews to distinguish them from Muslims according to a dress code established in the seventh century in the so-called “Pact of ‘Umar”. The kunya is the Arabic “cognomen”: that is, a construct name beginning with “Abu” and followed by a forename: thus Abu ‘Ali, Abu Ahmad, etc. It means “father of ...” and is either adopted by a man after the birth of a first son (the feminine equivalent is Umm ‘Ali, Umm Ahmad, etc.), or used as a nom de guerre, or a nickname, as in the case of Abu Nuwas, usually highlighting a person’s characteristic feature, physical or abstract. Strictly, dhimmis (non-Muslims) were not allowed to adopt Arab Kunyas in the ninth century. Here the situation is peculiar and not entirely clear: the Jewish taverner appears to have had the name Abu ‘Amr foisted upon him, perhaps by his easy-going Arab clientele (no doubt insouciant of name restrictions when indulging in forbidden wine). He is in any case ambivalent about the Kunya: for it has done him no real honor, nor changed his situation much, but at least it is not cumbersome. He is proud, no doubt, and the clients admire the way he expresses himself. What we can say for sure is that the discussion of “Abu ‘Amr” is an intertextual flourish of the kind Abu Nuwas relished: it alludes fondly to a line from the ‘udhri poet Majnun Layla: (trans. Rina Drory) “My heart refuses to love anybody but an ‘Amiriyya (a woman of the ‘Amiri tribe); her nickname is [Umm] ‘Amr, though she has [no son by the name of] ‘Amr”. This is the only intimation of an erotic register in the poem.
Vivid and animated dialogue takes the place of elaborate description in this wine song; the result is a narrative cameo of great realism, producing a subtle portraiture of human sentiments: at first some resentment and then admiration and mutual respect. Here the absent Christians come off as heretics, but the Jewish vintner, at first tarred by a bigoted slur, wins over his Arab visitors with his crustiness and silver tongue ( – and then the quality of his wine).
There is one striking descriptive element of the wine that is highly significant, chiming in with both the “antinomian turn” of this poem and its “assimilation of religious language and experience” (the worshiping of wine and flouting of prayer). The epithet “oily” to describe wine is unusual; it might seem clumsy and infelicitous as an epithet for choice wine were it not for the fact that it must surely allude to the Qur’anic “light verse”: (Q. 24: 35)
God is the light of the heavens and the earth. His light is like a niche in which there is a lamp; the lamp in a glass, and the glass like a brilliant star, lit from a blessed tree, an olive-tree neither from the East nor from the West, whose oil almost glows, even though no fire has touched it. Light upon light. God guides to His light those whom he wishes ...
Lexically, the phrase “an oily, golden wine to which we could not help but prostrate ourselves” contains a direct albeit cursory allusion to the Qur’anic verse, which was such a favorite of the mystics of Islam (a whole commentary is devoted to the verse by the great Sunni and mystical theologian al-Ghazali [d. 1111]).
There is a gnostic feel to any such image, a feature that can be felt more palpably in the entirety of the following poem. It contains the most numinous and idealized description of wine in the Diwan. This makes it extraordinary that Abu Nuwas is said to have composed it in Egypt while in a sordid state: he collapsed in a drunken stupor, urinated upon himself, and would have lost the precious poem to oblivion had it not been written out for him on the walls by the son of his host:
O my brother of the clan of Hakam,
You slept last night while I lay sleepless,
So pass me the virginal [wine] which has cloaked itself
In the head scarf of grey locks while still in the womb;
Youth answered to her call
After she had passed quite beyond old age,
For she is a wine [preserved] for the day when she is pierced,
Though an edge ahead of Time in years;
She is so antique that were she to acquire
An eloquent mouth and tongue,
She would sit like an elder among the people, upright,
And regale them with tales of ancient nations.
– A hand created for the pen or the sword
“Struck” her [with water] in the mixing
Among elite and noble companions
Who take their pleasures when they are within reach;
She then crawled through their limbs,
Just as a medicine crawls through a sick man,
And had the effect upon the house when she was mixed
That the morning has upon the night;
And the night traveler was guided by her
Just as travelers are guided by markers and cairns. (D. iii, 269–71)
The poem hints strongly at (some of) the reasons for which wine poetry became a favorite register among later Sufi (mystical) poets.
Hakam is the tribe to which Abu Nuwas claimed to belong through his dead father’s clientage rather than by blood. There is a faint evocation of a tribal context in the first line; essentially it is a brief “emotional prelude”, since the motif of sleeplessness is particularly associated in the poetic tradition with the pains of love. This is a nasib reduced to a minimum and wine thus emerges as a balm to suffering. Wine displaces love; indeed, woven into the numinous ideal of an antique draught, there is an obviously erotic resonance to the piercing of the “virginal” wine. The imagery is highly paradoxical: wine is both hoary and ancient and a virginal maiden to whom youthful vigor returns once “she” is unsealed; in Arabic the feminine gender of the “daughter of the vine” is played up semantically. There is more to the image of the grey head scarf: in addition to the mature age of the wine, it is intended to conjure the physical picture of a wine vat covered over time with grey or white cobwebs. There is a tangible reality in this idealism.
The nobility of the boon companions, whose presence is almost entirely diminished by the wine which “regales” them, is succinctly expressed in the phrase “a hand created for the pen or the sword”. The entourage of imbibers – their host certainly – is both learned and heroic. This is not quite the dry mock-heroism we find in so many other khamriyyat, but it is part of the same general tendency of transforming the old martial spirit of traditional, ancient poetry into values of comportment more appropriate to a “saturnalian” milieu.
“Th’hydroptic drunkard, and night-scouting thief,
The itchy lecher, and self-tickling proud
Have the remembrance of past joys, for relief
Of coming ills ...”
(John Donne, Divine Meditations)
There is a common and understandable view in Arabic literary history that Abu Nuwas repented of drinking wine, and of dissoluteness in general (mujun), before the end of his life. The idea is supported by several ascetic poems which seem to tell us as much. But the poems cannot be located in the chronology of the author’s life; and as with most of his poetry one can only have a vague sense of when they were written. The ascetic poem may at times be an exercise in pious expression, perhaps commissioned by a patron. And devoutness may be a fleeting sentiment; it may have been sincere at any point in time but that was no guarantee of permanence. It is a standard motif in Arabic poetry that tawba (repentance) is a precarious thing. We have seen this in the dialogue with the Devil, which dramatized the (attempted) erosion of resolve in the most vivid way. The poet appeared to keep that resolve in tact, but the Devil’s oath in the final line is a menacing threat and the poem ends in a tense ellipse ...
There are many declarations in Abu Nuwas’s khamriyyat that move fervidly and consciously in a direction contrary to remorse: from piety into sin and decadence. The poet’s posture is that he was pious as a youth and discovered self-indulgence subsequently:
I bought depravity at a high price and sold
Piety in return for a nice crop of pleasures. (D. iii, 98)
Two things governed the giving up of wine.
1. If we take religious piety temporarily out of the equation we are left with the calm propriety of old age and grey hair. In early Arabic poetry the lyric celebration of sundry indulgences is often set, according to a standard posture, firmly in the past. However vivid the scene depicted may be, in the putative present from which the poet looks back on his life the mantle of respectability has already been donned. Wine is a thing of the past. This is not religious repentance as such (it existed before Islam); it is the obligation of decency and forbearance (hilm) – the latter being perhaps the cardinal virtue inherited by Islamic society from the Jahiliyya. This ethos was understood and inherited by the later Islamic poets. Lyric celebration still often remained a nostalgic evocation of events set in the past.
2. In addition the later poets, from the early seventh century onward, also acquired the religious virtues of Islam. Repentance loomed large among them and so became a motif that capped the past posturing of hedonistic gratification. But not always; as al-Mutanabbi once said, “Is it wine that you repent of or its abandonment?”
The wine poetry of Abu Nuwas, and those of his ilk, is distinct from earlier poets in two ways. The first has been put eloquently by Hamori (1973: 71):
[The early ‘Abbasid Khamriya] is contrary to the archaic nasib in that the pre-Islamic poets used to recall a full past in a vague present, while the khamriya poet sees the party in the tavern as the very moment for which the wine has been stored since time immemorial: for him now is when the various predestined parts of the experience find one another.
We have already encountered this: “... a wine [preserved] for the day when she is pierced”. There is no aftermath to this moment; the poem ends in a sort of mystical intoxication. The wine poem telescopes time into the short period of a Bacchic fling. But there are significant instances when the moment of indulgence is survived. In the seduction poems we have read Abu Nuwas often has to face up to the brief recriminations of his waking victims – though he need not experience any self doubt; if he does, he mutters it under his breath. The following poem, however, is the most striking example of the poet stretching his celebration of indulgence to a point in time where he is forced to face up to remorse. This is a poem in which we sense that repentance was palatable because so eloquently contrived; it emerges exquisitely from both the structure and themes of this exceptional poem. It is a long and animated descriptive masterpiece, richly textured with Qur’anic (and Biblical) allusion and structured according to a sublime paradox whereby repentance emerges not simply as the natural end-point of a life of heedless comfort but also from the very elevated imagery with which wine is celebrated.
Five lines into the poem Abu Nuwas has arrived at a tavern on a tempestuous night:
... We roused the owners of the wine-shop
In a night-cohort, turbulent and swollen,
Like the sea which dazes the sailor with fear.
Suddenly at that moment there appeared a heathen crone,
Like a solemn anchoress,
Tracing her lineage back through infidel stock,
Monastic idol-worshippers,
Inquiring, “Who are you?” We replied, “People you know,
Every one open-handed, noted for his prodigality,
Who, along the way, have stopped at your house: so seize
The liberality of the generous and name your price,
For you have won a life of ease, provided you seize from us
What David seized from Goliath.
Be lively in making a profit from them, doing – at the same time –
A noble deed until they have left your house.
Then you can sleep like the dead!”
She said, “I have what you want. Wait until morning.”
We replied, “No, bring it now!”
It is itself the morning; its clear radiance dispels
The night when it shoots out sparks like rubies
As the patrolling angels do, when, at night, they stone
With the stars the rebellious demon Afrits.
It advanced in the cup as bright as the sun at day-break,
Poured from an amphora upturned, bleeding at the waist.
We said to her, “How long has it been in the amphora,
Since it was hidden away?” She replied, “It was made in the time of Saul.
It was concealed in the amphora and has grown to be
An old spinster buried inside a coffin in the earth.
It has been brought to you from the depths of its resting place,
So be careful not to take it in the cup with food.”
The odor that wafts from it to the drinkers was like
The scent of crushed musk from a newly slit vesicle;
When mixed with clear rain-water
It was like a network of pearls on a ruby brocade
Carried round by [a youth] like the moon with large black eyes
From which the magic of Harut could have sprung.
With a lutenist in our midst who moves as he sings
“Abode of Hind in Dhat al-Jiz’, Hail!”
...
Until when the sphere of the strings, together with the drums,
Spins us round, we are left as if in a trance.
We glorify in it in gardens thick with
Myrtle, acacia, pomegranate and mulberry,
Where the birds distract you from every other pleasure
When they warble in antiphonal strains.
Blessing be upon that time which slipped away too quickly –
A lovely time which was not hateful to me then.
Frivolity could not divert me from plunging into the midst of [wine’s] fray
And I did not fail to respond to its rallying cries
Until, lo! Grey hair surprised me by its appearance –
How hateful is the appearance of cursed grey hair
In the eyes of beautiful women; when they see its appearance,
They announce severance and separation from love.
Now I regret the mistakes I have made
And the misuse of the times prescribed for prayer.
I pray to you, God, praised be Your name!, forgive me
Just as You, Almighty One, forgave Him of the Fish (Jonah)! (D. iii, 61–4)
In the final four lines we see the poet shaken from a narcotic trance by rejection. Exploring the contradiction that is built into this poem the present author has remarked elsewhere: “The final allusion to biblical Jonah, whom we realize at the end is evoked by the “tempestuous night”, is enhanced by a handful of similar references interspersed throughout the poem: at line 7 the “heathen crone” is told to despoil the poet and his companions (i.e., to accept their money) “as David despoiled Goliath”; at line 10 sparks of wine are the stars hurled at rebellious demons by patrolling angels; at line 13 the amphora in which the wine is kept is said to date from the time of Saul, the King of Israel appointed by Samuel; in the following line the wine’s storage in a coffin (tabut) makes allusion to the Ark of the Covenant (also tabut); in line 18 the Saqi is so bewitching as to be said to be the source of Harut’s magic (“Harut” is an angel imprisoned in Babel with “Marut”, where they teach sorcery). This chain of references is sealed with that of Jonah. Since rhyme is part of the signature of any poem, the significance of these references is accentuated by the fact that they provide the rhyme word of six lines (note: the sounds “-ut” and “-it” are considered to rhyme in Arabic): Jalut (Goliath), Murrad al-‘Afarit (Rebellious demon Afrits), Talut (Saul), Harut, and sahib al-Hut (“He of the Fish” = Jonah). Each reference, less the final one, is part of an allegorical sequence that enhances the status of the wine. Yet the aura of hallowed bacchism thus affected is destroyed when a contradictory moral is conjured through the allusion to Jonah, who – we should remind ourselves – having obdurately resisted his divine calling was forced to recognize the will of God. In this manner the poem’s essential antithesis is contrived through a redemption story that lies latent in the imagery – to the same degree as the events – of the narrative.” (Kennedy, 1997, 235–6)
Abu Nuwas probably never gave up the desire to drink wine before his final sickness. But this poem allows us to think that he might have. We, in any case, will have cause to discuss the theme of wine a little further in reading some poems of praise. No genre of classical Arabic poetry is hermetically sealed off from the themes of all or any others.