O Lord, bring back the one who is faint with love

O Lord, bring back the one who is faint with love, who constantly bewails the broken pledge.

The day her beloved forsook her, she refused all comfort. She put her hands on her head and silently submitted to the hands of her enslaver. She has been wayward; she has carved her home in the treacherous clifs of time. For this her eyes grow dim with…

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This poem was written in the form of a muwashshaḥ, or “girdle poem” (shir ezor), a strophic form with a complex rhyming pattern that first appeared in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) among Arabic and Hebrew poets. This form was initially used for secular poetry, but soon Hebrew poets began to compose religious and even liturgical poems using it. This example plays cleverly on the traditional allegory of the Song of Songs as depicting the love between the people of Israel (the female lover) and God (the male beloved). The translator has formatted the poem as prose paragraphs.

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