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So thick and fast, they were as chains, and I to her did say, “My tears have fallen so thick, that now they’ve bound me with a chain.”
The treasures of my patience fail, absence is long on me And yearning sore; and passion’s stress consumeth me amain.
If God’s protection cover me and Fortune be but just And Fate with her whom I adore unite me once again,
I’ll doff my clothes, that she may see how worn my body is, For languishment and severance and solitary pain.
Then he went on to the fourth cage, where he found a nightingale, which, at sight of him, began to tune its plaintive note. When he heard its descant, he burst into tears and repeated the following verses:
The nightingale’s note, when the dawning is near, Distracts from the lute-strings the true lover’s ear.
Complaineth, for love-longing, Uns el Wujoud, Of a passion that blotteth his being out sheer.
How many sweet notes, that would soften, for mirth, The hardness of iron and stone, do I hear!
The zephyr of morning brings tidings to me Of meadows, full-flower’d for the blossoming year.
The scents on the breeze and the music of birds, In the dawning, transport me with joyance and cheer.
But I think of a loved one, that’s absent from me, And mine eyes rain in torrents, with tear upon tear;
And the ardour of longing flames high in my breast, As a fire in the heart of a brasier burns clear.
May Allah vouchsafe to a lover distraught To see and foregather once more with his dear!
Yea, for lovers, heart-sickness and longing and woe And wake are excuses that plainly appear.
Then he went on a little and came to a handsome cage, than which there was no goodlier there, and in it a culver, that is to say, a wood-pigeon, the bird renowned among the birds as the singer of love-longing, with a collar of jewels about its neck, wonder-goodly of ordinance. He considered it awhile and seeing it mazed and brooding in its cage, shed tears and repeated these verses:
