“POETRY FOR MORTALS AND THE DEAD”
On the Ascetic Poem and the Elegy
Scholars imbued with medieval Arab notions of poetic taxonomy might balk at placing the ascetic poem (zuhdiyya) and the elegy (marthiya) side by side, for medieval commentators considered the elegy to be a form of panegyric (madih): it was praise of the dead, with the accent being on “praise” rather than “the dead”. But the fact is: the elegy and ascetic poem have death in common, and the subject is not easily ignored. There are twenty-four ascetic poems in the critical edition of the Diwan. At least five other poems can be added to his extant output if one includes poems of less reliable attribution. One of the very finest of all these, and one, ironically, whose authorship is uncertain, is a funeral song for the poet’s own self. Abu Nuwas, or his silver-penned ghost-writer, imagines himself vividly after his own death; the tone is very much elegiac, with more than a hint of self-pity.
Bear patiently up to the vagaries of Fate
Perchance you will be grateful for the outcome ...
Prepare your self/soul before its decease,
Begin saving for the Day when
Our “savings” are tallied against us
* * *
It will seem as if your family calls out to you
(But you will not hear, exhaling your death rattle);
As if they have anointed you
With perfumes which the dead take for store;
And as if they have turned you over upon your bed
Then over into the darkness of the grave.
* * *
O would that I knew how you will fare
Unwitting upon your bed;
Or that I knew how you will fare
When [your body] is bathed in camphor and lotus blossom;
Or that I knew how you will fare
When account is made on the Morning of Assembly
* * *
What will be my defense about the things I have done?
What will I say to my Lord? What excuse will mine be –
For not having sought out a path of righteousness,
Or embracing the [good] I turned my back on?
O for the misery of my returns –
And the pity of what was missed of my life!
(D. ed. Ghazali, 609–10)
There is a simple structural enchantment about these verses. It has a preamble, followed by two paired segments of three lines each, and a conclusion – a perfect symmetrical arrangement. The central diptych of three-line sections features anaphora, that is, each verse begins with an identical formula. This rhetorical kind of repetition is a characteristic of ascetic poetry and can generate the effect of litany.
Imagining his own death had been a heroic posture of the early Arab poet, before Islam. For the pre-Islamic poet, furthermore, the situation was similar when, in some of the most moving short scenes of the early canon, he identified with the hungry desert wolf, alone, emaciated, and on the point of death on bitter cold nights. But imagining death and then conjuring up a time far beyond that point is Islamic. The two kinds of poetry have a radically different feel.
“Savings” (scilicet, stored up for recompense in the Afterlife) are a standard metaphor for pious acts. The Judgment is in this sense the archetype of a rainy day. “Savings” (Ar. dhakhr) are interchangeable or synonymous with “provisions” (Ar. zad). Death, the grave, Judgment, pious “savings”: these, among other elements, are all basic constituents of the zuhdiyya (– which is not, it should be stressed, religious in the sense of theological; there is as much theology in the decadent wine poem, if not more.) The poem, however, is exceptionally eloquent, grouping a few standard ideas around two emotively charged scenes (death and Judgment), sketched vividly yet with linguistic and descriptive economy.
The zuhdiyya is a minor genre, though it basks vicariously in the prestige of religion. With roots in a certain kind of universal wisdom to be found already in pre-Islamic poetry, notably the verse of the Christian poet ‘Adi ibn Zayd (d. c. 600), and with precursors among a small handful of early Islamic poets, it was developed into a fully fledged independent genre by Abu al-‘Atahiya (d. 826), who was by turns a literary companion and antagonist of Abu Nuwas. With its uncomplicated pietistic message centered on the ephemeral nature of material existence, it is the hardest genre in which to be original. It is perhaps no accident that it is associated principally with just one poet. The extraordinary fact about Abu al-‘Atahiya is that he was able, with easy fluency, to compose over 5,000 verses from a relatively restricted repertory of ideas. While he was unquestionably a gifted poet (and uniquely prodigious in a single genre), he also sensed that his preferred register was not beyond the talents and inspiration of Abu Nuwas. Below are selected some of the more inventive ideas from the latter’s few ascetic poems.
...The young man refuses all but to follow capricious passion
Though the path of Truth is clear to him.
Raise up your eyes towards women
Whose dowries will be your righteous acts;
Only a man whose balance weighs heavily
Will lead the houri out from her veiled enclosure. (D. ii, 158)
The metaphor of the scales of judgment is Qur’anic. In the short apocalyptic Sura 101, for example, the scales that measure deeds on Judgment Day are weighted heavily with the virtuous acts of people and lightly with the bad.
The poem produces an apposite image to reform the philandering male, conjuring marriage in the afterlife to the houris of Paradise in return for the dowry of an upright earthly life, principally a life of chastity. Abu Nuwas was speaking the language of a debauched man, whether as himself or someone else.
In Abbasid society Arab tribal genealogy (nasab) retained some of the importance it had had in earlier periods. The Arab tribes who had arrived as conquerors in the Near East outside Arabia in the seventh century continued to provide a language of social membership and prestige. A small number of families descending, or claiming to descend, from these tribes were still around in the flesh, as prestigious as people who sailed to America on the Mayflower. But more importantly, a vast number of people, mostly of non-Arab origin, remembered or claimed to remember having an ancestor or patron who was an Arab tribesman and who thus gave them a tribe to identify with. Abu Nuwas fell into this category. It does not mean that these tribes existed in any real sense of the word. They did not have chiefs, tribal lands, or collective interests; they did not engage in collective action; they were not real political or social groups – just memories and after-images. It was in this context that people were commonly versed in knowledge of the forefathers of the “tribes”, often going back to their eponymous ancestors. The ascetic poem sought to deflate the importance of these allegiances, cutting this sense of nasab down to size and promoting an “all-men-are-equal” type ethos:
I see that every living person is Mortal, son of Mortal
With a prestigious lineage among the dead (D. ii, 159)
This is cited from a poem that contains one of Abu Nuwas’s most admired ascetic lines:
If the clever man examines the world,
He will discover a foe dressed up as a friend
His poetry could elicit keen appreciation, not least from the paragon of the genre himself, Abu al-‘Atahiya, who is recorded as saying: “Sixteen thousand verses have entered into the public domain from among my ascetic poems but I wish that Abu Nuwas would attribute just one of his verses to me, along with two others, in return for a thousand verses of my own ...” The two poets were mutual admirers – when, that is, Abu al-‘Atahiya wasn’t deluded by paranoia into thinking that Abu Nuwas was encroaching on his poetic turf.
The zuhdiyya promotes an etiquette of ascetic comportment, though in a somewhat rudimentary fashion; that is to say, cumulatively as a collection of materials and not according to a methodical manifesto. In this general scheme idle talk is viewed as a symptom of the perishable material world:
... Better a death from the sickness of silence
Than from the sickness of chatter;
How often you have loosened up with banter
The bolts that lock away death ... (D. ii, 164)
The zuhdiyya is the most linguistically accessible of the genres of classical Arabic poetry; the medieval philologists and editors had far less need to gloss the language with explanations of meaning – of the kind they provided for other genres, especially the densely descriptive ones like the hunting poem which tended to use a difficult archaizing lexicon. Abu al-‘Atahiya’s poetry is reputed to have been popular in his day among the people of the market place precisely because he wrote in an appealing language that was quite within their grasp. It was a relatively simple register of formal poetry whose own particular eloquence was a consequence of its plain-spoken style. A phrase in medieval Arabic literary criticism, going back at least to the tenth century, was coined to describe writing that is at once easy to read and understand and yet hard to emulate: al-sahl al-mumtani‘ (“the inimitably easy”). Abu Hilal al-‘Askari (d. 1005) uses it in a well-known saying, though the concept is considerably older. It describes the zuhdiyya to a tee.
The poem translated in full below is an elegant ascetic meditation. It is a reiteration of the uncomplicated, collective wisdom of the pious and devout; the acoustics of the Arabic are soft and musical, accentuated by internal rhyme and assonance in the first three lines; the syntax is succinct, the lexicon and semantics straightforward. It is structured in three parts: an opening triplet, a central verse of devotion, and a closing triplet. The first and third parts have internal, and respectively distinct, phonetic, morphological and semantic cohesion. Thus the poem has what one might call perfect balance. To the cynical and discontent it might read as simplistic, to the pious and sensitive, more convincingly, it is unassuming and has the appeal of simple eloquence.
Every mourner will be mourned
Every weeper will be wept for
Every saving will be spent
And every memory forgotten
Only God remains
Whosoever is exalted, God is more exalted
* * *
He has provided our sustenance – O Lord!
We suffer and strive for Him
* * *
Good and evil have features
That cannot be concealed
Whosoever hides behind a cover
In God’s sight will be revealed
None of the things you see
Can be hidden from God (D. ii, 169–70)
We have encountered this fact already: the zuhdiyya apostrophizes man and encourages him to reflect. This effect is achieved in a uniquely engaging way in the opening two verses of a poem; they are truncated, ending elliptically, in such a fashion that the reader is forced to complete both the meaning and the syntax:
Be with God and He will be there for you
And be God-fearing, so that you may ...
You should be nothing other
Than prepared for the Fates, as if ... (D. ii, 170)
According to the commentary contained in one of the manuscripts of the Diwan, the lines imply: “fear God so that you may survive, prepare for death as if you are already dead.”
In stark contrast with their unfinished syntax, the first two lines are acoustically overdetermined. The rhyme letter, the guttural “k” (Ar. Kaf – the dominant consonant of the entire poem), is the Arabic second person singular pronominal suffix “–ka” (in poetry, for prosodic reasons, the suffix may lose its vowel: “–k”, as here, resembling thus spoken Arabic). The strong acoustics of the guttural phoneme, which is stressed by internal repetition within the line, amplifies the semantics of apostrophe, addressing the poem’s imaginary audience and obliging a response to the enigma of the missing verse endings. One can sense the aural effect even in transcription:
Kun ma‘a llahi yaKun laK
Wa-ttaQi llaha la‘allaK ...
La taKun illa mu‘iddan
li-l-manaya fa-Ka’annaK ...
The poem thus has both overt and subliminal rhetoric each of which is dependent on the other.
The Permanent Ink of the Angels
The most ambivalent of ascetic poems and one which al-Suli was inclined to categorize among the poems of mujun (ribaldry) is the following:
There is a sin which a man will desire full value from
And hearty praise, and to be placed frankly in its lineage
He does not grind his teeth with regret for it,
He stands proudly upright among the people;
Whenever he remembers it, his imagination gets the better of him
Such that anger may affect him due to his great pride.
The angels have recorded it with their hands
Against me, and The Days do not efface what they have written. (D. ii, 172–3)
According to Islamic belief, angels record the sins of men on scrolls (Qur’anic suhuf) that are unfolded and read on Judgment Day. “The Days” (Ar. al-Ayyam) are a standard agent in Arabic poetry of Time’s erosion. It is no clearer in the original Arabic of this poem what sin Abu Nuwas is referring to than it is in the English. That is left to our surmise. But there is a tension built into this poem: it would seem that the final line is intended to destabilize and threaten the insouciance and reckless pride of the first three. A note of volatility – of the ephemeral – is struck in the third line: the poet’s pride is now mixed with anger. Thus, faced with the steady and immutable written record of his sin, will he not come to rue his debauched conceit? Or is he rather challenging the immutable world with his pride? This kind of ambivalence is one of the defining features of Abu Nuwas’s poetry.
* * * * *
In pre-Islamic Arabia women of the tribe sang funerary laments in rhymed prose bewailing the dead. Poetry may have developed from this practice, in particular as a medium to encourage the taking of vengeance for those murdered or killed in battle. The dynamic which evolved for this poetry, one of the earliest independent genres, was made up of two elements: the invocation and license to “break the social constraint” of patience and forbearance (in order to cry and show grief), and praise for the deceased. In the Umayyad period the elegy came to be composed for “distinguished public personalities”; thus in addition to having the personal, effusive aspect of its earlier form it became a “tool of political or religious rhetoric” (EAL, art. “Marthiya”, G. Borg). Abu Nuwas wrote laments for both friends and political figures. But since the latter tended also to be friends or close associates, for instance the caliph al-Amin, there is a fair measure of spontaneity in most of the surviving poems which may explain in part their near fractured, or relatively unstructured, nature. Abu Nuwas’s elegies are distinct from the greatest or most classic examples of the genre – the numerous dirges of the poetess al-Khansa’ (d. 665) for her brother, Sakhr, or the neoclassical elegance of al-Mutanabbi’s elegy for his grandmother with its admixture of genuine sorrow, utter self-absorption and accomplished linguistic rhetoric. It is fair to say that Abu Nuwas is seldom cited as a leading figure of the genre; his poems in this category are just as interesting as biographical, and even historical, documentary shards.
People are divided between the glad and the saddened
And the sick man who is ransom to the palm of death;
But who now can be gladdened with this world and its gaiety
After [the passing of] the blessed Harun? (D. i, 299)
(Abu Nuwas also wrote consoling “Abu al-‘Abbas” al-Fadl ibn Rabi‘ upon the death of al-Rashid, but the lines read not so much as elegy for al-Rashid as encouragement to show allegiance to his son and successor, al-Amin.)
For Muhammad ibn Zubayda “al-Amin” (d. 813)
Death has folded away what was between Muhammad and me;
No one can unfurl that which death has folded.
There is no union now, just tears prolonged
By [memories I] cannot hold back;
I used to be wary of death for him alone;
There is nothing left now about which to care;
While houses are inhabited by those I dislike
The graveyard is inhabited by my loved one. (D. i, 299)
Two other fragments survive for al-Amin. One contains the line: “Was it not possible for people who have not died to die // And for death’s appointment to be driven from you to me?” – which is poignant (and prescient) as Abu Nuwas died not long afterwards.
Passing by the palaces of the Rabi‘ family, who had been the Barmecides greatest political rivals, Abu Nuwas lamented:
... Fate did not watch over the rights of Yahya al-Barmaki
Except as one watching over the dues of Rabi‘. (D. i, 300)
And passing by the former palaces of the Barmecides the poet wrote upon a random wall:
These are the Barmecides who learnt
The behavior of kings and taught it to the people.
When they sowed they [also] watered and when they built
No foundation ever crumbled,
And when they ever did something for men
They clothed it in a mantle of permanence. (D. i, 301)
On the morning of its return Death left no one for us
In whom we could rejoice
It is as if I offended death with [the] son I was blessed with
When I had grown old and grey (D. i, 301)
Adding to the poignancy of this shard about a child effaced from the world is that we know scarcely more about Abu Nuwas’s son than what these verses tersely communicate.
When Abu Nuwas’s tutor died he (Waliba) would have had no cause to regret missing out on life’s pleasures. It is interesting to see therefore what tone the poem takes; it is written in the so-called “Complete” meter (Kamil), but a shortened form of it, more suitable for light verses. The language is simple and unaffected; the rhyme pattern in Arabic established by the dead man’s name, Waliba.
(Translator’s Caveat. This translation suffers from the fact that, short though they are, each line is a syntactic unit; this exacerbates in English a sense of abruptness in the thematic transitions from line to line, and is not an uncommon problem in the less felicitous translations of early Arabic poetry.)
Your tears have poured copiously
With grief at the death of Waliba;
At Abu Usama’s death the wailing woman
Stood up among his companions
To publicize his noble acts
Without lie or fabrication;
Banu Asad has been afflicted,
Banu Nizar wears a frown [of distress];
[They have] lost their spokesman and leader
In times of calamity or stress;
Do not go far, Abu Usama,
For death is a necessity;
Every man is assaulted
By its striking arrows;
Annihilation was prescribed for [God’s] servants:
Every soul is leaving;
How many a brother you have left behind
With lasting anguish over you;
Before your death each one thought it
Too immense [a matter] that you be struck down by disaster. (D. i, 309)
Just as moving as this elegy was Abu Nuwas’s terse reaction on hearing of Waliba’s death: “Today good-mannered wit and erudition have died.” This, one may infer, is how one should understand the decadent life of a poet such as Waliba: that within the bravado of excess (in word and perhaps even deed) was the elegant and indelible heart of wit and learning.
Willy nilly
My heart is sickened by your illness;
May the Merciful turn harm aside from you
And may the evil Fates appear for me instead ...
... After He Died
Two intimate friends were created for union
And their union coalesced in love;
They were like two branches off a trunk
But were divided by the vagaries of Time,
Their stalks turned yellow having been green
Which caused the leaves to fall off their branches. (D. i, 308)
The expression here may strike one as abstract and impersonal. But the language is uncomplicated, which can be a sign of sincerity; and the short poem has its own acoustic quality: the sustained assonance of long “a” in Arabic which complements the grammatical (and semantic) use of the dual form. The sound of the poem puts stress on two when one of two has gone.
This chapter began with such a piece – a perhaps spuriously attributed poem which one editor has described as being of such beauty that it was just as likely to be by Abu Nuwas as any other poet. My feeling is that in this case the authorship may be beside the point: it is a superb and eloquent example of Abbasid self-effacement. As we come full circle in “Poetry for Mortals and the Dead” with self-elegy, the argument needs hardly to be made further that the zuhdiyya and the marthiya share an essential register.
There are in fact a number of elegant and ornamentally bare laments of self written apparently when Abu Nuwas lay sickly and dying:
Annihilation has crept into m[y] lower and upper [parts],
I see that I am dying limb after limb
No hour passes me by except that
It reduces me by a fraction in passing;
Along with my strength self obeisance has abandoned me
As I remember now, weakened and emaciated, obeisance to God
How I regret those nights and days
Full spent in amusement and play;
We committed every wicked deed;
May God forgive, pardon and give us reprieve. (D. i, 302)
He sent the following poem to a friend while suffering from the illness that would kill him:
The poetry of a dead man has come to you in the words of one living
Who has come to stand [at the junction] between life and death;
Fate’s “Events” have wasted his body such that
He is now almost invisible to the eyes of these “Events” –
If you look at me to perceive my features
You will not grasp a single word of the book of my face ...
(D. i, 302)
* * * * *
When Abu Nuwas was living that pleasure-seeking life for which he is famous and which he wrote up in his euphoric and often decadent lyric poems, he saw the glass of life half full. The focus simply shifted when, prompted by a religious sensibility or the demands of being a complete poet, the glass of life was seen as half empty, the pleasures of life delusional, and the poetry became the reminder to the living that they are mortal. The religious aspect of this issued from the same basic fact. It seems morose but it is true, as it is undoubtedly also true that the particular aesthetic beauty of the poetry can even make one forget the pall of this often doleful register.
There are various brief accounts of his epitaph. It is reported, for instance, that upon his shroud was embroidered the confession: “My excuse, Lord, will be to admit that I have no excuse.” This is personal, yet much of his ascetic poetry could be adopted as a universal epitaph for humankind
... Man disappears from view
Until it seems as if his movements
Were formed originally from the very stillness (D. ii, 172)