Brown Girls
The ardours celebrated in Coloured Stars: Versions of Fifty Asiatic Love Poems, by Edward Powys Mathers, have not been uttered in original English poetry since the days when the young Marlowe and the young Shakespeare lavished the wealth of Elizabethan eulogium upon the gorgeous bodily beauties of Hero and Venus—and even those ladies, all red and white, seem a little cool and proud compared with the browner girls who kindle such infinite desires in Asian lovers. The poets whom Mr. Mathers has here rendered with delicate skill represent almost every corner of the continent, yet the most frequent note in the collection is the flaming praise of radiant mistresses, pictured not so much in the lover’s hours of longing as in the hot moments of the fruition of his desire. For sheer intensity it would be hard to equal the two Afghan poems, Black Hair and Lover’s Jealousy, or the Kurdistan Vai! Tchod-jouklareum—full of raptures as barbarously naked as the girls they praise. Out of the same fury comes the Altai War Song, which sets forth the most tempting charms of love, only to vow that still better are the arrows and sabres and black horses of battle. The Burmese My Desire, only a little less passionate, is more philosophical. What most differentiates this anthology from any similar one that could be made from European literature is the comparative absence from it of the deep humility of the lover before the person or the thought of his beloved. These lovers are nearly all superbly confident. More civil moods, however, appear in the Hindustani pieces, which are not without a note of fear and distrust of women as chilly jilts. True to our preconceptions, the Japanese poems are the daintiest, all but one in the accustomed five-line stanza, and each one an exquisite picture associated with tender longings; and the Chinese poems seem most familiar, most universal, in feelings and ideas. Without the abandon of the poems from western Asia, and with less than the hard, bright compactness of the Japanese, they are exquisitely truthful and humane. It is notable that only the eastern Asiatics are here represented as giving expression to the woman’s emotions, as if in the west, women, at the worst the victims of desire, were at best only an ear to hear of it, never a voice to speak it out.