Please choose one of the following topics to address in a three-page paper due Tuesday, March 11 at 5pm. Please send me (slieb@middlebury.edu) your draft as a pdf file. Regardless of which topic you choose, you must support all of your arguments with appropriate and accurate citations from the poetry that you have read.
1.
Rain has deep resonances in the poetic imagination of the Arab bedouin. We have seen it appear at critical junctures in the poems of the pre-Islamic bedouin. Rain is no less pregnant with meaning in recently composed nabati poetry, although its associations may have shifted in the intervening 1500 years.
Please analyse the representation of rain in Arabian poetry using the texts that you have read in Desert Tracings, Arabia of the Bedouins (poems by al-Dindān), Nabaṭi Poetry (“The Sociocultural Setting”), Poetry and Politics in Contemporary Bedouin Society and the mu’allaqa of Imruʾ al-Qays. Describe what the different manifestations of rain evoke in each poem as well as the metaphoric associations that surround them. You may want to analyse how rain is treated in the three movements of the qasída and how its treatment in each is related to the archetypal narratives of rite-of-passage and vengeance. Finally, you may examine how the representation of rain in 20th century nabati poetry differs from its pre-Islamic predecessor. You do not need analyse every reference to rain that you have come across, just those that seem to be particularly illustrative of the points you wish to make.