1. We two saddled our riding-beasts, and I sent my friend
Across the awful waste, now hid, now seen.

2. When she beheld him, "Woe is me!" she cried. "Return!
A sick man through your love is like to die."

3. "By God," she swore, "if but his life-blood streamed
Upon my palm from his love-wasted frame,

4. It would avail him nothing if I stanched the flow,
When told the tale of how his fancy strayed."

5. And when she turned from me, and leagues of hate
'Twixt me and her were fixed, no friend beside,

6. I barred her, as the Crooked Rib his foe,
Whose life for days was death assured and doomed.

7. My soul I schooled to bear the loss of her—
That pearl, whose beauty was with grief distilled—

8. She wept till weeping was of no avail,
Then turned in relentlessness away from me.

9. When words are spurned, and answering words repelled,
Where shall the hapless lover turn, and say?—

10. "My friend, words profit not, nor answers given;
Down to Love's valley 'neath the hill she bends."

11. Go to her, give her drink poured from the right,
Floods from the spring whose living waters flow.

12. And say, "What thinkest thou of one whose tear-drops' tale
Is long when shadows after sunset fall?"