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for reverence of him. When he looked upon the boy, his eyes were dazzled and his wit confounded, and the saying of the poet was exemplified in him:
What while yon fair-faced loveling was in a certain place And the new moon of Shawwal[1] shone glittering from his face,
There came a reverend elder, who walked with leisure pace: His steps a staff supported and in his looks the trace
Of abstinent devoutness was plain unto the sight.
The days he had made proof of and eke the nights essayed; In lawful and unlawful he had not spared to wade.
He had been love-distracted for minion and for maid And to a skewer’s likeness worn down was he and frayed;
But wasted bones were left him, with parchment skin bedight.
A Moor[2] in this same fashion the sheikh himself did show, For by his side a youngling was ever seen to go:
He in the love of women an Udhri[3] was, I trow; In either mode[4] seductive and throughly versed, for lo,
Zeid[5] was to him as Zeyneb,[6] to wit, and wench as wight.
Distraught he was with passion for this and th’ other fair; He mourned the camp, bewailing the ruins bleak and bare:[7]
Of his excess of longing, thou’dst deem him, as it were, A sapling that the zephyr still bendeth here and there.
Cold-heartedness pertaineth to stones alone aright.
- ↑ Specially bright in the eyes of the Muslim, as by its appearance putting an end to the long fast of Ramazan.
- ↑ Var. “Persian” (Macnaghten). The inhabitants of Northern Africa have always had the reputation of being debauched.
- ↑ i.e. a member of the tribe of the Benou Udhreh, see note, Vol. II. p. 227.
- ↑ i.e. in the love of girls and boys.
- ↑ Generic name for men.
- ↑ Ditto for women.
- ↑ i.e. he was a reciter of erotic verses, always constructed by the Arabs after certain well-known patterns, handed down from the præ-Islamite poets, of which the commonest and most celebrated was that which introduces the lover halting by the ruins of the camp where his beloved dwelt aforetime and bewailing its desertion. The invention of this form of opening or (so to speak) poetic “gambit” is attributed to the greatest of the poets of the Time of Ignorance, i.e. the princely bard Imrulcais.
