The Response to Nature in Arabic Poetry

Abstract

THROUGHOUT this study the terms for nature, to nature, and shall be limited to such attitudes toward inanimate nature as are not primarily caused or conditioned by the practical needs of human life. While obviously many an individual approach or reaction to nature may have remained inarticulate, the general directives and restrictions imposed by convention on the range of his selfexpression are not likely to have overly obscured the poet's feelings, since these frequently stand revealed through such slight indications as, for example, the choice of epitheton or metaphor, in which the poet enjoyed considerably more freedom than in the selection of subject matter. If now we compare the part accorded to feeling for nature in Arabic poetry down to about A.D. 1000-and, therewith, indirectly the part played by an aesthetical or sentimental response to nature in the Arab's spiritual economy-with the part accorded it in Western poetry since the Renaissance, it becomes evident that, on the whole, nature means considerably less to the Arab than to the occidental artist, both as source and as object of his inspiration.' The detailed analysis of the Arab Naturgefiihl as attempted on the following pages should be read in the light of the fact that the poesy of nature does not, in the realm of Arab literature, hold the importance it attained in the literatures of the west.