ABSTRACT
Arabic poetry is a poetry of a very clearly circumscribed repertory of themes. With much formal rigour these themes are distributed over the Arabic poem’s (qaṣīdah’s) three structural ‘sections’, – the nasīb (elegiac-lyrical prelude), the raḥīl (desert journey), and the fakhr (self-exaltation) or madḥ (encomium) – themselves very clearly circumscribed and defined as components of a quite architectonic construct. These structural sections then determine not only the kind of themes they accept but, even more importantly, they impose or, as it were, predetermine the moods that will rule over the repertory of poetic themes by ‘modulating’ them – and that will ultimately give those themes their abiding semanticity. Because of the very rigorous structural system that is thus engendered, Arabic poetry is, necessarily, a poetry that in its praxis of achieving individual, and original, works of art expands, or rather ‘impends’, toward the interior – its own interior. It is formally, structurally, and thematically highly inward looking and capable of its own ‘private’ exaltations and self-absorbed refinements – and these exaltations and self-absorptions are also its limitations. This comes to the fore especially in that poetry’s formal, and indeed formalist, confines, which do not allow it much room for a loosening, or dissipation, of perspectives, or of idiosyncracies other than the idiosyncracy of genre, nor of formal exploratory manoeuverability outside those established confines – all these being the things which in modern literary-critical parlance we have come to call ‘creative poetic freedom’. To look for such notions of ‘poetic freedom’, however, would be in the case of the classical Arabic sense of form no less than anachronistic.
