[Translation.]
Song
Malua, fetch water of love,
Give drink to this mamane bud.
The birds, they are singing ecstatic,
Sipping Panaewa’s nectared lehua,
Beside themselves with the fragrance
Exhaled from the garden Ohele.
Your love comes to me a tornado;
It has rapt away my whole body,
The heart you once sealed as your own,
There planted the seed of desire.
Thought you ’twas the tree of Hopoe,
This tree, whose bloom you would pluck?
What is the argument of this poem? A passion-stricken swain, or perhaps a woman, cries to Malua to bring relief to his love-smart, to give drink to the parched mamane buds—emblems of human feeling. In contrast to his own distress, he points to the birds caroling in the trees, reveling in the nectar of lehua bloom, intoxicated with the scent of nature’s garden. What answer does the lovelorn swain receive from the nymph he adores? In lines 11 and 12 she banteringly asks him if he took her to be like the traditional lehua tree of Hopoe, of which men stood in awe as a sort of divinity, not daring to pluck its flowers? It is as if the woman had asked—if the poet’s meaning is rightly interpreted—“Did you really think me plighted to vestal vows, a tree whose bloom man was forbidden to pluck?”