Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love

Chapter 2: Dedication to Malcolm Nicolson

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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.

Dedication to Malcolm Nicolson

I, who of lighter love wrote many a verse,

Made public never words inspired by thee,

Lest strangers’ lips should carelessly rehearse

Things that were sacred and too dear to me.

Thy soul was noble; through these fifteen years

Mine eyes familiar, found no fleck nor flaw,

Stern to thyself, thy comrades’ faults and fears

Proved generously thine only law.

Small joy was I to thee; before we met

Sorrow had left thee all too sad to save.

Useless my love—as vain as this regret

That pours my hopeless life across thy grave.

L. H.