in his Tammuziyyat. Every crookedness angered him, even his own; he would seethe with rage, and the word would come out from under his pen like a piece of iron out of the forge, dripping blood and radiating light and fire. If we leaf through his diwan we see him repenting early: in a single year — the year 1934 — he published his first poem ("Whither?") and closed it with this line:

The valley claps for our weddings when the valley hears the echo of the two kisses.

And in the same year he composed "The Psalm of Salvation," in which he says:

I repent of a past braziered in flame, and wash away my defilements with a vial of perfume.

It is as though he had no sooner come of age than he turned gray. Yet despite the repentance in his poetry he remained sharp of appetite, and he imagined the lily — mankind's symbol of purity — as though it felt what we feel, saying of the smile of the innocent lilies:

What ails the lilies above the spring, casting off their maiden veils, while the youth of the spring seduces them?

I think it an image that never passed through a poet's mind before — and how many are the offspring of poets' wits!

As for Fouad's words and his poetic images, I find many of them torn from his own surroundings — such is the effect of upbringing upon us. Hear how he addresses a woman in the poem "A Passerby":

You are not she who kneaded me, nor of my leaven, so leave me to walk alone — and go your way.

As for death — God keep it far from the listeners — I used to see it in his poetry wherever I turned in his diwan, as when he says:

Should you find in my eyes a sorrow, and in my face the yellowings of sunset

And as he says in a poem entitled "A Graveyard":

I am the face of the grave: on my sallow brow you meet the phantoms of death; a choking grief has worked into every rib, and funerals sway through the inmost bends.

Have you seen this poetry of passing away? Truly, a man's thought is his guide.

And if we fold up the page of mortality, we see some samples of the colors of sweeping love. In the poem "The Hidden Passion" he addresses a beloved concerning a mouth of hers which he feared she

would make into an endowment for posterity, and said to her:

Keep it for me alone in its purity: I am the blaze, and mankind is water and clay.

And in the poem "A Virgin" he says:

In your tender voice there are wounds — a thousand sighs surge within it, and a sigh. I love upon your lips a thing that sank into the parting of the lips and strayed.

Have you looked at his words? The words ghalla, fatha, 'ajanatni, and khamiri are Lebanese village words one hundred percent — and how much pure Arabic there is in our mongrel speech! Would that he had used nothing but the purely classical.

Fouad Suleiman's poetry is not ornate, well-laid words; it is speech that lives by the heat of love in its speaker's heart. He is not one of the symbolists, though he said in the poem "The Black Wedding":

O my fair-haired dream, O tenderness that drifted through a mute and darkened heart.

And if we leaf through The Moon's Path, we see that his prose in it is as poetic as his diwan. If you come face to face with "Mirrors That No Longer Shine," your flesh creeps at those expressions describing the house in the absence of its master. Everything went dark in the eyes of the dutiful son; then that darkness soon lifted when the father returned to his nest, and blessings filled the house.

As for the essay "My Childhood," I say — and I do not think I exaggerate — that it is the most splendid essay I have read on this subject. The abstraction he achieved there made childhood a living being, as if of flesh and blood.

I said that Fouad Suleiman was a son dutiful to his parents — and could any but one possessed of his love express it as he did? Hear what he says in describing his mother's face: "My mother... of the colors of the peony-wood is my mother's face."

(It is as if he who wove it wove it once, then cut off his own hand lest he weave its like.)

In "Mantles of Purple" is the utmost freedom of thought; there Fouad the writer turned psychologist, analyzing the poet's soul and its needs...

As for the essay "The Moon's Path," it is the Song of Songs — "how lovely she is!" — of the Lebanese village. And in "Mirrors That No Longer Shine" there is a breath of Tagore. Read his depiction there of the deserted house and mother: there you find the picture of the old Lebanese house complete in