The Poetry of the Orient

-** <c «r^ *1#* 53riim*tmpttt of the Intrrr etr Books ar the hours of 11 a. in. The Libi a. m. till 4 p. m. 1. The em uthorized to borrow books 2. Before I to file with the Librariai Department, or of the Bur 3. Ko boo" name of the borrower sha 4. Ofworl ed; of works of two or mo 5. The pei B are strictly prohibited fi ether of the Department (5. Borrow i two weeks, may at the < 1*1 ditional two weeks. Glass. *t& 7. Theloa 8. Books Le Catalogue with an astei 9. When : Book. borrower, it must be repl 10. Applies n. except in cases of sick 11. Booksi cammed and replaced upo 13. When ! -eks without renewal, its Department. ] and deducted 13. Writing on me leaves or covers or dooks. ana rare lummy or turning down of their leaves are strictly prohibited; violation of this rule will debar employes from further privileges of the Library. 14. In 'selecting books from the shelves care must be used in handling them. replacing those not drawn on the shelves from which they were taken; the number of the shelf may be ascertained from the label above. 15. Employes, on quitting the service of the Department, must return all books in their possession belonging to the Library. Final payment of their. salaries will be withheld by the Disbursing Officer until he is satisfied that all books charged against them at the Library have been returned. 16. For infringements of any of the above rules the Librarian is authorized to suspend or refuse the issue of books to the culpable persons. Bv order of the Secretary : GEO. M. LOCK WOOD. Chief Clerk. (13599—10 Mo THE POETRY OF THE ORIENT. BY WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER. What precious things I found in Oriental lands, Returning home, I brought them in my votive hands. BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS 1866. & b N <h Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 4 QSfel IN 5 l«07 University Press: Welch, Bigelow, and Company, Cambridge. cdfe TO / THE DEAR AND PURE MEMORY OF MY DEAD BOY, HENRY LODGE ALGER, WHO LOVED MANY THINGS IN THIS BOOK, I NOW DEDICATE IT. PREFACE The whole field of Oriental literature, so far as ac- cessible through English, Latin, German, and French translations, has long been with me a favorite province for excursions in such leisure hours as I could com- mand. And during that time I have been in the habit of versifying the brief passages which struck me most forcibly. From the enjoyment these peculiar fragments of meditation and imagery gave me, — from the conviction that others too would enjoy them, — from the difficulty of finding them where they now lie, dispersed and buried amidst repelling masses of dry detail, — and from the expressed desire of several friends, — arose the resolve to venture the present publication. There seems to me also a striking propriety, and the promise of profit, in bringing to the acquaintance of Americans the most marked mental peculiarities of the Orientals. Must not a spiritual contact between the enterprising young West and the meditative old VI PREFACE. East be a source of uncommon stimulus and culture ? It is a noble ambition to desire to master all the varieties of lawful human experience ; and Oriental poetry offers to our attention fields of thought, modes of feeling, styles of imagination, the most impressively unlike our own. Whoever, born and nurtured in the midst of Western civilization, wishes to understand the whole of human nature and the whole of human consciousness, especially in its more ideal depart- ments, wT ill nowhere else find so much instruction and excitement as in the province to which the present work essays to introduce him. Many persons seem to think that this region — the poetic literature of the East — is fitted to yield only a barren crop of verbiage, or a tawdry mass of sentimental extravagance. It often has these charac- teristics. It also possesses all kinds of wealth, in their most exalted degrees, and in their most wonder- ful profusion. The poetry of the unimaginative Chi- nese is noticeable for ethical good sense, — a wholesome vein of homely truth. Its beat is circumscribed to the ranges of practical experience, neither plunging to metaphysical depths, nor soaring to rapturous heights. The Muse of China is a ground-sparrow. With the Arabs passion is carried to its most fiery ecstasies, its most tenacious lengths. Their ideas seem to be trans- muted into sensations, rather than their sensations to PREFACE. VU be represented in ideas. Imagination itself is heated, vascular, vibrating with the blood. Sanscrit and Hin- dostanee poetry is characterized, in its most peculiar phases, by an unrivalled idealization. Imagination often takes the reins from judgment, and runs riot, and language breaks into a blossoming wilderness of metaphor. But the richness and originality of the result in ideas and emotions, as well as in imagery, are frequently grand and exhilarating. The most distinctive Persian poetry exhibits an exquisite deli- cacy of sense elsewhere unparalleled, a vast and ethe- real play of fancy and sentiment, a fetterless jubilancy of reason and faith, the very transcendentalism of wit. All seems strained through the imagination, deprived of grossness, held in solution, ready to dart in electric freedom. The dying Sufi, Mewlana Riimi, says, in anticipation of his funeral, to the friends weeping around him : — " While your dim eyes but see, through the haze of earth's My frame doomed to mix with the mouldering clod, I am treading the courts of the seventh heaven in gladness, And basking unveiled in the vision of God." Where has the divine lesson, " Bless them that injure you," been more charmingly rendered than in the following lines from Hafiz, translated by Sir William Jones ? " : ! Vlll PREFACE. " Learn from yon Orient shell to love thy foe, And store with pearls the hand that brings thee woe Free, like yon rock, from base vindictive pride, tears side Imblaze with gems the wrist that thy ; Mark where yon tree rewards the stony shower With fruit nectareous or balmy flower. All nature calls aloud, ' Shall man do less Than heal the smiter, and the railer bless ? ' The substance of many of the pieces in the ensuing pages, from the great Eastern authors, will be found most surprising. Some pieces will be found merely odd, quaint, grotesque, or bizarre ; some are unques- tionably trivial ; but nearly all, it is hoped, possess, for one reason or other, some peculiarity which lends them a justifying interest, if not value. There is a naivete in the mythological rhetoric of the old Hindu bards mentally provocative in a singular degree. What a glimpse into the pre-historic state and habits of man, in the primeval Aryan world, is opened, when we find, in the Rig Veda, the clouds called cows, the winds calves, and the rain milk ! The cow bellows for her calf; that is, the thunder-cloud roars for the wind to draw the rain from its breast Again, the colors of the spectrum are seven sisters riding together in the chariot of the year, drawn by seven horses. The axle of the chariot is never heated, the nave never worn ; its journeying damages not the ! ; PREFACE. IX four quarters of the horizon ; the team never sweats nor snorts, and is unsullied by dust The form, also, of Eastern poetry is in many cases very peculiar. The ghazel consists usually of not less than five, or more than fifteen couplets, all with the same rhyme. Here is an imperfect one, translated by Vans Kennedy. In perusing it the reader must know that " cell," in the Sufi dialect, means chapel " pagans," priests' ; " wine," Divine love. " The shade that cypress here bestows, to me 's enough. The joy that from the goblet flows, to me 's enough. The cell where pagans wine expose, to me 's enough. The sign how swift each moment goes, to me 's enough. If not to you, the joy it shows to me 's enough. The bliss her converse fond bestows, to me 's enough. Love sweeter far than angel knows, to me 's enough. A guileless heart, with verse that glows, to me 's enough." A divan is a body of ghazels arranged in alpha- betical order, according to their isocatalectic letters. The larger proportion of the specimens given here are faithful representations of Hindu, Persian, and Arab thoughts, sentiments, and fancies, which I have met with in the voluminous records of the different Asiatic Societies, in prose versions from the Vedas and Puranas, and in a thousand scattered sources. Of the rest, the originating hint and impulse alone, or merely the character and style, are Oriental. X PREFACE. I have prefixed to each piece which is strictly a translation the name o!" the original author, whenever it was known to me. The specimens derived through the German of Herder and of Riickert I am com- pelled to leave anonymous, as no clew is given to the authors from whom they were derived. I have affixed the letter H. to those drawn from Herder, the letter R. to those drawn from Riickert. All the pieces remaining, in addition to those now designated, are to be ascribed, under the conditions before stated, to the present writer. With small pretensions, with fervid interest in the subject, this humble offering, brought from the altar of the Oriental Muses, and laid on the shrine of American Literature, is commended to the kind notice of those whose curiosity or sympathy responds to the fascination of Eastern gorgeousness, reverie, and passion.

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