Is there not enough balm in Ofrah?

Joseph Ibn Tsadik wrote this rather difficult muwashshaḥ (girdle poem) as a panegyric for someone named Isaac, a “nobleman at the gate.” A lovesick girl (Ofrah) appears in the first stanza, while the subject of the panegyric, Isaac, enters in the second stanza. The poet says to tell the girl to “go slow”—to have some compassion for him—and that she should learn to do so by gaining moral instruction from Isaac. At this point, the girl disappears from the scene, and the poet speaks of his esteem for Isaac. In girdle poems, the last lines (here, a single line) of each stanza have a rhyme scheme of their own, which threads, like a girdle, through the poem. In the last stanza, these lines (the kharja) are often written in either a dialect of spoken Arabic, as here, or in the Romance vernacular, and typically speak of love in a first-person feminine voice. In our poem, the last stanza and the kharja return to a lovestruck girl, probably the girl from the first two stanzas, and it is her voice that concludes the poem.