Third: renewal in the structure of the poem

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.