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.
Out I came from the dancing-place:
The night-wind met me face to face—
A wind off the harbour, cold and keen,
“I know,” it whistled, “where thou hast been.”
A faint voice fell from the stars above—
“Thou? whom we lighted to shrines of Love!”
I found when I reached my lonely room
A faint sweet scent in the unlit gloom.
And this was the worst of all to bear,
For someone had left while lilac there.
The flower you loved, in times that were.