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speedily return with the baggage, and great good shall betide us from him.’ And he went on to appease her and chide the vizier, being duped by her device.
Meanwhile Marouf fared on into the open country, perplexed and knowing not to what land he should betake himself; and for the anguish of parting and the pangs of passion and love-longing, he lamented and recited the following verses:
Fortune hath played our union false and rent our loves in twain; My heart’s dissolved and all on fire for separation’s pain.
Mine eyes with many a tear-drop rain for my belovéd’s loss; This, then, is severance; ah, when shall meeting be again?
O shining full-moon face, I’m he whose entrails for thy love Thou leftest torn with waste desire, a love-distracted swain.
Would I had never met with thee, since, after the delight Of thy possession, needs the cup of misery I must drain!
Marouf will never cease to be for Dunya’s[1] love distraught: Still may she live, though he should die, of very passion slain!
O thou whose visage radiant is as the resplendent sun, Succour his heart that’s all consumed with love-longing in vain.
Will Fate, I wonder, e’er reknit our separated loves And shall we ever of the days union and gladness gain?
Shall my love’s mansion reunite us two in joy and I The sapling of the sands[2] once more in my embraces strain?
Bright visage of the moon at full, ne’er may thy countenance, The sun of me thy lover, leave with charms to shine amain!
With passion and its cares content am I, since happiness In love’s the butt whereat ill-fate to shoot its shafts is fain.
Then he wept sore, for indeed the ways were blocked up in his sight and death seemed to him better than life,
- ↑ Apparently the name of the princess. Dunya (the world, or the fortune of the world) is not an infrequent name for an Arab beauty. See antè, passim.
- ↑ A common similitude for a slender and graceful youth of either sex. The allusion is to the slenderness of the upper part of the body, springing as it were) from the heavy buttocks, as a sapling springs from a mound of sand.
