The Entertainers: Famed Poets and Musicians of Moorish Spain

By Lisa Yarde

When the Moors invaded Spain in the eighth century, they brought the classical traditions of a rich culture steeped in the arts of poetry and music for two centuries. Before Islam, Arabian culture celebrated music and poetry, but the Prophet Muhammad disapproved of the arts so linked to lingering pagan practices. In Andalusia, the Moorish descendants of Arabian, Berber and Spanish peoples developed varying styles of music, like the nubah, as well as the risqué muwashshah and zajal poetry, which they set to song. Later, the courtiers of Moorish Spain composed qasidas to commemorate important events and extoll the virtues of their patrons.

The nubah involved a group of people singing verses individually, accompanied by bow-stringed instruments and drums. The muwashshah typically has three line stanzas with a recurring rhyme, introduced at the beginning. The zajal was a spontaneous form of short poems, sung in stanzas and followed by a different rhyme each time. Many of the themes in both poetic forms expressed ideals of religious duty but more often, beauty, sensual pleasures or love, typically lost love. The qasidas were the longest form of all, at least 50 lines that rhymed.

Oud player

Ziryab is the father of the Hispano-Arab musical styles of the Moorish period and founded the nubah tradition.  He was born in Iraq in the early ninth century, and may have been Kurdish or of mixed Arab and African descent. He lived in the cultural capital of the eastern Muslim world at Baghdad and trained under another musician until he surpassed his master. A dangerous rivalry developed and Ziryab wisely left for Moorish Spain. A year later, he met his patron, the Ummayad prince Abd ar-Rahman II at the capital in Cordoba. The prince paid Ziryab a monthly salary of 200 gold dinars, which the musician spent on his richly decorated home and costly brocades.  He also founded a school in Cordoba, where he taught fellow musicians. Ziryad also improved the oud, more commonly known as the lute in medieval European society, by adding a fifth red string between the second and third ones. Click here for a sample of the oud played in composition with the guitar and drums, similar to music of the twelfth century in Moorish Spain.

Nearly two centuries after Ziryab, in 1001, the Caliph of Cordoda fathered a child, Wallada. Historians have described her as beautiful, with fair skin, light or blue eyes or blonde hair. In her mid-twenties, her father died and since he had no living sons, Wallada inherited all his property. She used this wealth to build a home where she entertained guests and dazzled them with her poetry. Wallada never married but she did take an equally famed lover, the poet Ibn Zaydun. As the pair were from rival clans, their love affair was a risk but neither cared for the consequences. Nine of Wallada’s letters to Ibn Zaydun have survived. They demonstrate a passionate, but tumultuous relationship that ended bitterly and with some regret for their lost love. A monument to their love exists in Cordoba.

Monument to Wallada and Ibn Zaydun

At the beginning, the lovers enjoyed the following poetic exchange:

Wallada
The nights now seem long to me, and I complain night after night
That only those were so short, which I once spent with you

Ibn Zaydun
Your passion has made me famous among high and low your face devours my feelings and thoughts.
When you are absent, I cannot be consoled, but when you appear, my all my cares and troubles fly away.

When Wallada later feared that Ibn Zaydun had fallen in love with one of her slaves, she recited:
If you had been truly sincere in the love, which joined us, you would not have preferred, to me, one of my own slaves.
 In so doing, you scorned the bough, which blossoms with beauty and chose a branch, which bears only hard and bitter fruit.
 You know that I am the clear, shining moon of the heavens but, to my sorrow, you chose, instead, a dark and shadowy planet.

Eventually, the pair reconciled, but the renewal of their lovers’ vows did not last. 

Alhambra Palace

In the final flowering of Moorish Spain’s power, a bitter rivalry between two court poets culminated in the violent deaths of both men. In the mid-fourteenth century, the Andalusian poet-vizier Ibn al-Khatib served several of the rulers of Granada, the last bastion of Spanish Islam. He had a protégé, Ibn Zamraq, who he trained for several years. Perhaps Ibn Zamraq grew tired of waiting in the wings for his master to die and pass on his important post of vizier. Ibn Zamraq bided his time, composing qasidas and poems in the muwashshah style, etched in marble that still adorn the Alhambra Palace today. In 1371, when Ibn al-Khatib retired in disgrace (Ibn Zamraq may have aided in his downfall), his former protégé sent assassins to Morocco to ensure he would never return. Ibn Zamraq eventually fell out of favor and met a brutal end in 1393.

Ibn Zamraq’s qasidas survive, including:  
Are there not in this garden wonders
Which God has refused to be rivaled in beauty?
Carved from a pearl of diaphanous light
Its basin is adorned with pearls on all sides.
In it, silver melts and flows amidst jewels
Then departs equal to it in beauty, white and pure

The traditions of the Moorish poets and musicians still survive in Morocco today, where those exiled from their home lived their final years, after the re-conquest of Spain.

Lisa J. Yarde is a historical fiction author. Her novels ON FALCON'S WINGS, an epic medieval novel chronicling the starstruck romance between Norman and Saxon lovers, and SULTANA, set during a turbulent period of thirteenth century Spain, are available now.

Greatest Hits: Sappho & Co.

By Lindsay Townsend

Sarmatia in my BRONZE LIGHTNING, which begins in the Mediterranean of 1652 BC, would surely have known of the the Muse. Homer called her 'Daughter of Zeus' in The Odyssey, but the poetry we have left from ancient Greece comes much later and mostly from men: Alcman, Pindar, Theocritus, and the great playwrights of the fifth century BC, Callimachus of Alexandria.

The sources for women's writing in ancient Greece at first appear to be much more scarce. Women do appear in Greek plays: Klytemnestra, Antigone, Lysistrata. In these works they have lively voices but their words have been written by men. Where is the literature written by women? Where do Greek women speak directly to us?

Sadly, little has survived. Manuscripts were copied by men and they selected what to copy. It could be there are more papyri in the Egyptian desert--thousands of them still remain in the ancient rubbish dump still being excavated at Oxyrhynchus after a hundred years--or in some yet undiscovered cache that will give us more authentic women's voices. So far the pickings are thin, but there's real quality there.

Foremost amongst the poets is Sappho, whose life on Lesbos in the early sixth century BC, at the centre of a group of girls worshipping Aprodite and the Muses, gave her material for nine books of poems full of affection, admiration and longing. Only a few poems have survived, but their directness is appealing. 'As pale as summer grass,' she (or her narrator) describes herself, a flame playing under her skin, as she gazes hopelessly at one of her girls chatting with a man. Another fragment:

The moon has set, and the Pleiades.
The night is half gone.
Time passes, and here I lie alone.

Later in the century came Korinna, who lived in Boiotia and wrote in the local dialect. One poem talks of her own voice, 'as clear as a swallow's', which gave delight to the 'white-robed ladies of Tanagra', her home town. The ancient world thought she was a rival of the great Pindar himself.

Some, like the fifth-century poets Praxilla of Sicyon and Telesilla of Argos, have left so little writing intact that we can hardly judge their work. Another, Erinna, lived on Telos, an island near Rhodes, and died before she was twenty, leaving us a reputation based on The Distaff, a tribute to her dead friend Baukis, whose father lit her funeral pyre with the torches intended to light her wedding. Only a few tantalising lines remain out of three hundred.

We have more complete poems by Anyte, who lived in Tegea on the Greek mainland in the third century BC, than by any other Greek woman, even Sappho. Even so, there are just eighteen certainly by her, a poor legacy for a poet very highly regarded in her day and for long afterward. One tells of children playing with a billy-goat, one of the sadness of a small girl, Myro, at having to make graves for her pet cricket and cicada. Here’s another, describing a statue of the goddess Aphrodite:

This is the place of the Cyprian, where she fulfils her pleasure
Looking out for ever from the land over the shining sea,
To make voyaging kindly to sailors. All around the ocean
Trembles, staring at her image of oil-glistening wood.

There's a useful anthology here which only underlines the scarcity of ancient Greek women's writing which survives. Maybe one day the papyrus mounds of Oxyrhynchus will give us more.

Literature & Education: Sappho and Co.

By Lindsay Townsend

Sarmatia in my BRONZE LIGHTNING, which begins in the Mediterranean of 1652 BC, would surely have known of the the Muse. Homer called her 'Daughter of Zeus' in The Odyssey, but the poetry we have left from ancient Greece comes much later and mostly from men: Alcman, Pindar, Theocritus, and the great playwrights of the fifth century BC, Callimachus of Alexandria.

The sources for women's writing in ancient Greece at first appear to be much more scarce. Women do appear in Greek plays: Klytemnestra, Antigone, Lysistrata. In these works they have lively voices but their words have been written by men. Where is the literature written by women? Where do Greek women speak directly to us?

Sadly, little has survived. Manuscripts were copied by men and they selected what to copy. It could be there are more papyri in the Egyptian desert--thousands of them still remain in the ancient rubbish dump still being excavated at Oxyrhynchus after a hundred years--or in some yet undiscovered cache that will give us more authentic women's voices. So far the pickings are thin, but there's real quality there.

Foremost amongst the poets is Sappho, whose life on Lesbos in the early sixth century BC, at the centre of a group of girls worshipping Aprodite and the Muses, gave her material for nine books of poems full of affection, admiration and longing. Only a few poems have survived, but their directness is appealing. 'As pale as summer grass,' she (or her narrator) describes herself, a flame playing under her skin, as she gazes hopelessly at one of her girls chatting with a man. Another fragment:

The moon has set, and the Pleiades.
The night is half gone.
Time passes, and here I lie alone.

Later in the century came Korinna, who lived in Boiotia and wrote in the local dialect. One poem talks of her own voice, 'as clear as a swallow's', which gave delight to the 'white-robed ladies of Tanagra', her home town. The ancient world thought she was a rival of the great Pindar himself.

Some, like the fifth-century poets Praxilla of Sicyon and Telesilla of Argos, have left so little writing intact that we can hardly judge their work. Another, Erinna, lived on Telos, an island near Rhodes, and died before she was twenty, leaving us a reputation based on The Distaff, a tribute to her dead friend Baukis, whose father lit her funeral pyre with the torches intended to light her wedding. Only a few tantalising lines remain out of three hundred.

We have more complete poems by Anyte, who lived in Tegea on the Greek mainland in the third century BC, than by any other Greek woman, even Sappho. Even so, there are just eighteen certainly by her, a poor legacy for a poet very highly regarded in her day and for long afterward. One tells of children playing with a billy-goat, one of the sadness of a small girl, Myro, at having to make graves for her pet cricket and cicada. Here’s another, describing a statue of the goddess Aphrodite:

This is the place of the Cyprian, where she fulfils her pleasure
Looking out for ever from the land over the shining sea,
To make voyaging kindly to sailors. All around the ocean
Trembles, staring at her image of oil-glistening wood.

There's a useful anthology here which only underlines the scarcity of ancient Greek women's writing which survives. Maybe one day the papyrus mounds of Oxyrhynchus will give us more.

Thursday Thirteen: Gay Love Poems

By Erastes

Continuing our month of love, and because love is love and is for everyone.

Thirteen Things about Gay Love Poetry


1. The Song of Songs, Now widely acknowledged to be a homoerotic poem:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

2. Shakespeare, notably the infamous (and very witty) Sonnet 20:

A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman were thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

3. Abu Nuwas (756-815):

I die of love for him, perfect in every way,
Lost in the strains of wafting music.
My eyes are fixed upon his delightful body
And I do not wonder at his beauty.
His waist is a sapling, his face a moon,
And loveliness rolls off his rosy cheek
I die of love for you, but keep this secret:
The tie that binds us is an unbreakable rope.
How much time did your creation take, O angel?
So what! All I want is to sing your praises.

4. Michelangelo: In the 1530s, Michelangelo was sustaining a relationship with his much younger model Febo di Poggio. He calls Febo "that little blackmailer," because Febo adopted Michelangelo as "my honorary father" and steadily demanded money, clothes, and love-gifts from him. On a page containing financial calculations, Michelangelo wrote:

Here with his beautiful eyes he promised me solace,
And with those very eyes he tried to take it away from me.

Their passion raged through 1533-34, but ended when Michelangelo discovered that the mignon had "betrayed" him, perhaps by actually stealing money or drawings from his sugar-daddy. The artist felt humiliated by his subservience to the model.

Several poems pun upon the boy's name. "Febo" equals Phoebus, and poggio is the Italian word for "hill"--and suggest physical consummation:

Blithe bird, excelling us by fortune’s sway,
Of Phoebus' thine the prize of lucent notion,
Sweeter yet the boon of winged promotion
To the hill whence I topple and decay!

But such a topple was sweet:

Easily could I soar, with such a happy fate,
When Phoebus brightened up the heights.
His feathers were wings and the hill the stair.
Phoebus was a lantern to my feet.

5. Walt Whitman: Perhaps less love for a single man, but love for the rough-trade he would immerse himself in. Whitman's notebooks of this period are filled with descriptions of buss drivers, ferry-boat men, and other "rude, illiterate" men that he met

I share the midnight orgies of young men . . .
I pick out some low person for my dearest friend,
He shal be lawless, rude, illiterate, he shall be condemned by others for deeds done,
I will play a part no longer, why should I exile myself from my companions?

And more romantically. . .

When I Heard at the Close of the Day (No. 11, from 'Calamus')

And when I thought how my friend, my lover, was on
his way coming, then O I was happy,
Each breath tasted sweeter – and all that day my food
nourished me more – and the beautiful day passed well,
And the next came with equal joy – and with the next,
at evening, came my friend.

6. Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas: Famous for being linked to Oscar Wilde and his poem "Two Loves" gives us one of the most famous lines in gay poetry.

I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.
Then sighing, said the other, 'Have thy will,
I am the love that dare not speak its name.

7. W H Auden's "Funeral Blues," famously famous in Four Weddings & a Funeral:

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

8. Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. In Gaveston's first speech he reads Edward's letter to him, and he remarks upon it:

'My father is deceased. Come Gaveston,
And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.'
Ah, words that make me surfeit with delight!
What greater bliss can hap to Gaveston
Than live and be the favourite of a King!
Sweet prince, I come! These, these thy amorous lines
Might have enforced me to have swum from France,
And, like Leander, gasped upon the sand,
So thou wouldst smile, and take me in thine arms.

9. Sir Philip Sidney's "My True-Love Hath My Heart" from Arcadia:

My true-love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given..

10. Hafiz, circa 1320-1389:

With looks disheveled, flushed in a sweat of drunkenness His shirt torn open, a song on his lips and wine cup in his hand With eyes looking for trouble, lips softly complaining So at midnight last night he came and sat at my pillow. . . ."

11. Byron's Don Leon (attributed):

How oft, beneath the arbour's mystic shade,
My boyish vows of constancy were made!
There on the grass as we recumbent lay,
Not coy wast thou, nor I averse to play;
And in that hour thy virtue's sole defence
Was not thy coldness, but my innocence.

12. Muhammad al-Nawaji bin Hasan bin Ali bin Othman (1383?-1455) wrote For a Beautiful Black Boy:

Aroused, he exhales
The intense perfume of his musk.
The sight of his face, lit by a ray of light
Imprints itself.

13. Byron's The Cornelian. Byron became obsessed with a choirboy, John Edleston (spelled "Eddleston" by Byron), whom Byron met as a student at Cambridge and with whom he was deeply in love (see The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, ed. Byrne R. S. Fone, p. 219) and the poem is about a stone that Edleston once gave the poet.

He offer'd it with downcast look,
As fearful that I might refuse it;
I told him, when the gift I took,
My only fear should be, to lose it.

This pledge attentively I view'd,
And sparkling as I held it near,
Methought one drop the stone bedew'd,
And, ever since, I've lov'd a tear.