Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love

Chapter 6: Among the Rice Fields

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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.

Among the Rice Fields

She was fair as a Passion-flower,

(But little of love he knew.)

Her lucent eyes were like amber wine,

And her eyelids stained with blue.

He called them the Gates of Fair Desire,

And the Lakes where Beauty lay,

But I looked into them once, and saw

The eyes of Beasts of Prey.

He praised her teeth, that were small and white

As lilies upon his lawn,

While I remembered a tiger’s fangs

That met in a speckled fawn.

She had her way; a lover the more,

And I had a friend the less.

For long there was nothing to do but wait

And suffer his happiness.

But now I shall choose the sharpest Kriss

And nestle it in her breast,

For dead, he is drifting down to sea,

And his own hand wrought his rest