We recognize that there is an invisible thread that binds together love poems so remotely separated by time and place as those of the medieval Persians, Arabs and Troubadours, and the modern English poets.
The Arabic note of ecstasy is found even in the poems of Goethe, especially in a few in his _West Eastern Divan_, influenced by his studies of Oriental literature during the Napoleonic wars. He used his own experiences with eastern names, but he never failed to produce literature of ecstasy. The Oriental romance also exerted an influence on Beckford, Landor, Southey, Byron and Moore. Even Tennyson got the idea of _Locksley Hall_ from reading Sir William Jones's prose translation of the _Muallaqat_; Browning adopted an Arabian metre in his _Abt Vogler_; George Meredith's _The Shaving of Shagpat_ was written to emulate the _Arabian Nights_.
The Arabs excelled also in the elegy. Among the most famous elegies in Arabic poetry are those of Khansa, a Pre-islamic poetess, on the murder of her two brothers. There is an account of her by Thomas C. Chenery, in the notes to his translation of Hariri's _Assemblies_ V. 1, pp. 387-391. In fact the elegy is more common among early Pre-islamic poetry than the love poem. The Orientals, particularly the medieval Hebrews, were always distinguished in this kind of poetry. One of the best, certainly the best in Turkish poetry, is the elegy by Baqui on the great Sultan Suleiman I, translated by E. J. W. Gibb in _Ottoman Poetry_.
The Arabian love poems and elegies are proofs that poetry was originally, as to-day, a personal cry, an outburst of emotion due to repression. The cry of grief for the dead in battle; that is the note in all early literature, Occidental and Oriental.
The poem among the Arabs and Hebrews had also a definite utilitarian purpose. In early times satire was one of the chief forms under which lyric poetry appeared. The poet was employed to combat the enemy and his curses against them were supposed to be effective. He was a soothsayer, a prophet, a magician. He voiced not only the communistic feeling of the tribes, but his personal emotions. Even down to our day the public demands that the poet write poems against the enemy in time of war. Goethe was criticized for refusing to write against the French, for example, but he explained later to Eckermann that he had no hatred towards the French. In all wars there have been poets who have written against the enemy, but usually this kind of poetry has been of an inferior order. It finds its own tomb in a poem like the famous _Hymn of Hate_ by Lissauer in the late world war.