Here we have fully in bloom, in the tenth century, those conceits which meet us, not only in the Hebrew poets of the next two centuries, but also in the English poets of the later Elizabethan age.
It is very artificial and scarcely sincere, but also undeniably attractive. Or, again, in the lines of Zoheir, addressed by the lover to a messenger that has just brought tidings from the beloved,
Oh! let me look upon thine eyes again,
For they have looked upon the maid I love,
we have, in the thirteenth century, the very airs and tricks of the cavalier poets. In fact, it cannot be too often said that love poetry, like love itself, is human and eternal, not of a people and an age, but of all men and all times. Though fashions change in poetry as in other ornament, still the language of love has a long life, and age after age the same conceits and terms of endearment meet us. Thus Hafiz has these lines,
I praise God who made day and night:
Day thy countenance, and thy hair the night.
Long before him the Hebrew poet Abraham ibn Ezra had written,
On thy cheeks and the hair of thy head
I will bless: He formeth light and maketh darkness.
In the thirteenth century the very same witticism meets us again, in the Hebrew Machberoth of Immanuel. But obviously it would be an endless task to trace the similarities of poetic diction between Hebrew and other poets: suffice it to realize that such similarities exist.
Such similarities did not, however, arise only from natural causes. They were, in part at all events, due to artificial compulsion. It is well to bear this in mind, for the recurrence of identical images in Hebrew love poem after love poem impresses a Western reader as a defect. To the Oriental reader, on the contrary, the repetition of metaphors seemed a merit. It was one of the rules of the game. In his "Literary History of Persia" Professor Browne makes this so clear that a citation from him will save me many pages. Professor Browne (ii, 83) analyzes Sharafu'd-Din Rami's rhetorical handbook entitled the "Lover's Companion." The "Companion" legislates as to the similes and figures that may be used in describing the features of a girl.
"It contains nineteen chapters, treating respectively of the hair, the forehead, the eyebrows, the eyes, the eyelashes, the face, the down on lips and cheeks, the mole or beauty-spot, the lips, the teeth, the mouth, the chin, the neck, the bosom, the arm, the fingers, the figure, the waist, and the legs. In each chapter the author first gives the various terms applied by the Arabs and Persians to the part which he is discussing, differentiating them when any difference in meaning exists; then the metaphors used by writers in speaking of them, and the epithets applied to them, the whole copiously illustrated by examples from the poets."