This is a lonely lover!
Come, fair one, to his side,
That happy be together
The bridegroom and the bride!
The hour of love approaches
That shall make one of twain:
Soon may be thus united
All Israel's hosts again!
OPHRAH
To her sleeping Love
Awake, my fair, my love, awake,
That I may gaze on thee!
And if one fain to kiss thy lips
Thou in thy dreams dost see,
Lo, I myself then of thy dream
The interpreter will be!
TO OPHRAH
Ophrah shall wash her garments white
In rivers of my tears,
And dry them in the radiance bright
That shines when she appears.
Thus will she seek no sun nor water nigh,
Her beauty and mine eyes will all her needs supply.
These lovers' tears often meet us in the Hebrew poems. Ibn Gabirol speaks of his tears as fertilizing his heart and preserving it from crumbling into dust. Mostly, however, the Hebrew lover's tears, when they are not tokens of grief at the absence of the beloved, are the involuntary confession of the man's love. It is the men who must weep in these poems. Charizi sings of the lover whose heart succeeds in concealing its love, whose lips contrive to maintain silence on the subject, but his tears play traitor and betray his affection to all the world. Dr. Sulzbach aptly quotes parallels to this fancy from Goethe and Brentano.
This suggestion of parallelism between a medieval Hebrew poet and Goethe must be my excuse for an excursion into what seems to me one of the most interesting examples of the kind. In one of his poems Jehudah Halevi has these lines: