I write with a heart devoted to thee and the thought of thee And an eyelid, wounded for weeping tears of the blood of me. And a body that love and affliction and passion and long desire Have clad with the garment of leanness and wasted utterly. I plain me to thee of passion, for sore hath it baffled me Nor is there a corner left me where patience yet may be. Wherefore, have mercy, I prithee, show favour unto me, For my heart, my heart is breaking for love and agony.
The cure of hearts is union with the beloved and whom his love maltreateth, God is his physician. If either of us have broken faith, may the false one fail of his desire! There is nought goodlier than a lover who is faithful to a cruel beloved one.' Then, for a subscription, he wrote, 'From the distracted and despairing lover, him whom love and longing disquiet, from the captive of passion and transport, Kemerezzeman, son of Shehriman, to the peerless beauty, the pearl of the fair Houris, the Lady Budour, daughter of King Ghaïour. Know that by night I am wakeful and by day distraught, consumed with ever-increasing wasting and sickness and longing and love, abounding in sighs, rich in floods of tears, the prisoner of passion, the slain of desire, the debtor of longing, the boon-companion of sickness, he whose heart absence hath seared. I am the sleepless one, whose eyes close not, the slave of love, whose tears run never dry, for the fire of my heart is still unquenched and the flaming of my longing is never hidden.' Then in the margin he wrote this admired verse:
Peace from the stores of the grace of my Lord be rife On her in whose hand are my heart and soul and life!
Vouchsafe thy converse unto me some little, so, perchance, Thou mayst have ruth on me or else my heart be set at ease. Yea, for the transport of my love and longing after thee, Of all I've suffered I make light and all my miseries. God guard a folk whose dwelling-place is far removed from mine, The secret of whose love I've kept in many lands and seas! But fate, at last, hath turned on me a favourable face And on my loved one's threshold-earth hath cast me on my knees. Budour beside me in the bed I saw and straight my moon, Lit by her sun, shone bright and blithe upon my destinies.[FN#39]