[When you told us our glances, soft, timid, and mild,]

^{Translated from the Arabic by Joseph Dacre Carlyle} 

When you told us our glances, soft, timid, and mild,
      Could occasion such wounds in the heart,
Can ye wonder that yours, so ungovern’d and wild,
      Some wounds to our cheeks should impart?

The wounds on our cheeks, are but transient, I own,
      With a blush they appear and decay;
But those on the heart, fickle youths, ye have shewn
      To be even more transient than they.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 15, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“[When you told us our glances, soft, timid, and mild,]” appears in Joseph Dacre Carlyle’s Specimens of Arabian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1796). The Arabic original was written at some point during the life of Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, who is believed to have been born sometime after the year 994 and who died in the year 1091. Carlyle’s translation of the poem bears an epigraph derived from the Latin of Miguel Casiri, author of the Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana Escurialensis; the epigraph reads, “Verses addressed by Waladata, daughter of Mohammed Almostakfi Billah, Khaliph of Spain, to some young men who had pretended a passion for herself and her companions.” In The History of the Mahometan Empire in Spain (T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1816), James Cavanah Murphy, an Irish antiquary, calls Wallada the “Arabian Sappho” while quoting Carlyle’s translation in its entirety. As Murphy claims, “Her poetical compositions are characterised by wit and ingenuity, as will appear from the following verses, addressed by her, impromptu, to some young men who had pretended a passion for herself and her companions.”

Joseph Dacre Carlyle, born on June 4, 1758, in Carlisle, England, was a translator and scholar who specialized in the Near East. He is the translator, into Latin, of Ibn Taghribirdi’s Rerum Ægyptiacarum Annales (Cambridge University Press, 1792) as well as the author of Specimens of Arabian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1796). His Arabic translation of the Old Testament and his poetry collection Poems Suggested Chiefly by Scenes in Asia Minor, Syria and Greece (William Bulmer and Co., 1805) were published posthumously. He died on April 12, 1804.