Hassan Jalal Weshah

The Hymns of the Last Twilight Hassan Jalal Weshah

The Hymns of the Last Twilight is a collection of poetry in which the poet combines elements of nature with his own sense of loss and exile. The poet's selection of beautiful images creates a distant land of aesthetic pleasure. It is divided into three parts; Memories, Longing and Confessions. Each part contains a number of poems. The spontaneous outpouring of nostalgia defines the general tenor of the poems contained in the first section, Memories. The deep sense of loss of the sweet and happy days spent in the communion of Nature as well as in the company of the beloved ones characterizes the recurring theme of the Memories. The pang of grief and agony keeps haunting the very psyche of the poet and a nice piece of poetry emerges out of it. The second section, Longing, too, expresses the poet's sense of personal loss of romantic love. He feels agonized when he finds that he is not one with his beloved. Some undefined powers have set them apart to suffer the trauma. But still he finds solace in the world of his own imagination. In the last stanza of his poem Let those Birds Sing, for instance, an optimistic voice is heard: "For reasons we do sometimes migrate/ When seasons do change in time, my dear! / But time and space are none, I state / Our souls by love are linked forever". The last section, Confessions, is markedly imprinted on the poet's consciousness. He acutely feels the festering wounds of his beloved country - strife-torn, thoroughly devastated, shorn of all values, only mad and blind pursuit for achieving nothing and pushing it into abyss of total destruction, everlasting gloom. To the poet, the world is totally fragmented, scattered and broken into pieces.