Ode 249

I WILL not stay my hand till thou art mine;
Not till my soul from out my body fly
Will I the hope of winning thee resign;
And how can I
A new love take that am so wholly thine?

My life is at my lips, ready to go—
O kiss those lips, and give me life again;
Hopeless my longing is, too well I know—
But O the pain!
Beloved, would'st thou treat a beggar so?

When I am dead, go open thou my tomb,
And a strange sight shall meet thy frightened eyes—
Flames feeding on me till the day of doom;
And smoke shall rise
From fires of love that even my shroud consume.

If thou but walk the meadows, such delight
Fills the sad cypress, that unnatural flowers
Break from its barren womb, and to strange height
The low shrub towers—
Of thee so thaumaturgic is the sight.

Watch in yon garden how, from place to place,
Seeking, the disappointed zephyr goes;
A rose he dreams of, lovely as thy face.
Ah! no such rose,
Zephyr, in any mortal garden blows.

Beloved, raise thy veil; whole peoples mourn
To see thy face, and men and women weep
And curse the tyrant day that thou wert born:
How canst thou keep
A world in tears, and pay such love with scorn?

Set thick with barbed hooks thy tendrilled hair—
No wonder fish are caught in such a net;
I bade my heart free of those hooks to tear—
Ah! no one yet,
HAFIZ, it answered, hath escaped that snare.