Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love

Chapter 12: Though in my Firmament thou wilt not shine

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About This Book

The collection gathers lyrical poems rendered as translations or imitations of love songs and laments set in an exoticized eastern milieu, presenting intimate monologues that explore desire, jealousy, mourning, and the interplay of sensuality and spiritual yearning. Vivid sensory imagery—flowers, spices, night, ritual, dance, and seafaring—frames recurring motifs of loss, unrequited passion, and elegiac remembrance. Many pieces assume the voice of longing speakers, blending eroticism with melancholy and occasional bitterness, while others meditate on heroism, sacrifice, and the social rituals that shape intimate life. A mix of narrative lyric and descriptive pieces yields a unified mood of intense emotion and poetic exoticism.

Though in my Firmament thou wilt not shine

Talk not, my Lord, of unrequited love,

Since love requites itself most royally.

Do we not live but by the sun above,

And takes he any heed of thee or me?

Though in my firmament thou wilt not shine,

Thy glory, as a Star, is none the less.

Oh, Rose, though all unplucked by hand of mine,

Still am I debtor to thy loveliness.