Textual Intentions: A Reading Of Adonis' Poem “Unintended Workship Ritual”

In his long poem entitled “Quddās bi-lā qasd” (Unintended Worship Ritual), the well-known Syrian–Lebanese poet Adonis (Dr. 'Ali Ahmad Sa'īd) celebrates a love relationship with a young woman he came to know while he was a professor at the Syrian University in Damascus. He mentions two dates and two cities at the end of the poem, suggesting perhaps that he began writing the poem in Damascus in January of 1976 and that he finished it in Beirut in August of 1978. He had moved to Damascus from Beirut during the early years of the Lebanese Civil War and accepted a teaching position at the Syrian University, but he later returned to Beirut, where his home had been since he had left his native Syria to become a Lebanese citizen in 1956. The same young woman also inspired him to write a much shorter undated poem entitled “Awwal al-ijtiya” (The Beginning of Sweeping Annihilation) in which his passionate love is expressed in terms of a deep desire to be natural, to give vent to the powers within the self, and to remove what he considers to be the constraints of hypocritical, repressive sociocultural conventions in Arab society.