My homeland: even if eternal paradise kept me from you…

Love for home runs so deep that even the happiness of paradise could not remove the longing. This is a poetic exaggeration of an exile’s attachment to the place of birth.

The line belongs to Shawqi’s Siniyya, written during his exile in Spain. Memories of Egypt run through the poem, including Alexandria and Ain Shams.

The reference to paradise takes longing to an extreme: even a place imagined as perfect cannot replace home. The poet speaks from exile, and the comparison makes an attachment that distance has not erased vivid to the reader.

قصيدة «أحرام على بلابله الدوح» (الشوقيات), من السينية، نظمها في منفاه بإسبانيا

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