Ahmad Shamlu is a prolific Persian poet of post-Mosaddeq Iran; and the most successful Persian poet to synthesize classical engage Persian poetry with the modernist innovations of western poetry. Critics in general note Shamlu's poetry to run parallel to the stages of modernist Persian poetics from Nima Yushij. However, Reza Baraheni has described Shamlu's work as a sociological study, even a biography of Iranian society over the past four decades or so. Below are excerpts of several of Shamlu's early poems, taken from an essay written by the late Armenean poet Leonardo P. Alishan. Personally, while I sympathize with his suffering, I cannot agree with many of his beliefs, particularly of the archetypical man being lord of his own universe. Abandoning hope in heaven doesn't grant one heaven on earth.

The context of his work places him in the position of an almost quixotic rebel - also a realist and humanist - with utmost respect for the revolutionary. Most telling, perhaps, is "She'ri keh Zendegi-st" (A Poetry That Is Life)

'Today

poetry

is the people's weapon;

For the poets

are but a branch from the forest of the people,

not jasmines and hyacinths of someone's greenhouse.

...

He writes poetry --

meaning,

he touches the wounds of the old city;

meaning,

he tells a tale

at night

of pleasant morning.

Shamlu, who used the nom de plume "Alef Sobh" [A. Morning] up to 1953 and henceforth, "Alef Bamdad" [A. Dawn], has always utilized "night" as a symbol of evil and oppression. Thus, when he states,

He writes poetry

meaning,

he opens sleeping eyes

toward

the rising morning...

he is clearly indicating that the poet's function is to "awaken" the people and to assure them of the inevitable "morning," the dawn of revolution and light.

In Bagh-e Ayeneh [Garden of Mirrors] (1960), Shamlu remained the Promethean rebel, but the revolutionary's zeal had subsided considerably. He still declared, like Prometheus, "I have cursed all the gods/as the gods/have cursed me. " But the people's continued passive and resigned attitude was now driving him toward despair:

We wrote and wept

We laughed and rose to dance

We roared and forfeited our lives....

No one heeded us.

...

Far away

they hanged a man.

No one raised his head to see.

...

We sat and wept

and, with a cry,

we vacated our frames.

Now he witnessed the sufferings and executions which had followed in the post-Mosaddeq trials, and felt the loneliness:

My unknown companions

fell like burnt stars

in such numbers

to the dark earth

that you'd think

the earth

remained

forever

a starless night.

And finally, the poet finds himself in a prison where the crimes of many of the other prisoners have stemmed from their abject poverty. His sole "crime" is that he knows who the real criminal is.

Love, a new theme introduced into Shamlu's engage poetry with Garden of Mirrors, now became his primary preoccupation, replacing his ideal people and audience. In "Az Shahr-e Sard" [From the Cold City] of Garden of Mirrors, the poet had so addressed his beloved, Ayda:

Make me invulnerable with the armor of your caress.

I will not succumb to darkness.

I have summarized the world in your small bright dress

and will not return

toward them.

O my written and unwritten poems!

Let there be no doubt

as to your royal reign

if she alone

remains your reader!

For she is my independence from petty merchants

and people alike

also from those whose sole motive for reading my poems

is to criticize me for their own dull minds.

And addressing the people, he wrote:

I am twice condemned to torture:

to live so,

and to live so

amongst you

with you

whom I have loved for so long.

In November 1964, during the protests and demonstrations which followed in Tehran and other cities, Shamlu realized that his passive people could move, but only when moved by what he considered the worst possible motive - religion. The people appear at the beginning of "The Tablet" as a languid octopus, stretching into the streets, and waiting with "anticipation/ and silence." Shamlu expands on his persona of the poet-prophet, a blend of a lyrical Jesus and an epic Moses, holds up to them a clay tablet which "speaks of compassion, friendship, and honesty." But the people who lack "an ounce of guts," prefer to wait for their religious messiah.

Gone are the times you wept in mourning

for your crucified Christ; now

every woman is a Mary

and every Mary has a Jesus on a cross

though with no crown of thorns, no cross, no Golgatha,

no Pilate, no judges, no courts of justice;

Jesuses with similar fates,

Jesuses with similar souls,

uniformed Jesuses,

with boots and leggings of the same kind--

the same kind,

with equal shares of bread and gruel

(for Equality is the precious heritage of Mankind!)

And if there is no crown of thorns

there is a helmet to wear on your head;

And if there is no cross to bear on your shoulder,

there is a rifle

(the means of greatness

all at hand.)

And every supper

may well be The Last Supper

and every look

the look of a Judas.

....

And, alas, no more is the way of the cross

an ascent to Heaven

for it is a descent to Hell

and the eternal wanderings of the soul.

But the people do not seem to heed the poet-prophet's call for a secular struggle. They disagree with his view of religion as a "sin" in our times. And the speaker realizes the futility of his appeals:

I now knew that they waited

not for a clay tablet

but for a book

and for a sword

and for guards to assault them

with whips and maces

and drop them to their knees

before the steps of the one

who would descend the dark stairway

with a sword and a book.

Fully aware that his reader knows Islam is the religion of the sword and the book, Shamlu attacks it, an attack which gains significantly in its bitterness while adding to Shamlu's loneliness, bitterness, and need for Ayda's assuring love.

Shamlu eventually transformed his persona from a public poet-prophet to a sensitive, often helpless, and seldom silent observer who was not only a witness to the "crime" but was also a victim, an observer who refused to compromise his conscience. Ebrahim dar Atash [Abraham in the Fire] (1973) depicted a sick and static, a morbid and lifeless society. The first poem of this collection, "Shabaneh" [Nocturnal], was an appropriate prelude to the poems which followed:

There is no door

there is no road

there is no night

there is no moon

neither day

nor sun.

We

are standing outside

time

with a bitter dagger

stuck in our spine.

No one

talks

to anyone

for silence

is speaking

in a thousand

tongues.

We fix our looks

on our dead

with the sketch of a grimace

and wait our turns

deadly

serious!

For a time, he leaves on a self-imposed exile to America and Britain. Returning to Iran after the Shah had been deposed, he began writing articles and giving interviews wherein he attempted to make certain that the meaning of the line "to be deserving of freedom" was properly understood, only to find the ulama had hijacked the revolution; and it was doomed to repeat the history of the oppressed becoming the oppressor. Being an staunch, outspoken critic of the ulama as well as Iran's religious culture, it no doubt took great courage not to consider a second period of exile. In "Dar In Bonbast" [In This Dead-End] he gives a powerful and clear picture of post-revolutionary Iran:

(Translated by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak)

They smell your mouth

lest you might have said: I love you,

they smell your heart:

Strange times, my dear.

They flog love by the road-block:

Let's hide love in the larder.

In this crooked blind alley, at the turn of the chill

they feed fires

with logs of song and poetry.

Hazard not a thought:

Strange times, my dear.

There, butchers

posted in passageways

with bloody chopping blocks and cleavers:

Strange times, my dear.

And they chop smiles off lips,

and songs off the mouth:

Let's hide love in the larder.

Canaries barbecued

on a fire of lilies and jasmines:

Strange times, my dear.

Satan, drunk with victory

squats at the feast of our undoing.

Let's hide God in the larder.

Yet, he refused to give up on hope. In "Khatabeh-ye Asan, dar Omid" [A Simple Sermon on Hope] (1980), the longest poem of this collection, he reaffirmed his humanistic belief and anthropocentric optimism:

To live

and offer prayers

to the exalted lordship of Man on earth;

to live

and to perform miracles

or else

what is your birth but the memory of a futile pain,

just as your death

just as the passing of your barren mule train

through the desert distance between your birth and death.

...

And for Shamlu, "the ultimate miracle" was "to be just." However, this collection also appropriately ended with a Shabaneh [Nocturnal] poem, at the end of which the tired poet asked, "Has it always been like this?/Is it always like this?".

Despite the fact that for the past couple of years the Khomeini regime has not allowed the publication of any new poems by Shamlu, he continues to write. He writes because of an overwhelming "burning urge" which he compares to the powerful sexual urges of a young man. He writes because for him the poem has "an instantaneous life" which it demands from the poet as a fully developed fetus would from its mother. Shamlu writes because he is doomed to write and damned to remain "the conscience of mankind, even if mankind pays no attention." Finally, Shamlu writes because he "needs to shout or to whimper, and shouting or whimpering are manifestations of protest and signs of life."

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