Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love

Chapter 4: I Shall Forget

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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.

I Shall Forget

Although my life, which thou hast scarred and shaken,

Retains awhile some influence of thee,

As shells, by faithless waves long since forsaken,

Still murmur with the music of the Sea,

I shall forget. Not thine the haunting beauty,

Which, once beheld, for ever holds the heart,

Or, if resigned from stress of Fate or Duty,

Takes part of life away:—the dearer part.

I gave thee love; thou gavest but Desire.

Ah, the delusion of that summer night!

Thy soul vibrated at the rate of Fire;

Mine, with the rhythm of the waves of Light.

It is my love for thee that I regret,

Not thee, thyself, and hence,—I shall forget!