On “His Dark Elation”

Al-Shamardal ibn Sharīk belonged to the Tamim. Alive toward the end of the first/seventh century and into the early decades of the second/eighth century, he, along with his brothers, participated in the wars of conquest in Khurāsān: during this campaign three of his brothers lost their lives. He died after 109/727–8. His poetry on hunting themes was held in high esteem.

The poets of pre-Islamic Arabia (ca. 500-622 CE) lived in a world in which they were hunted by Fate. Fate, and its avatar Death, stalked them remorselessly, ready, like a hunter, to spring an ambush or, like a predator, to launch an attack. The hunt emerges in the poetry of the period as a foundational conceptual matrix within which the worth of men and the value of their deeds were assessed and turned into song. A successful kill represented a temporal climax in which the hunter mimicked and appropriated the workings of Fate—a fleeting instant in which the hunter was master of his identity. With the advent of Islam this matrix was eventually fine-tuned, but persisted without much alteration—it was now God who set man’s destiny.

Our poem describes the nocturnal depredations of a wolf, persistently attacking the poet’s flock at night, while his comrades sleep. Called on to face the unknown, he engages the wolf in single combat. This poem is also conspicuous for its narrative—traditionally, according to a now-outmoded Western critical commonplace, early Arabic poetry was marked by its avoidance of narrative.