Keats and Byron

     
      In evening of 5th, November 1979, I went to see Shaw's You Never CanTell at the Lyric-Hammersmith, London. The usher, Caroline Murphy whom I befriended later, wondered how could Shaw interest foreigners because, she thought, his themes, humour and issues are so domestic and local that they appealled only to British people. Caroline, as you could tell from her surname, Murphy, was originally Irish and he had a paper on Shaw's Major Barbara which contributed to his promotion to professership. He always praised Shaw and when I pointed to him one day that Eric Bentley advocated Shaw, AlWakil lamented the situation that with the exception of Bentley and very few scholars Shaw was undervalued and victimised. AlWakil one day praised Shaw by saying that "The Don Juan in Hell" scene in Shaw's Man and Superman read like a Mozartian symphony, speaking in Arabic: اصلا جنك دتسمع موزارت. AlWakil championed Shaw because Shaw's socialism and anti-Britishism appealled to AlWakil's communism But AlWakil always struck to be knowledgable of English literature. When we were 4th year finalists, he introduced to the curriculum the subject of Oral Test and he told us that at the end of the year he was going to test us. "In what?", we asked, and he said, "Any English literature book." So we, about 60+ students went our ways, each choosing a book, and at the end of the year, we, one by one, went to sit for a test before him and each one of us had read a book in English literature. My book was Shaw's St Joan. The questions AlWakil put to me about St Joan and Shaw showed someone in the know Indeed, I fail to recall that AlWakil spoke one complete English sentence. It was all Baghdadi, in fact, Hillawi vernacular he spoke formally in-class, sprinkled, when the occasion arose, with technical terminology like rhyme, rhythm, blank verse, alexandrine, irony, etc ... But Wordsworth left no man he knew in London without reciprocated hard feelings, and, finding that there was no friend around, he went to live in seclusion in the Lakes District. Conversing on the same topic with AlWakil one morning, Al-Wakil commented in Arabic. By the way, AlWakil, even in class when I was his student, hardly spoke in English. He spoke in Arabic even when teaching us Beowulf and Chaucer. Only technical terminology like: simile, metaphor, alliteration, caesura, allegory, allusion, etc ... he said them in English, usually writing them on the black-board rather than actually pronouncing them. He said about Wordsworth ليش هوا خلا واحد ما اتناوشا Keats and Byron reciprocated hate and despise. They quarrelled over--among many things--Pope whom Keats detracted and Byron praised. They were both self-conscious of their social backgrounds. Keats, the grass-root man attributed, mainly unfairly, Byron's popularity by saying, "You see what it is to be 6 foot and lord", and Byron teased Keats by saying, "Poetry is the provenance of the nobleman".