Lesson 5: "The Eagles" by Mohamed Ibrahim Abu Sunna and the New Realist School

01First: the new (realist) school and the conditions that led to it

• The Romantic direction stayed dominant in Arabic poetry between the two world wars (the First 1914–1918 and the Second 1939–1945) — among the poets of al-Diwan, al-Mahjar and Apollo.
• Then new political, social, economic and cultural factors arose in Arab life which weakened the poets' pull towards Romanticism and turned them towards realism in varying degrees.
• In their first phase the poets of the new poetry still mixed in something of Romanticism, influenced by their predecessors — but they turned to the public life around them.
• Theirs most prominent: Salah Abdel-Sabour, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Mohamed Ibrahim Abu Sunna and Farouk Shousha.

02Second: renewal in content and subject

1) Painting the worries of people

• The new poets depicted people's worries, problems, hopes and aspirations.
• Example: Abu Sunna in "The Questions of the Trees" treats the position of the twentieth-century human torn between reaching for a passing material gain and holding on to enduring values.
• The trees ask him at night to throw himself into the current of a river coming from the depths of despair; he then dialogues with his heart: "What is the meaning of paradise?" — and the heart answers that he should travel inside himself until he reaches the human, then his homeland, then God.

2) Poetry as adherence to reality

• They understood poetry as adherence to reality, a feeling for it, and expression of it in all its faces: sincerity and falseness, progress and backwardness, joy and despair.
• And for what is in it of struggle between freedom and slavery, justice and oppression and the rest of life's contradictions.
• Example: Salah Abdel-Sabour in "Torn Seasons (Fousoul Muntaza'a)".

3) Death and the end

• They spoke of the end and death, as in al-Sayyab's poem "Night of Parting (Laylat Wada')".

4) A plurality of subjects

• Humanity's stance towards the universe, history and myths; the affairs of the homeland; and the reviving of heritage.
• Example: Salah Abdel-Sabour drawing on the saying of Ubayd bin al-Abras in "the time has come for the ray to set".

03Third: renewal in the structure of the poem

1) Living language

• They used the living language we hear in people's speech — visible in their diwan titles such as "People in My Land (al-Nas fi Biladi)" by Salah Abdel-Sabour, and in phrases like "until we meet (ila al-liqa')", "once upon a time (kana yama kan)" and "I sleep on my mother's lap (anamu 'ala hijr ummi)".
• Some of them overused colloquial and foreign words, to loosen the grip of classical dictionary language and purely formal aesthetics.
• For the realists style is a means and not an end, and the weight falls on logic and the sequence of events; so they kept away from flat statement, oratory and direct expression.

2) Image, symbol and myth

• Care for the image and the employment of symbol and myth — as Abu Sunna did in "The Questions of the Trees", making the trees an entry for depicting the materialism creeping over the modern human: a coming river that sweeps people away, and poverty in the shape of a ghoul people flee from.
• Another example: Farouk Shousha in "The Tide of the Sea (Madd al-Bahr)", painting people's absorption in themselves — grief crouching over the houses and hanging from spider-threads, the question bold-eyed, and the clouds raining sorrows.
• The image is not confined to the partial (simile, borrowed image, kinaya, metonymy) but extends to the total, unfolding images.
• The symbol and the mythic use produced a degree of obscurity in some experiences.

3) Objective unity

• They built the poem as an objective unity in which ideas, meanings, feelings, images and music combine into one complete, developing structure.
• The structure resembles the architectural build of a story or a play with its parts and units; they divided it into paragraphs, each with its own role, and it demands attention and follow-up from the reader.

4) Music and the active foot (taf'ilah)

• The music of poetry is one of the most important foundations of this school.
• The traditional line rests on the equality of its two halves; the new poetry rests its music on a repeating musical unit — the taf'ilah (active foot) — without committing to a fixed number of them in each line and without two halves.
• A line may consist of one foot or several; for that reason it is called the poetic line (sattr sha'ri), not the house (bayt).
• Lines differ in length and shortness, and the reference point is the completion of the expression of the sentence or meaning.
• Its poets gave up the single rhyme to avoid dullness and affectation, so rhymes vary between the stanzas.
• Example from "The Tide of the Sea": the line varies between four feet, three, two and one, and the rhyme alternates between a silent ta after a long vowel (waw) and a silent lam after the long vowel.

04Fourth: the poet

• Mohamed Ibrahim Abu Sunna was born in 1937 in a village of al-Saf district, Giza governorate, in the Egyptian countryside.
• He witnessed the transformations of Egyptian society and the events of Arab society and engaged with them.
• He is among the most prominent poets of the second generation of the pioneers of the new poetry.
• He published eight diwans, among them "The Sea Is Our Appointment", "Meditations in the Stone Cities", "Bells of the Evening", "My Heart and the Giraffe in the Blue Dress (Qalbi wa-Ghazilat al-Thawb al-Azraq)", "Mirrors of the Distant Day" — besides two plays and some studies.

05Fifth: vocabulary of the text

06Sixth: the general idea and the two methods

• The experience rests on four positions that make clear two methods of living for the human being.
• The first method stands on pride, freedom, ambition, elevation above the easy demands of life, and reaching for what is more enduring and more everlasting.
• The second method is a life of comfort, simplicity, inertness and absorption in satisfying the instinct of hunger, with surrender to cowardice and fear and the waiting for death.
• The people of the first method go on through the wide horizons, certain that someone lies in wait for their deeds and wants to destroy them — and yet they remain in their pride.

07Seventh: the four positions

Position one (paragraph 1): the eagles remember

• Ambitious human beings are depicted as eagles: free, ranging, looking towards the high mountains.
• The eagles remember the plains and their green, their pools, and the rabbits leaping in the grass like pearls — while hunger burns their insides.
• Yet they insist on looking to difficulties that are almost impossible, so they rise above it and soar like suns that slipped out of their orbits.
• Then the horizon becomes their property, the stars their lighthouses, eternity their scheme — and they take the pride that killed their hunger.
• So they forget the dust of the plains, the green of the fields and the stretch of the sands.

Position two (paragraph 2): the rabbits

• An opposite picture: in the deep narrow pass the rabbits squat waiting for a fate bristling with death.
• They eat their grass by fleeing into the burrow, and tremble with fear among the shadows.
• A life of cowardice, fear and permanent surrender.

Position three (paragraph 3): awareness of the danger

• The eagles free in the horizon know their own death: eyes lie in wait for them, and spearheads come in succession behind spearheads.
• That is, they are conscious of being watched and of standing in the place of attack by the spiteful.

Position four (paragraph 4): insistence on the summit

• They grow more proud of themselves and more confident; they raise their heads and soar, they climb high and flutter with triumph.
• They do not remember the green of the plains and their good — instead they track the roses of the summits in the far reaches of space, and the dream of perfection.
• They go on to the summit however their conditions change between success and failure, without looking back.
• Note the contrast: in the first paragraph they remembered the easy comfort, and in the last they do not remember it, absorbed in the summit and eternity.

08Eighth: the symbols and the images

The symbol

• The eagles: ambition, freedom, dignity, insistence — and all that the eagle suggests of strength, far sight, sharpness of vision, being the highest-flying and strongest-winged of birds.
• The poet used its plain name "eagles" and not its nicknames (such as "father of the black" or "father of the finger"), and used the plural form described as "the free ones (al-taliqa) three times, to suggest ambitious, gifted, free and proud human beings.
• The rabbits: inertness, weakness, cowardice and clutching at life — they are known for fear, panic and love of food.
• Symbols of elevation: the mountains, the impossible, the suns, the stars, the lighthouses, eternity, space, the summits.
• Symbols of inertness: the plains, the deep narrow pass, the shadows, the burrow.
• All the symbols aim to bring out the high meanings a human being should take on.

The images

• New poetry relies on the total, unfolding image, not only the partial one, and joins the image to the symbol.
• Partial borrowed images: the eagles, the rabbits, space, the horizon, the mountains, "hunger burns their insides", "they take pride".
• The eagles are likened to suns and stars in height and independence of course.
• The obscurity that appears in some images clears up quickly under attentive reading.

Drawing on heritage

• "Tremble with fear" is drawn from the Qur'anic verse "the day the trembler trembles (yawm tarjifu al-rajifa)" — suggesting extreme panic.
• "The spearheads succeeding one behind the other" is drawn from the old saying "the spearheads broke upon the spearheads (takassarat al-nisal 'ala al-nisal)" — suggesting resistance and insistence.

09Ninth: the qualities of style and music

• Suggestive language, far from directness and flat statement.
• Plurals: the poet uses plural forms because he is dealing with a matter of humanity in our age, in two fields — greatness (eagles, mountains, suns, stars, spearheads, heads, summits, lighthouses) and comfort (rabbits, fields, plains, shadows, pools).
• Tibaq (true contrast): "climb high and flutter (ta'lu wa-takhfaq)" to balance a thing against its opposite.
• Muqabala (extended contrast): "the free eagles in space" against "the squatting rabbits in the deep narrow pass".
• Repetition for confirmation of meaning: "the free eagles…" three times, "the horizon" three times, "the free ones" three times, "the plains" three times.
• The present tense verb spreads to show renewal and continuation of the act: for the ambitious — lies in wait, soars, climbs high, raises; for the inert — leaps, eats, trembles, together with the active participle "squatting (qabi'a)" — so the difference between the two positions is confirmed.
• The music of the taf'ilah: short and long lines according to the completion of the emotional flow, and varied rhymes with no commitment to a single one.
• Objective unity and the unity of a psychological atmosphere built on the conflict between the two methods of life.

10Tenth: the traits of new poetry in this text

• The use of suggestive language and the distance from flat statement.
• The symbol on which the whole text rests.
• The total unfolding image alongside the partial one.
• Drawing on heritage inside the phrases.
• The poetic line, the taf'ilah and varied rhymes in place of the traditional bayt.
• Objective unity within a developing structure.
• Care for a contemporary human question: the conflict of ambition with inertness.

11Eleventh: the values drawn from the text

• Ambition, pride and rising above the petty things of life.
• Insistence on reaching the summit despite those who lie in wait and despite the hardships.
• Rejection of inertness, cowardice, surrender and clutching at a humiliated life.
• Reaching towards eternity and the highest ideals.
• Freedom, self-respect and confidence in oneself.

12Exam traps and key takeaways

• The realist turn came after the Second World War: Romanticism ruled between the two wars (al-Diwan, Mahjar, Apollo). Do not date realism to the 1920s.
• Its four named poets are Salah Abdel-Sabour, al-Sayyab, Abu Sunna and Farouk Shousha; Abu Sunna belongs to the second generation of the pioneers, not the first.
• Early new-poetry texts keep some Romanticism — "total break with Romanticism" is wrong; the change is one of degree.
• Renewal is in content (people's worries · adherence to reality · death and the end · many subjects) and in structure (living language · symbol and myth · objective unity · taf'ilah music) — a question can ask which category an item belongs to.
• Definition to remember: the new line rests on the repetition of the taf'ilah, with no fixed number of feet, no two equal halves; hence it is called the poetic line (sattr) and not the house (bayt), and line length is judged by the completion of the meaning.
• Style is a means, not an end for them; weight falls on logic and sequence of events — which is why they avoid oratory and direct statement.
• Symbols of elevation and inertness must not be mixed: mountains, suns, stars, lighthouses, space, summits, eternity vs plains, the deep narrow pass, shadows, the burrow.
• Abu Sunna chose the plain name "eagles" instead of its nicknames and repeated "the free ones" three times — purpose: suggesting gifted, free, proud human beings.
• The four positions run: remembering → the rabbits → awareness of danger → insistence on the summit; the structural trick is that paragraph 1 remembers the comfort of the plains and paragraph 4 no longer does.
• Two heritage echoes with fixed purposes: "the day the trembler trembles" → extreme panic; "the spearheads broke upon the spearheads" → resistance and insistence.
• Style evidence: plurals (because the theme is a matter of humanity), tibaq in "climb high and flutter", muqabala of eagles against rabbits, the present tense for continuation, the active participle "squatting" for the inert.
• Obscurity is a cost of symbol and myth, but in this text it clears under attentive reading — do not call the poem deliberately hermetic.