سلوا كؤوس الطلا

The opening plants the song squarely in the khamriyya, the Arabic wine-song tradition running from the Abbasid libertines to the Sufi mystics — then reverses its polarity. Classically the drinker seeks the wine; here the cups themselves are interrogated for the privilege of having touched her lips. The beloved does not taste the wine; she consecrates it. Shawqi keeps the genre's glamour and discards its dissipation in a single courtly turn.

The poem's journey to the stage was the slowest in her repertoire. In October 1932, days before his death, Shawqi sent the text to the young Riad al-Sunbati with his blessing; the composer later recalled living with it for years before the setting satisfied him. Umm Kulthum premiered it in 1938, in maqam Huzam — the solemn, quarter-tone-shaded mode Sunbati would make the signature of his grandest qasidas.

The boldest line Shawqi permits himself: what harm if her lips had been my cup? The conditional "law" — if only — does all the work, desiring everything while claiming nothing. It is the decorum of the classical ghazal: audacity conducted entirely in the subjunctive, and Umm Kulthum delivers it with a lightness that lets the audacity pass as grace.

The famous verse, and the reason this poem matters to her biography: her speech is sorcery, except that it is song, as if it had run upon the lips of David — the prophet whose psalms are the tradition's very figure of divinely beautiful music. By widespread account Shawqi wrote the poem after hearing Umm Kulthum sing at his villa, Karmat Ibn Hani; the "enchantress" of the qasida is the woman who would one day sing it. She is, in effect, performing her own portrait.

Mid-poem, the beloved dissolves into a dove of the thicket — the classical Arabic emblem of the voice that grieves beautifully. The questions ("who taught her sorrow? who whispered longing to her?") are the questions every listener asked about Umm Kulthum herself: where does a voice like that learn its ache? Shawqi's answer is the oldest one — from the night, and from love.

An astonishingly exact picture of a singer in performance: the lifted, startled throat, the ear turned as if listening to the dark, the unfocused eyes. Anyone who has watched film of Umm Kulthum mid-qasida has seen precisely this posture. The poet describes the dove; the description is a portrait from the concert hall.

The poem ends on a sigh made into language — "ahan... aha" — and Sunbati, understanding the gift, makes the sigh the melodic destination of the entire work. In performance, including the celebrated evening at the Royal Opera House in November 1944, Umm Kulthum would return to the final line again and again, each "aha" placed differently — the purest demonstration that in tarab the wordless syllable can outweigh the sentence.