Ophrah shall wash her garments white
In rivers of my tears,
And dry them in the radiance bright
That shines when she appears.
Thus will she seek no sun nor water nigh,
Her beauty and mine eyes will all her needs supply.
These lovers' tears often meet us in the Hebrew poems. Ibn Gabirol speaks
of his tears as fertilizing his heart and preserving it from crumbling into
dust. Mostly, however, the Hebrew lover's tears, when they are not tokens
of grief at the absence of the beloved, are the involuntary confession of
the man's love. It is the men who must weep in these poems. Charizi sings
of the lover whose heart succeeds in concealing its love, whose lips
contrive to maintain silence on the subject, but his tears play traitor and
betray his affection to all the world. Dr. Sulzbach aptly quotes parallels
to this fancy from Goethe and Brentano.
This suggestion of parallelism between a medieval Hebrew poet and Goethe
must be my excuse for an excursion into what seems to me one of the most
interesting examples of the kind. In one of his poems Jehudah Halevi has
these lines: