Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/172

 clan, even where personal forethought might have averted it, is an expression of communal sympathy curiously contrasting with the personal lyric for which our modern literatures have made such wide room. The Arab knows the folly of his clansmen, but he will die by their collective folly rather than live by his individual wisdom; and so the poem goes on, "I fought as a man who gives his life for his brother's life, who knows that his time is short, that Death's doom above him hangs. But, know ye if Abdallah be gone and his place a void; no weakling unsure of hand, no holder-back was he!"

But it would be a mistake to suppose that early Arab poetry contains no indications of personal quarrels with the clan, that the clansman's self-sacrificing devotion was never weakened by any sense of injustice experienced at the hands of his kindred. Lest the reader should carry away any such mistaken impression, we shall here offer one more specimen from the Hamâseh which will illustrate the conflict of personal with communal action; and it is worth noticing how the subject of the dispute is the defence of personal property by the clansman's kindred.

Certain men of the Benû Sheybân had fallen upon the herds of Qureyt, son of Uneyf, of the Bel-ʿAmbar, and carried off thirty of his camels. So he asked for help of his kin the Bel-ʿAmbar, but they helped him not. Then he betook himself to the men of Mâzin; and a company of these went forth with him and drove away a hundred camels of the herds of Sheybân, and gave them to him and guarded him until he came to his tribe. Upon this incident the following poem, which is the first of the Hamâseh, was composed.

Had I been a son of Mâzin,

Never had my herds been ta'en

By the sons of Dhuhl of Sheylân,

Sons of children of the dust.