In my memory of Nazik al-Malaika there are three verses by which I came to know her and to love her. They accompany me today with the memories of my school years. They settled in my mind together with the classroom and the pupils and my teacher Marun Abboud, who said of her what al-Nabigha said of al-Khansa — as if Omar Abu Risha were Marun Abboud's Hassan.

As for the three verses, they are:

Since you went, I have remained bewildered in the darkness — sorrow bears witness that I have kept to my place; my fancy pictures for me your steps and their fall, and when I listen closely I wake from my illusions: nothing... but the wind raging in the darkness, nothing... but my sighing and my weeping...

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Darkness, the wind, sighs, imag-ining and fancy, tears...

These are the greatest common factor in everything Nazik al-Malaika has said until now.

Never once have I tried to read a poet or a man of letters or a writer without working to fathom his soul — its inner depths and its surfaces, the bottoms of its waves and their foam — through what he writes; for I believe that the writer who does not live his literature, whose literature is not a genuine outpouring of an experience he has lived and a setting-forth from the foundations of the soul — mind and thought, feelings and sensations — is not a writer who deserves to be read.

From this point of view I attempt to survey the poetry of Nazik al-Malaika in "The Bottom of the Wave."

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There is no doubt that the poetess has developed from "The Lover of Night" to "The Bottom of the Wave"... but she has developed along the line she began, and has never once departed from it.

Darkness, for example: Nazik al-Malaika no longer merely loves it — she has come to dread the morning:

Let us part now, while a melody remains on our lips, too proud to disclose the secret, so it chose the silence of nothingness; while in the dewdrops a lip remains, singing, and while your face, like the darkness, still holds a thousand meanings, clothed in shadows — the beauty of the impossible — which the rigidity of an idol may yet come over if night lifts its two hands from us..

The sighs set forth, followed one upon another, and thickened until they became a sadness that clings to the poetess's soul and that she cannot part with; rather she cries out to it for help and finds her rest in it:

We prepared for it love and sanctification and confidences, and made ourselves ready to meet it, eyes and lips, and we shall meet it in prayer as we meet a god, and we shall offer it the bursting of sweet tears as solace, and we shall grant it a sorrow stronger and ever stronger, and we shall give it eyes and brows...

As for the illusions and imagin-ings, they have become specters and terrifying images that awaken in her soul foreboding and apprehension and suspicion and fear and terror of something she does not know, or pretends not to know — she tries to hide it, and

it shows itself between the words and in the folds of the letters.

Perhaps I am not philosophizing if I say that Nazik al-Malaika, in this collection, is trying to overstep the restraints that the condition of her society has imposed upon her and upon many women like her, but she collides with the traditions... You see her, in the splendor of her poetry's flight, suddenly stop — and you feel, as you read her, the jolt of this sudden halt, and you sense that this flight did not continue to the range the poetess wanted...

Thus have I understood these quiescent rhymes in most of what she has written about herself and out of herself:

But while we were dreaming we sensed something like an obscure echo; in the waves dark with silence we heard something like a throbbing echo: the avenging jinn-maidens mounting toward us in chariots — and my companion answered: "They are at play; that is the voice of the rip-pling waves..."

This sudden halt we do not find, for instance, in "The Martyr" and "The Sleeper in History" and "The Legend of Two Eyes"... and we feel it falling less heavily in "An Invitation to Life."

Most of Nazik al-Malaika's poetry in this collection is living, free-flowing meters, and living feelings trying to break free, and an expression that is, to my mind, easy and simple. There is no hunting after the word, no diving after the term; and the obscurity is in the meaning, in the aims, and in a failed attempt to portray a soul shackled by everything around it. And the poetess consoles herself for this obscurity: