Part 14 (2/2)

There I beheld her as she and her damsels Paced 'twixt the temple and outer enclosure; Damsels the fairest, the loveliest, the gentlest, Pa.s.sing like slow-wending heifers at evening; Ever surrounding with courtly observance Her whom they honor, the peerless of women.

Then to a handmaid, the youngest, she whispered, ”Omar is near: let us mar his devotions.

Cross on his path that he needs may observe us; Give him a signal, my sister, demurely.”

”Signals I gave, but he marked not or heeded,”

Answered the damsel, and hasted to meet me.

Ah for that night by the vale of the sand-hills!

Ah for the dawn when in silence we parted!

He who the morn may awake to her kisses Drinks from the cup of the blessed in heaven.

Ah! where have they made my dwelling? Far, how far, from her, the loved one, Since they drove me lone and parted to the sad sea-sh.o.r.e of Aden.

Thou art mid the distant mountains; and to each, the loved and lover, Nought is left but sad remembrance, and a share of aching sorrow.

Hadst thou seen thy lover weeping by the sand-hills of the ocean, Thou hadst deemed him struck by madness: was it madness? was it love?

I may forget all else, but never shall I forget her as she stood, As I stood, that hour of parting; heart to heart in speechless anguish; Then she turned her to Th.o.r.eyya, to her sister, sadly weeping; Coursed the tears down cheek and bosom, till her pa.s.sion found an utterance; ”Tell him, sister, tell him; yet be not as one that chides or murmurs, Why so long thy distant tarrying on the unlovely sh.o.r.es of Yemen?

Is it sated ease detains thee, or the quest of wealth that lures thee?

Tell me what the price they paid thee, that from Mecca bought thy absence?”

I give three other examples of Arabic love poetry by different translators, prose renderings by McGuckin de Slane in Ibn Khallikan's _Biographical Dictionary_ and by Terrick Hamilton in the _Romance of Antar_, respectively, and a verse translation by Lyall.

The following poem (Ibn Khallikan, V. 2, p. 330) is attributed to Ibn Alaamidi of the eleventh century:

Admire that pa.s.sionate lover! he recalls to mind the well protected park and sighs aloud; he hears the call of love and stops bewildered. The nightingales awaken the trouble of his heart, and his pains, now redoubled, drive all prudence from his mind. An ardent pa.s.sion excites his complaints; sadness moves him to tears; his old affections awake, but these were never dormant. His friends say that his fort.i.tude has failed; but the very mountain of Yalamlan would groan, or sink oppressed, under such a weight of love. Think not that compulsion will lead him to forget her; willingly he accepted the burden of love; how then could he cast it off against his will?

--O Otba, faultless in thy charms! be indulgent, be kind, for thy lover's sickness has reached its height. By thee the willow of the hill was taught to wave its branches with grace, when thy form, robed in beauty, first appeared before it. Thou hast lent thy tender glances to the gazelles of the desert, and therefore the fairest object to be seen is the eye of the antelope. Sick with the pains of love, bereft of sleep and confounded, I should never have outlived my nights, unless revived by the appearance of thy favor, deceitful as it was.

These four shall witness the sincerity of my attachment: tears, melancholy, a mind deranged, and care, my constant visitor; could Yazbul feel this last; it would become like as--Suha. Some reproach me for loving thee, but I am not to be reclaimed; others bid me forbear, but I heed them not. They tell thee that I desire thee for thy beauty; how very strange!

and where is the beauty which is not an object of desire? For thee I am the most loving of lovers; none, I know, are like me (_in sincerity_) or like thee in beauty.

The next poem represents one of the many outbursts of Antar:

O bird of the tamarisk! thou hast rendered my sorrows more poignant, thou hast redoubled my griefs. O bird of the tamarisk! if thou invokest an absent friend for whom thou art mourning, even then, O bird, is thy affliction like the distress I also feel? Augment my sorrows and my lamentations; aid me to weep till thou seest wonders from the discharge of my eyelids. Weep, too, from the excesses that I endure. Fear not--only guard the trees from the breath of my burning sighs.

Quit me not till I die of love, the victim of pa.s.sion of absence, and separation. Fly, perhaps in the Hijaz thou mayest see some one riding from Aalij to Nomani, wandering with a damsel, she traversing wilds, and drowned in tears, anxious for her native land. May G.o.d inspire thee, O dove! when thou truly sees her loaded camels. Announce my death. Say, thou hast left him stretched on the earth, and that his tears are exhausted, but that he weeps in blood. Should the breeze ask thee whence thou art, say, he is deprived of his heart and stupefied; he is in a strange land, weeping for our departure, for the G.o.d of heaven has struck him with affliction on account of his beloved; he is lying down like a tender bird, that vultures and eagles have bereft of its young, that grieves in unceasing plaints whilst its offspring are scattered over the plain and the desert!

This poem by an unknown author is tenderness unexcelled:

_One Unnamed_

Nay, ask on the sandy hill the ben-tree with spreading boughs that stands mid her sisters, if I greeted thy dwelling-place; And whether their shade looked down upon me at eventide as there in my grief I stood, and that for my portion chose: And whether, at dawn still there, mine eyelids a burthen bore of tears falling one by one, as pearls from a broken string.

Yea, men long and yearn for Spring, the gladsome: but as for me--my longing and Spring art thou, my yearning to gain thy grace; And men dread the deadly Drought that slays them: but as for me--my Drought is to know thee gone, my life but a barren land!

And sooth, if I suffer when thou greet'st me with words unkind, yet somewhat of joy it brings thou thinkest on me at all.

So take thy delight that I stand serving with aching heart and eyes bathed in tears lest thou shouldst sunder thyself from me.

Arabic poetry may lack the light of intellectual outlook that we find in our greatest English poets; it may be deficient in the intensity of religious fervor characteristic of the medieval Hebrew poets; it may fall short of the high mystic strain attained by the Persians, but in the fervor depicting love of pa.s.sion they have not been surpa.s.sed. The greatest Persian lyric love poet, Hafiz, and the greatest Turkish lyric love poet, Baqui, clearly were under their influence.

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