The Literature of Ecstasy

by Albert Mordell

It is said that even the French poem, the Chanson de Roland, shows Arabic traces since the Arab invasion had reached into France.

We recognize that there is an invisible thread that binds together love poems so remotely separated by time and place as those of the medieval Persians, Arabs and Troubadours, and the modern English poets.

The Arabic note of ecstasy is found even in the poems of Goethe, especially in a few in his West Eastern Divan, influenced by his studies of Oriental literature during the Napoleonic wars. He used his own experiences with eastern names, but he never failed to produce literature of ecstasy. The Oriental romance also exerted an influence on Beckford, Landor, Southey, Byron and Moore. Even Tennyson got the idea of Locksley Hall from reading Sir William Jones's prose translation of the Muallaqat; Browning adopted an Arabian metre in his Abt Vogler; George Meredith's The Shaving of Shagpat was written to emulate the Arabian Nights.

The Arabs excelled also in the elegy. Among the most famous elegies in Arabic poetry are those of Khansa, a Pre-islamic poetess, on the murder of her two brothers. There is an account of her by Thomas C. Chenery, in the notes to his translation of Hariri's Assemblies V. 1, pp. 387-391. In fact the elegy is more common among early Pre-islamic poetry than the love poem. The Orientals, particularly the medieval Hebrews, were always distinguished in this kind of poetry. One of the best, certainly the best in Turkish poetry, is the elegy by Baqui on the great Sultan Suleiman I, translated by E. J. W. Gibb in Ottoman Poetry.

The Arabian love poems and elegies are proofs that poetry was originally, as to-day, a personal cry, an outburst of emotion due to repression. The cry of grief for the dead in battle; that is the note in all early literature, Occidental and Oriental.

The poem among the Arabs and Hebrews had also a definite utilitarian purpose. In early times satire was one of the chief forms under which lyric poetry appeared. The poet was employed to combat the enemy and his curses against them were supposed to be effective. He was a soothsayer, a prophet, a magician. He voiced not only the communistic feeling of the tribes, but his personal emotions. Even down to our day the public demands that the poet write poems against the enemy in time of war. Goethe was criticized for refusing to write against the French, for example, but he explained later to Eckermann that he had no hatred towards the French. In all wars there have been poets who have written against the enemy, but usually this kind of poetry has been of an inferior order. It finds its own tomb in a poem like the famous Hymn of Hate by Lissauer in the late world war.

Nothing in literature illustrates more the belief in the

magical power of poetry than the chapters in the Book of Numbers dealing with the effort of the Moabite King Balak to get Balaam to curse the children of Israel. Balak believed that these curses would help him defeat the Hebrews. But instead Balaam blessed them, unwillingly, saying that he could but utter the words God put in his mouth, for the inspiration of the poet came to him always from hidden forces. He reached to ecstasy every time he spoke.

Arabic poetry then deals in intricate forms conveying ecstasy, with all the stock themes of poetry, but especially with love.

The similarities between Biblical Hebrew poetry and Pre-islamic Arabic poetry have been touched upon by Dr. George A. Smith in his The Early Poetry of Israel and by Thomas Chenery in his excellent introduction to his translation of Hariri's Assemblies. Participators in various military events themselves composed the poems in which they told of their exploits, as you may note by comparing the Muallaqat with the songs of Miriam and Deborah. There was the same interest in nature as you may see by comparing descriptions from the Psalms and Job to that of the thunderstorm by Imru'ul Qays in the Muallaqat. The poetry of both nations was often nomadic, the product of the influences of the desert. Both nations recorded personal emotions, springing from tribal events.