This rough rendering has been put into metrical form as follows:
A MODERN AZTEC LOVE-SONG.
I knew it not that thou hadst absent been,
So full thy presence all my soul had left;
By night, by day, in quiet or changing scene,
’Tis thee alone I see, sense of all else bereft.
And when the tinkling pendants sway and ring,
’Tis thou who in my heart dost move and sing.
In another love-song in the same language I have met a conceit which I distinctly remember to have read in some old English poet, that of a lover who complains that his heart has been gathered in along with her flowers by a maiden picking roses.
The literal translation of this song reads thus: