Poetry

Unknown Narrator

This speaker moves through the collection as mourner, pilgrim, and prophet—kissing a dead friend's brow in one poem, passing a secret cup to a blind medieval poet in another, and watching the White Way's electric towers argue with the ancient Night. Grief and grandeur pull against each other in him: he dares not weep beside Esau's amber locks, yet insists 'Thou shalt rise and thou shalt live in me.' His voice is the thread that binds Lebanon's cedars to Manhattan's skyline, making the whole book a single continuous meditation on loss, inheritance, and what poetry can resurrect.

Allah

Addressed directly in 'Prayer in the Desert' and hymned in 'The Song of Rain,' Allah appears less as doctrine than as the force that answers thirst—'a little rain, a little rain' becomes the refrain of a whole parched people. The tension is between drought and deliverance: the faithful lie prostrate, pierced by flaming darts, begging the Bestower to sustain his 'sun-crowned Daughter.' He matters because the collection's geography of longing—sand, simoom, palm, and stone—only makes sense as a landscape waiting on his mercy.

Alcazar

Personified as a woman of shifting moods—her throne shared by bard and saki, her feet hennaed, her gardens forever blooming—Alcazar carries the memory of Arab Spain at its most sensuous and precarious. The tension lies in what her lyric interludes cannot hold: feuds stain the same throne that wine consecrates, and Melancholy haunts the opalescent rhyme she evades. She matters because she gives the Andalusia sequence its beating heart, transforming architectural ruin into a living, dancing, grieving figure whose splendor the later poems can only mourn.

Zahra

In the 'Al-Zahra' section she stands as the counter-argument to mere glamour: neither Orient rhapsody nor fickle rumor could prolong her reign, only the maxims her sovereigns wrought and the midnight oil Averroes burned. Her distinctive tension is between sensual beauty and intellectual legacy—she is 'the bearer of the light' even as Oblivion reaps through the mihrabs. She matters because she reframes the whole Andalusia elegy: what survives is not the rose and bulbul but the transmitted flame, making her the collection's quiet answer to decay.

Khamsin

Khamsin moves through the poems as both destroyer and herald—passing in phantasmagoric waves over shifting dunes, through shattered orbs and barren caves, yet carrying a message of renewal rather than ruin. The tension is in its doubleness: it is the simoom that threatens to bury the faithful, and also the storm through which a spirit wings its flight across phosphorescent gulfs of night. It matters because it gives the collection its central paradox—devastation as the very vehicle of rebirth—and its most vivid image of Arabia's harsh, holy climate.

Hanem

In 'Water and Flowers' she is the counterweight to the desert's vast hungers—a presence whose nearness turns verdure into an arbor for love and water into a place of blessing. The tension is between restless questing and the quiet refuge she represents: the speaker begs her to cease seeking 'the mountains of the blest' and rest where love actually grows. She matters because she grounds the collection's mysticism in tenderness, reminding the reader that the sacred is sometimes simply a nest built near springs, with flowers laid down today.