12 - Love poetry (ghazal)

Summary

No independent love lyrics survive from the pre-Islamic period, but love remembered is frequently the first of the themes through which the archaic qaṣīdah ranges. In the introductory section of the qaṣīdah, the nasīb, the poet conjures up lost love through a variety of conventional motifs: the recognition in a deserted encampment of the place where he and a loved woman once enjoyed days of friendship; a dream haunted by the woman's phantom; or the evocation of the morning when her tribe, neighbours for a season, made ready to leave. At times, the poet's grey hair has caused the woman to deny her favours; less often, the poet has tired of waiting for them. Some poets – al-Aʿshā for example – describe the lady in sensuous detail. The names vary but it is, from top to toe, always the same woman: all pampered softness, languor, plenitude.

The poet may suffer and weep, but he lets us know that he can bear it. By the conventions of the poem, the loss of intimacy with a gentle, sweet and indolent creature of luxury leads him to proclaim his intimacy with hardship and danger in the desert. The poet al-Muthaqqib al-ʿAbdī tells in three lines of Hind's change of heart, then continues:

Dost thou then mean it so? Shall I tell thee how many a land, what time in the summer days the Sun stood still thereon

And the singing cicadas shrilled in the sunshine, and the shining sun-mist, with its white sheets folded and its striped veils, showed its side to me,

I have traversed on a she-camel with well-knit fore-legs …