soul finds no field but words and phrases, which it sends forth in strength and burning and longing.. So she says in the poem "Pride": —

And lips that die athirst, and do not ask: where is the nectar? Where is the cup?

And souls that feel the deepest feeling, and seem as though they did not feel

Do not question me, do not wound the secret in my soul, and do not spurn the pride of my stillness

If I spoke, in every word there would be the grave of a dream and the dawn of a dead wound

This sorrowful melody accompanies our poetess in most of the poems of the collection, and whoever reads "Splinters and Ashes" becomes certain that its author is a poetess in truth — in her deep, bursting pain, in her new and sorrowful horizons, in her burning anxiety, and in her mysticism, which wells up from her very self. And for all her being touched by Western poetry, and the breadth of her reading, her personality shows itself to you through her poems; this personality is not lost behind a thick veil of many personalities. That is because the poetess draws her inspiration from herself and makes her own self speak, and finds in her self and in her being an echo of all the poetic selves and souls that these human souls have known — souls that are all prey to anxiety and perplexity, to love and tenderness. So she says in the poem "Faces and Mirrors":

They called me "I," and they did not understand me — what am I, what is my sullen existence?

What am I? A burning that finds

no rest, and a shadow that soon will pass

In the clearness of the mirror I stared long at my phantom, doubt in my eyes

As though some pale one were staring into my face, like me, bewildered, folded away

This, this is "I." There is no doubt — so why do I not touch her with my hands?

Why can I not touch the self? And erase my eternal burning?

And though Nazik al-Malaika is a poetess of the idea, the idea in her is neither intellect nor logic that comes to you hard and dry; it comes to you in a procession of beautiful words, pulsing and alive, and in meters that move within the poems and surge according to the meanings and the states the poetess is living. Most of her poetry is states of the soul, passing through it in brief moments of time, so that you feel, as you read, that you are being drawn with her toward the unknown, not knowing when the poetess will bring you back from her enchanted world. Let us listen to her in the poem "Utopia": —

I shall remain, drawn by longings toward the everlasting, distant horizon

And I dream, I dream, and do not wake except to dream a new dream

I kiss its walls in imagination and ask the vast space about it

And ask about it the outpouring of perfumes, the drops of dew, the drifts of ice

And ask until the question dies on my lips and the song fades away

And when I die... I die with my heart keeping a tryst with Utopia

And Nazik al-Malaika, in her poetry, does not attempt easy things; she bends over the folds of the soul and attempts the rugged paths, and so most of her poems come in subjects strange through and through — strange even in their titles and their atmospheres... She says in the poem "The Funeral of Mirth":

I shall close my window, for the light muddies my cold darkness

I shall let down this heavy curtain over the page of the vanished story

And drive away the dull voice of the winds and the radiance of the spiteful stars

And lean my head upon memories, and dip my eyes in two tears

And send my love to wrap the slain one and warm his lifeless brow

Perhaps I may give him back his life, and wipe the blueness from his lips

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Nazik al-Malaika is a poetess worthy of study. She is a poetess who lives for poetry, and for poetry alone; and she is, beyond that, a new phenomenon of woman's possibilities in an art in which people have reproached her for never having excelled..