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Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love cover

Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love

Chapter 29: From Behind the Lattice
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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.

From Behind the Lattice

I see your red-gold hair and know
How white the hidden skin must be,
Though sun-kissed face and fingers show
The fervour of the noon-day glow,
The keenness of the sea.
My longing fancies ebb and flow,
Still circling constant unto this;
My great desire (ah, whisper low)
To plant on thy forbidden snow
The rosebud of a kiss.
The scarlet flower would spread and grow,
Your whiteness change and flush,
(Be still, my reckless heart, beat slow,
’T is but a dream that stirs thee so!)
To one transparent blush.