Lesson 4: "I Love You, My Homeland" by Mahmoud Hassan Ismail and the School of Apollo

01First: the circumstances in which the school of Apollo appeared

The reality it emerged into

• It appeared at the start of the fourth decade of the last century (the early 1930s), after a literary battle between the school of al-Diwan and the conservative poets (the Revivalists).
• Shukri had stopped writing after his seventh diwan "Flowers of Autumn" (1918); his two friends al-Aqqad and al-Mazini attacked him, and then al-Mazini turned to journalism, the story and the essay.
• Al-Aqqad alone remained of the Diwanists, occupied with literary genres other than poetry.
• Into this reality — in which both the conservative and the al-Diwan directions had frozen — Apollo came trying to go past both of them and complete what was lacking in them.

The streams and forming factors of the school

• Profit from Khalil Mutran, from the literary quarrel between Revivalists and Diwanists, and from the Romantic poetry — original and translated — and the critical articles published by al-Aqqad, al-Mazini and Shukri; so the school turned to renewal and to overwhelming emotion.
• Influence by the European Romantics, the English above all: the leader of the school Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi studied medicine in England for about ten years.
• His colleagues (Ibrahim Nagi, Ali Mahmoud Taha, Mohamed Abdel-Mouatti al-Hamshi, Saleh Jawdat…) mastered foreign languages and read European and Russian literature.
• Influence by the literature of Mahjar, above all the poetry of Gibrán Khalil Gibrán, which gave their verse a sharp emotional direction.
• The spirit of liberation: its poets felt the independence of the self and individual freedom, and were soaked in a revolutionary spirit ever since the 1919 revolution against the English occupation.

The name and the magazine

• "Apollo" comes from Apollo, the Greek god of light, art and beauty; taking this name itself shows the influence of foreign cultures.
• The school's poetry is tied to the appearance of its magazine "Apollo" in 1932, and in the same year the Apollo Society was formed and took the magazine's name.
• They adopted Khalil Mutran as their spiritual father.
• Only a little work of theirs had appeared before the magazine: Abu Shadi's first diwan "Calls of the Dawn", Ali Mahmoud Taha's poem in "al-Dastour" newspaper (1918), and the Tunisian Abu al-Qasim al-Shabibi's preface to his diwan "The Spring".
• But 1932 saw their real break-out and the publication of most of their diwans.

02Second: the artistic traits of the school of Apollo

1) The personal nature of the experience, and nostalgia

• Belief in the personal (subjective) nature of the poetic experience, and longing for the lands of memory.
• Example: Ibrahim Nagi remembering the house of his beloved, so his heart flutters and he weeps over the wounded past; and al-Hamshi in "The Withered Orange" recalling the memories of his youth.

2) A new language

• Using Arabic in a new way in word-sense, metaphor and image: "the lunar perfume", "the soft fragrance", "the weeping twilight", "the lost sailor", "the burnt breaths", "the lost paradise".
• Words frequent in their poetry: the field, the light, tyranny, death, time, perfume, fragrance, the sail, the sailor, blossom, rose, honey, exile, sunrise and sunset, twilight and horizon, the bank and the shore, the oasis.
• Embodiment (tajsid): turning abstractions from the conceptual into the sensory — as when Nagi says that yearning withered and folded itself away.
• Personification (tashkhis): giving a human quality to the non-human — as al-Hamshi's "the evening breeze steals a perfume".
• Symbol and agile words, and sometimes foreign words and myths: the carnival, Osiris, Venus, Akhenaten.
• Care for imagery — the palm, the light and the wind in Mahmoud Hassan Ismail, and mythical images in most of its poets.

3) Love of nature

• Devotion to nature, its beauty and intimate converse with it; their diwans and poems carry names that prove it: "Glimpses of Spring", "Rays and Shadows", "Return of the Shepherd", "Over the Waves", "The Spring" by Abu Shadi; "Songs on the Nile" by Saleh Jawdat; "Songs of the Cottage" by Mahmoud Hassan Ismail; "A Voice from the Sky" by Abu al-Qasim al-Shabibi.

4) Pessimism and sorrow

• Pessimism, surrender to pain and grief, contemplation and despair — so much that Mahmoud Hassan Ismail titled a diwan "Where Can I Flee?".
• There is no contradiction between loving nature and being pessimistic: they flee to nature away from pain and pour their sorrows into it.

5) A plurality of subjects

• Woman, the suffering of life's torment and injustice, nature, complaint, longing for memories, and the depiction of misery.
• Distance from political poetry, except for Abu Shadi who wrote much of it, and Ibrahim Nagi.

03Third: renewal in the form of the poem at Apollo

• Tendency to free the poem from a single rhyme by using many rhymes in one poem.
• Tendency to quiet music rather than loud music.
• Dividing the poem into stanzas whose rhymes and metres differ.
• Use of free verse (al-shi'r al-mursal) which keeps no single rhyme and employs more than one metre — the boldest being Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi in his poem "The Artist", and Saleh al-Sharnoubi who wrote "Glimpses" as free verse.
• Commitment to artistic unity in most of their work, like all Romantics: "The Shore of Araf" by al-Hamshi, "The Ruins" and "The Epic of the Mirage" by Nagi, "Tariq bin Ziyad" and "Souls and Ghosts" by Ali Mahmoud Taha.

04Fourth: the figures of the school

• From Egypt: Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi (the leader of the school), Ibrahim Nagi (the physician), Ali Mahmoud Taha (the engineer), Mohamed Abdel-Mouatti al-Hamshi, Mahmoud Hassan Ismail, Saleh Jawdat, Saleh al-Sharnoubi, Jamila al-Alayli, Hassan Kamil al-Sayrafi, Taher al-Tanahi, Mustafa Abdel-Latif al-Saharti, Mukhtar al-Wakil, Ahmed Rami, Kamal Nishat, Abdel-Rahman al-Khumaysi, Fouzi al-Antayil, Abdel-Aziz Atayqa.
• From the Arabs: Abu al-Qasim al-Shabibi and Mohamed al-Halaywi (Tunisia), Nazik al-Malaika in the early part of her life and al-Jawahiri (Iraq), Mohamed al-Mahjoub, Tawfiq al-Bakri and al-Tijani (Sudan), Fahad al-Askar, Ibrahim al-Aridis and Ahmed al-Adwani (Kuwait), Saqer al-Qasimi (Oman).
• From Mahjar: Elia Abu Madi and others.

05Fifth: the poet

• Mahmoud Hassan Ismail (1910–1977): an Egyptian poet.
• In his early phase his poetry was shaped by his rural upbringing and his love of the countryside, as appears in his diwan "Songs of the Cottage", by which he became known — he was called "the poet of the cottage".
• His poetic personality emerged very early, and he contributed to varifying the metres and the music of Arabic verse.
• His images are marked by range in metaphor, the layering of borrowed images, and often strangeness; the effect of that is softened by the strength of his feeling and the heat of his emotion.
• Many diwans were published for him; the most famous: "Songs of the Cottage", "Thus I Sing", "At a Bow's Two Lengths (Qab Qawsayn)" and "The River of Truth", from which this text was chosen.

06Sixth: the idea of the text and the meaning of homeland

The homeland in the text

• The homeland does not appear as a piece of land with borders, but as a living existence and a living world that fills the poet's feeling and overflows with life and movement, in which creatures beat with life.
• The phrase "ya kull… (O all…)" — a call plus the word "kull" (all) — recurs, followed by words from the world of sounds (a melody, a clap, a warble) that carry pleasing senses.
• The sources of these sounds are: the palate of the bird, the wave of the river, and the footsteps of the shepherds over the grass.
• The word "kull" expresses generality and shows the amount of joy and rapture that floods the poet.
• The first verse is the focus of the text: the homeland is everything he wishes for; in it is beauty in all its colours, and in it are magic and love.

Religious tolerance

• "To whom does the crescent raise its mosque? To whom does the cross show its temple?" — the mosque beside the church and the crescent alongside the cross.
• The children of one homeland are joined by love of it and readiness to defend it whatever the challenges.

The night as a symbol of ordeal

• The night is the occupation, the trials and the hardships that threaten the homeland; its tyranny grew strong, but the poet promises to scatter it.
• Everyone faces it: the shores, the flowers, the lives, the breeze, the wave, the bird, and the hands that light the lamp of progress and hopes.
• The means of resistance are not restricted to weapons — defending the homeland is an obligation on everyone belonging to it, by every possible means.
• And the poet brings back the dawn of the homeland from the hand of ordeal, shining like the sun above the world.

07Seventh: the two axes of the text and the order of its ideas

Axis one: love

• Speech about nature, the countryside above all: the singing of birds, the sound of the wave, the warbling of the shepherds — and about the beauty and magic of the homeland and the harmony and kindness of its people.
• He declares love from the very first words: "I love you, my homeland (ahwaak ya watani)" — a sentence repeated in the same structure or with some of its words, with a variation that deepens the love.

Axis two: sacrifice and ransom

• In the middle of the speech of love he turns to what the homeland is exposed to, and addresses it: "O rock that the winds of time weakened, while time itself was not weakened" — the winds grew weak and the rock stood firm.
• Then he returns to love, which reaches its peak in "and love in you is renewed by every beating heart".
• Then he returns to the challenges, and the talk of ransom comes: "however tyrannical the night becomes, O my homeland… we will scatter it".
• Everything in the homeland turns into the price of its freedom and dignity: its earth, its sky, and all between them.

08Eighth: vocabulary of the text

09Ninth: imagery and styles

Rhetorical images

• "What the lip of love tells satisfies me (fatni)" — a borrowed image: love is likened to a living being with a lip that quenches the poet's thirst and his yearnings.
• "Every melody in the bird's palate I play, and it plays me" — a reciprocal image: he plays the melody and the melody plays him, expressing his merger with the homeland.
• "The clap between the river's waves I hear answering me in song" — personification of the wave as though it sang in harmony with the poet and delighted him.
• "The sound of the shepherds' footsteps… enchants me" — the sound of footsteps becomes a warble that intoxicates him.
• "O rock that the winds of time weakened" — the homeland is likened to a rock against which the winds break, and the challenges are likened to storm winds.
• The crescent and the cross: two symbols of Islam and Christianity.
• "He seeks magic (al-sihr) from its magic" — asking enchantment of the land that is itself enchantment.
• The night: a borrowed image for ordeal and challenge, described as tyrannical and insolent, and as something that is torn and burned as if it were material.
• The resolve of the nation's children is likened to a fire that lays bare the darkness of the night.
• "Its melody makes me fragrant (u'attiruni)" — an interchange of the senses: what delights hearing is expressed by what delights smell.
• The homeland as a living being that sets its own steps on the road of progress; and hopes as plants set along the road by a hand that plants them.
• The night "goes too far", "we reap it", "we scatter it" — a thing that is reaped; then the dawn of the homeland is taken back from the hand of ordeal.

Styles

• Repeated invocation: "O my homeland", "O all…", "O rock".
• Interrogation: "To whom is the crescent's mosque, and to whom the cross's temple, and to whom the beauty?" — purpose: assertion and pride, not asking.
• Repetition of "I love you, my homeland", of "kull (all)" and "bi-kull (by every)" to confirm love and make it general.
• Verbal sentences that express action: we scatter it, we reap it, we tear it, we burn it, we bring back your dawn.
• The conditional structure: "however tyrannical the night becomes… we will scatter it".

10Tenth: music and artistic unity

• The poet varied the music of the poem, so it came out bewitching, with an agility that hints at love, happiness and optimism.
• Rhyme spreads as the fragrance of love and hope for the homeland, and varies between the stanzas, as is the custom of the school of Apollo.
• Artistic unity is achieved by unity of subject (the poet's love for his homeland and its lovely memories) and unity of psychological atmosphere (the overwhelming emotion of that love).
• The density and interweaving of images is a hallmark of Mahmoud Hassan Ismail, and it demands a special language rich in transferred and far-reaching metaphor.

11Eleventh: the traits of Apollo in this text

• Personal experience: the homeland is presented out of the poet's own feeling and emotion.
• Love of nature: the bird, the wave, the grass, the breeze, the flowers.
• A new language: interchange of the senses, personification, embodiment, symbol.
• Quiet music and varied rhyme.
• Artistic unity.
• But the text goes past the complaint usual in Romantic poetry to hope and defiance, and it belongs to national poetry.

12Twelfth: the values drawn from the text

• Love of the homeland and pride in belonging to it.
• Sacrifice and ransom of self and effort in its defence.
• National unity and tolerance between Muslims and Christians.
• Hope that tyranny and ordeal pass away and the dawn is recovered.
• Esteem for the beauty of nature and of the Egyptian countryside.

13Exam traps and key takeaways

• Apollo appeared in the early 1930s, and both its magazine and its society date to 1932 — do not move the school's birth to the date of any single diwan.
• Its streams are four: Mutran and the Revivalist-vs-Diwan battle · the European (English) Romantics, through Abu Shadi's ~10 years in England · Mahjar, above all Gibrán · the spirit of liberation born of the 1919 revolution.
• Mutran is their "spiritual father", not their founder; the founder-leader is Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi.
• Pessimism and love of nature do not contradict: nature is where they flee to pour out grief. A question may offer them as opposites.
• Form renewal: many rhymes in one poem · quiet music · stanzas of differing rhyme and metre · free verse · artistic unity. Free verse = no fixed rhyme AND more than one metre; the two examples are Abu Shadi's "The Artist" and al-Sharnoubi's "Glimpses".
• They avoided political poetry except Abu Shadi (and Nagi) — a tempting "all Apollo poets shunned politics" statement is wrong.
• Professions recur: Nagi the physician, Ali Mahmoud Taha the engineer, Abu Shadi the doctor; Mahmoud Hassan Ismail is known as "the poet of the cottage" from "Songs of the Cottage", and the text itself is taken from "The River of Truth".
• In the poem the homeland is a living being, not a bounded piece of land; "ya kull" is call + the general word "kull", signalling the breadth of joy.
• The questions "to whom is the crescent's mosque…" have the purpose of assertion and pride, not requesting information; the night is a symbol of the occupation and ordeal, and the crescent–cross pair is religious tolerance and national unity.
• Resistance here is not weapons alone — shores, flowers, lives, breeze, wave, birds and the hands kindling the lamp all take part; protecting the homeland is an obligation by every possible means.
• Imagery labels to keep separate: embodiment = abstraction made sensory (yearning withered) · personification = human quality given to the non-human (the breeze steals a perfume) · interchange of the senses = hearing described in the language of smell ("its melody makes me fragrant").
• Artistic unity here is unity of subject + unity of psychological atmosphere; and the text's special note is that it passes Romantic complaint into hope and defiance, making it national poetry.