A black cat has passed between them. (Referring to friends who have quarrelled.)
Whenever you touch a stone, may it become gold! (A blessing.)
The donkey began its tricks on the bridge.
Light for others, fire for the house. (A saint abroad, a devil at home.)
The black donkey is tied up at the gate. (A worthless thing is always at hand.)
Here is a riddle by Nerses Shnorhali:—
I saw an outspread white tent, wherein black hens were perched, that laid eggs of various kinds and spoke in human language. (A book.)
Between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth lived, almost contemporaneously, three great poets, all ecclesiastics:—Constantine Erzingatzi, Hovhannes Erzingatzi, and Frik, who were almost the last singers of the dying Armenian kingdom.
The first of these, Constantine Erzingatzi, was born about 1250–1260 in Erzingan. From early youth he showed poetic talent and gained favour from the people, but incurred the jealousy of his own associates. In one of his poems he says he cannot tell why his enemies hate him and expresses a desire to know their reason. Erzingatzi had a friend, a certain Amir Tol, who lived in Tabriz. Erzingatzi used to send his poems, as he wrote them, to this friend, who entered them in a book. The poems in this collection number twenty-two. The manuscript is preserved in the library of St. Lazare, Venice. The themes of Erzingatzi’s poems are—among other things—the love of the rose and the nightingale, the beauty of nature, the wedding of the flowers, spring, dawn, and morning. In his love poems, he throws over his emotions a mystic veil of celestial hue, and some of his lines rise to a higher level than ordinary amorous verse. For him, love and beauty are one and the same. He says that one who is without love has no sense of beauty. He calls his lady-love a breeze of spring, and himself a thirsty flower, but a flower on which only a hot southern blast is ever blowing, so that his love-thirst continually endures. He likens his mistress to the radiant heavenly bodies—the sun, moon, and stars—but her light is stronger than that of all other luminaries, for it alone can illumine his darkened heart.
Erzingatzi says that, if he is to have any share in the life of love in this world, he will be content with one hour of “morning love” that springs from the heart. For that he is willing to exchange his life. He prays to God for such love, always emphasising the word “morning.”