Wild Bouquets...

My reader's pardon, if I scratch her ear with the verse I bring her—verse she has been accustomed to hearing from the mouths of village women and village men on a wedding night, or at a funeral, or on a harvest day, and has grown up to regard as vulgar and commonplace, and to be too careful of her time to let us waste it in reading about it. Her pardon, if I come to tell her that in this living verse there are flashes of beauty that deserve attention, and if I ask her to leave the poetry of the diwans for a little while and come with me to hear the poetry of a folk who perhaps neither write nor read. She will find that, in place of the bramble she has loved, she will meet with roses and the flowers of the field.

Ours is not the only literature among literatures to contain, beside the poetry published in it, popular songs passed from tongue to tongue for generations, songs of no known author, changing from time to time according to the singers and the circumstances. No literature is without this; but ours is perhaps the only one that has turned its face away from them and refused to adopt them, and so has denied our poets the profit of what is in them. Would English poetry, I wonder, not have been the loser had the popular songs called Ballads (and our songs are just such) not entered its heritage in the age of the Romantics and after?

Before me now is a collection of these songs, such as we hear as we go about this part of the world, gathered by a Finnish scholar named Aapeli Saarisalo from the two villages of al-Buqay'a and al-Bassa on the border of Palestine, and entitled by him "Songs of the Druzes"—naming the whole after a part. I shall speak of a single aspect of these songs, confining my citations to what appears in the book, though it leaves a number of the sweet poems untouched.

These songs were composed for singing, dancing, the dabke, and the like; their English name, Ballads, points to this, for the source of the word means: dancing. Hence we notice in them much repetition of ideas, stanzas, lines, expressions, and words. And as a result of their surviving through many ages, certain changes have come over their parts: stanzas have been dropped, distorting the run of the thought, and new stanzas have been inserted that do not always fit the song as a unity. From time to time, too, we find mention of modern inventions, which the village artists were pleased to work into the body of the songs they inherited: so they make the lover send his greeting to his girl by automobile, for the speed of its going; ask her to have her picture taken and send him her photograph, that he may treasure it above his eyes; describe the airplane; and so forth.

Although many of these songs were composed to be sung at weddings, the prevailing theme is the description of the beloved's coldness, her desertion, and her tormenting of her doting swain's heart—even in the wedding songs themselves. Thus we find the lovesick poet describing to us something of what he has suffered from love:

His eyes have been ruined:
(My eye—weeping has increased its swelling;
mountains of kohl cannot allay its swelling)
Nay, the light in them has gone out and they have gone blind
(My eyes, at parting from the beloved, are blind;
from so much weeping and sorrow they are blind)

And he has gone mad; people call him, from the violence of his love for her, a madman; he has wandered the horizons with no Kaaba but her
(I have become a dervish, roaming for love of you)

He suffers morning and evening, and endures as none other has endured
(Not Joseph endured a patience like mine, nor Noah,
nor Job on the day that he was tried)

So the world darkens in his eyes, and he tries to break free, crying out to God:
(Your world has closed in upon us; from You we ask deliverance)
and he asks Him either to help him or to let him die and give him rest
(And if, O my Creator, there is no deliverance for me from this distress,
I beg You—I want no living; take back what You entrusted)

So he goes on lamenting his ill fortune, and weeps, and the doves weep with him
(Alas for me: the doves keened, and I keened too)

And he keeps mourning until he understands that this is love's inevitable end, and that he must bear it patiently

"O my soul, why do you complain of her love?
O my heart, why are you burnt by her love?
O my mind, why are you maddened by her love?
Such is the reward of him who sought love"

He must, then, be content with what his love has come to, and remain faithful where he has met with nothing but ingratitude. And here he is, proving his enduring love—a love at times unruly, at times meek: he grieves over the desertion and finds the beloved's disdain harder than the torment of the keeper of Hell
"Parting from loved ones is harder than the torment of Malik"
and "Malik sent word and said to me: I shall not come your way;
the fire of pining at your beloved's side is enough for you";

Yet for all that, he seldom hurries after her; he is content to send the doves to follow her, and to beg God to send a breeze that will bring her back to him. And he goes on singing of his love for her despite her coldness and the ruin of his soul in her passion.

"O lovely one, know that I love you;
my soul and my inmost parts have perished loving you;
though they lay me in the tomb, my heart will love you"

And look at the close of the stanza:
"So long as God is worshipped in heaven!"
And he is ready to sacrifice everything for her sake, even his religion
"For your sake I have forsaken my religion and the Book."

He finds the poison she gives him to drink sweeter than honey, and keeps her memory so that nothing comes between her and him
"Between me and you are islands afloat in the sea;
should my day come, and my body go down into the pit,
I will send you my soul upon the waves of the sea, swimming"

Nothing tempts him to leave her; even Beirut does not allure him, and he stays bound to al-Bassa, where she is. Nor does the poet content himself with showing his feelings toward the beloved: he goes on to describe to us the beauty treasured in her, and describes the various parts of her body, for describing her makes him happy
"In describing her the tongue is loosed;
in telling of her beauty it takes cheer"

His descriptions of the body do not differ from those which Arabic poetry generally bestows upon it: her eyes are black, kohl-lined, almond-shaped; her hair tumbles loose upon her shoulders, with crimped braids like ostrich plumes, black as night, or as the hearth, hanging undyed like horses' manes; and she takes care of it and cuts it short in the European mode
"She cut a length and let a length hang;
she cut it in the Frankish cut"

She has an eyebrow like a keen sword, and cheeks in which sugar mingles with dibs (grape or carob molasses), and in her lips a welcoming spring for him who comes to it. As for his description of her nose—that the liquid within it revives the dead—and of her ear—that its scent cures the one who has been stung—these are far from art. But he sings in describing her bosom, and claims he cannot do justice to what is there, though he tries

"I said: Paradise must be in it,
whether below it or above it;
seven stars shine in it,
rising from among its veins;
did she not keep it covered,
it would veil the shining sun"

And he pictures it for us as though the moon were struggling to break free of it, and speaks of her breasts, firm and finely turned. As for her waist, "its slenderness has undone all strength and cunning"; as for her neck, it "inclines and sways"; and as for her legs—
(Her legs are a pair of wax candles;
the goldsmith's hands it was that fetched them forth;
whiter than the snow of Sannine,
their color evenly matched.
If they showed from beneath the pantaloons

a cripple, catching sight of them,
would rise and walk from that very hour).

And she is tall of stature, like a lance and like a bough, with broad shoulders and movements that bewitch like the beating of tambourines. And why should he go on longer? She is sugar cane, and that is enough for him.

He describes for us the rings and anklets with which she adorns herself, and speaks of her dresses after the latest fashion, and especially
(That pepper-hued dress of yours—in it are life and death).

And of her veil
(The day she wears it for the feast,
the birds of Paradise coo to her)

And in these songs there are certain glimpses of lovely poetry that cross our path like flowers upon the hollows: as the poet's description of his sweet beloved—he asks her for water and she quenches his thirst with a glance, and he asks her name and she answers: Love, or Passion, or Beauty, or Wonders. Or his description of the pains of love:

"I passed my hand over my head and found it white;
nothing whitened my head but your desertion, O loved ones"

Or his complete absorption in his love

"The sun rose, and the world beheld it,
and my inmost parts caught fire, with love of a beauty."

Or this sweet line

"Whoever has tasted the cup of love has tasted the cup of death"

Or his description of the beloved's chastity

"And no one at midnight has ever rattled her doors."

Or the mention of the paradox—that she made the eye go blind from weeping at her parting, and at the same time made the blind man see when his eyes fell upon her beauty; or the deft paradox the poet casts within a single stanza:

"At a wink of her eye the dead sit up;
I returned to the dust and became one of the dead"

Or his description of the birds of Paradise cooing to his beloved; or this picture of the reach of her beauty's power—saying nothing of the beauty itself, but giving only its effect:

"The day the qadi saw her,
he flung off his turban and let his robe trail"

Or the description of her forehead rising with the moon, so that people are bewildered whence the light came; or his prayer that his beloved come back to him though the sun should then vanish for years—nothing would be sweeter to him than that darkness; or his mockery, and his describing the houri as "dry sugar"; or his fierceness and his scorn for his beloved should she do a shameful thing:

"O palm tree that with my tears I nourished—
with the tears of my eyes and eyelids I watered her;
when I saw another pluck fruit from her,
I left her to the other, I, and cast her away"

These are flashes of beauty in these living popular songs, radiating and giving light to the whole. These songs may lack artifice, craftsmanship, ornament, outward form, and the other things the village girl lacks; but that does not prevent there being found in them, as in the city, and as in classical verse, the elements of beauty, feeling, truth, and sincerity. They are wild flowers, in the fields and on the hills; we may travel rough distances before we find a few of them; but the sight of those few fills our heart with joy, and you will see us hastening to them, to offer them to the beloved in bouquets.