The heroic strain in poetry is the first of its purposes among all nations, just as love in poetry is the last of all its chapters and stands at the very summit of the poets' purposes.

Man began by showing his ardor in dance, exulting at the defeat of his enemies and mimicking their movements — the movements that betrayed cowardice — in order to mock them. When words were coined, sounds and cries turned into syllables and then into words, and man mounted, in the display of his ardor, the ladder of music, expression, and song, until poetry became what it is in its advanced stages, gathering up such meanings as bespeak turbulent natures and feeling souls.

Some of those who have studied the history of love say that it, like everything else, has phases in which its aims and its substance have varied.

In its first phase love was material and nothing more, stopping at the expression of sex. Then it passes into the second phase, in which it is at one time material, concerned with describing beauty and pursuing it wherever it may be, and at another time spiritual, concerned with beauty of mind and character — this by reason of the appearance of the Virgin Mary and the fascination with chastity and maidenly modesty that spread in the wake of her appearance, which led to the separation of the two sentiments: the senti-ment of admiration for comeliness of feature, and the sentiment of passion for the lofty spirit. A man would wed a wife to bear him sons, and then join himself, beside her, to another — a woman of cultivation — in a violent spiritual union, which before long drew after it a sweeping flood of corruption. Matters remained so until Jean-Jacques Rousseau appeared and composed romances whose heroines united beauty of form with beauty of character; people then recognized the barrenness of separating the two sen-timents, and how far such separation departs from what nature has laid down for mankind. So beauty in both its kinds was united in the person desired — and this is the third phase, the phase of true love.

Since the individual is liable to be affected by the phases through which society has passed, he must needs traverse the three phases of love just described in the course of his climb up the ladder of mental advancement. Thus you see the wish of the raw, untaught youth confined to material love alone: he seeks in the girl he chooses nothing but beauty of body and face. But if he does not marry before

experience has schooled him and learning refined him, he passes into the second phase, admiring the beautiful girl for her comeliness and loving the well-bred girl for her spirituality; and then he marries none but the girl who unites the two beauties — beauty of qualities and beauty of features — and so spares himself the worst of regret and heartache.

Love in poetry is a kind of worship of beauty, in which a man gives voice to the ferment of youth within his soul; nay, it is a kind of prayer, for in it are supplication and imploring, entreaty and the begging of pardon, and an exaltation born of a hallowing that approaches, nearly or remotely, the degree of deification.

I have set down this preface in order to ask: where does love in Arabic poetry stand among its three phases?

You will surely find that what was written down of the poetry of the first Jahiliyya — and only the least of it was written down — is not without indication that the Arabs knew love in its third phase. If you read al-Shanfara, that master poet and fearsome brigand who used to waylay travelers by night in the desert, you find him yearning after his beloved only to describe her chastity and gravity. He said:

Umayma — talk of her brings no shame upon her husband; when women are spoken of, she is chaste and exalted.

But the poets of the second Jahiliyya sing more of the beauty of face and body — or perhaps they did so in imitation of the Greeks in their carving of statues. Al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani, famous for his elegance and his constant journeying between Palmyra, Baalbek, and Damascus, stood before those temples marveling at the splendor of their statues — nude and draped, full figures, half figures, and beautiful heads — only to return and sing of al-Mutajarrida, wife of al-Nu'man, queen of al-Hira; and

al-Dhubyani was one of the king's boon companions and intimates. He composed on her a