1. Did you return from the torment of youth, and find
In complaining of love someone sympathetic?

2. Or were you remembering a band of brothers true
Until you tested them and found not a single one?

3. They left you in the long night while in their hands
Was magic which brought you fleeting sleep, far-scattered.

4. It was as if the bonds you had with them
Were old blood clotted, and a covenanted pact.

5. My friend! And when did I ever find one faithful
In affection, so that his meaning was unfailing?

6. After you I readied myself for blame, for solace,
And stored after you witness of youth undimmed.

7. And I hoped that you against disasters would defend,--
Only from you came disasters and calamities instead!

8. As for fantasy, never did I forbid its chasing me:
Can fantasy reach one awake and watching?

9. Moving along the loam of a barren hill,
An object of arrow-practice set apart as a butt;

10. How did you find your way to it when before attaining it
Is a rent the winds pass through, aimless?

11. No purpose failed you in visiting it,
If you had chanced to knock upon it with a sleeping eyelid!

12. Marveling at the dashing of hope--but she knew not
That against it I struck cold iron when I shot.

13. The clouds were not raining on it showers
To flood, nor did mirage find freshets to feed it.

14. When you sent a raider to sweep the plain,
Seeking game, then you wronged the intrepid scout!

15. Who tells the infidels that my ambitions
Have become a legend among them and strings of verse?

16. Lying stagnant on their honesty--which itself
Folds up countries and scans their holdings!

17. Why should I keep coaxing the one who turns from me,
Reforming each corruption in these wretches?

18. Raising in their encampment the market of glory
Till I spend in it superior goods made worthless?

19. An inborn defect of the soul, an error
In natural judgement--I found no lucid guide.

20. Have you seen one more lost than a generous prince
Summoning to his side a miser calling folk to God?

21. One housing in his train, inside his abode,
The friend he meets as foe and envious rival!

22. Men are reversed: so if you hear of a defective man
Know indeed that his fortune is bettered.

23. The differences of lots necessarily caused
Them to make it an interest, or something harmful.

24. One enumerating in boast his abundant wealth
Till you intoned over him an ancestral glory.

25. I ringed him with my ruins, and many a time
I rained on him chains, with pendants on them.

26. Hold off! For you count no unmarried, childless man
As prospering, nor invoke a slanderer as a parent.

27. Men of passion, when branded with shame,
Take up spears around it and roll up their sleeves.

28. They put God first, so that if you pass their dwellings
You meet only one generous and struggling.

29. If they do battle they fill the land with dead;
If they make peace they build up the quarters with mosques.

30. Far from it! The objects of wants are not won by sleeping,
Nor do planets arrive led by one sitting.

31. Many a sovereign whose inclination they seized
Until at his hands they fixed custom followed.

32. Their neighbor was never in one day your neighbor,
His sharp sword sheathed while yours was active.

33. He has birth known far and wide, while another
Makes claims he wants proofs and witnesses to.