And men dread the deadly Drought that slays them: but as for me—my Drought is to know thee gone, my life but a barren land!
And sooth, if I suffer when thou greet'st me with words unkind, yet somewhat of joy it brings thou thinkest on me at all.
So take thy delight that I stand serving with aching heart and eyes bathed in tears lest thou shouldst sunder thyself from me.
Arabic poetry may lack the light of intellectual outlook that we find in our greatest English poets; it may be deficient in the intensity of religious fervor characteristic of the medieval Hebrew poets; it may fall short of the high mystic strain attained by the Persians, but in the fervor depicting love of passion they have not been surpassed. The greatest Persian lyric love poet, Hafiz, and the greatest Turkish lyric love poet, Baqui, clearly were under their influence.
Arabic poetry then is probably richer in love ecstasy than that of any nation. This is due to the fact that they are both a sensuous and at the same time deeply religious people. They were strongly emotional, extremely vindictive and extremely hospitable. They recorded their emotions unabashed. They had the naïveté of the child and cried out their slightest pain; they weep and bemoan constantly. Antar, one of the poets of the Muallaqat and the hero of the romance bearing his name, is more of a child than Achilles. He is always sobbing and weeping copiously; he is the prototype of the medieval knight who wept and declaimed because of absence of his mistress, a feature of romance which Cervantes ably ridiculed in Don Quixote.
Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, was one of the first to point out the Arabic influence on chivalry and romanticism. The battle as to the extent of
Arabic influence has been waged ever since, with, I believe, the victory to the Arabs. FitzMaurice Kelly, the historian of Spanish Literature, emphasizing the Hebrew influence, has resented the statement of the great Arabic influence, but Robert Briffault in The Making of Humanity has proved that this influence has been underestimated rather than exaggerated.
The fact that there existed in Pre-islamic times equal morality for both sexes—women also were freer than in Post-islamic times—gave rise to romantic love.
Arabic literature made the love or erotic note in its tender or chivalrous phase, fashionable. True, this note existed very sparingly among the Greeks and Romans in Sappho and Catullus, but the romantic note was singularly absent from European literature in the early medieval ages. Men loved then as they did before and after, but the personal romantic love note was not considered a proper theme for poetry. The religious and martial emotions held sway. Critics now admit that intense love poetry of the Troubadours appearing like an oasis in the barren literature of the medieval ages was influenced by the Arabs, the rhymes as well as the themes being taken from the east. The troubadours influence the German Minnesingers, and these two groups remain among the best composers of love poetry Europe has had.
The troubadours also entered England, influencing its poetry for nearly two centuries.[214-A]
The love element in the books of chivalry is due to Arabic influence. Cervantes attributed his Don Quixote to a Moorish author because the Moors wrote so many romances. Early Italian poetry owed much to the love poetry of Sicily which was impregnated with the Arabic
spirit. Wyatt and Surrey, who traveled in Italy, greatly influenced English literature. Thus Arabic poetry somewhat influenced English poetry. Similarly the Spanish Cid shows traces in marked degree of the Arabic invasion of Spain. No one has more enthusiastically and effectively pointed out the Arabic influences in European poetry than Sismondi in his history of the literature of the South of Europe. He begins the work with, after the introduction, a chapter on Arabic literature, and he especially recognizes that the tenderness of the love sentiment and the chivalric attitude towards women came from the Arabs. The most sympathetic and exhaustive account of the great influence of Mohammedan influence upon Europe is in Samuel P. Scott's History of the Moorish Empire in Spain.