Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love

Chapter 9: The Net of Memory

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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 Net of Memory

I cast the Net of Memory,

Man’s torment and delight,

Over the level Sands of Youth

That lay serenely bright,

Their tranquil gold at times submerged

In the Spring Tides of Love’s Delight.

The Net brought up, in silver gleams,

Forgotten truth and fancies fair:

Like opal shells, small happy facts

Within the Net entangled were

With the red coral of his lips,

The waving seaweed of his hair.

We were so young; he was so fair.