Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love

Chapter 43: The Rice was under Water

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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.

The Rice was under Water

The Rice was under water, and the land was scourged with rain,

The nights were desolation, and the day was born in pain.

Ah, the famine and the fever and the cruel, swollen streams,

I had died, except for Krishna, who consoled me—in my dreams!

The Burning-Ghats were smoking, and the jewels melted down,

The Temples lay deserted, for the people left the town.

Yet I was more than happy, though passing strange it seems,

For I spent my nights with Krishna, who loved me—in my dreams!