EYES AND STARS

The eyes are subjected to similar treatment, as in Lodge’s lines

     Her eyes are sapphires set in snow
     Resembling heaven by every wink.

Thomas Hood’s Ruth had eyes whose “long lashes veiled a light that had else been all too bright.”  Heine saw in the blue eyes of his beloved the gates of heaven.  Shakspere and Fletcher have: 

     And those eyes, the break of day,
     Lights that do mislead the morn!

When Romeo exclaims: 

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. ... her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night,

he excels, both in fancy and in exaggeration, all the ancient poets; but it was they who began the practice of likening eyes to bright lights.  Ovid declares (Met., I., 499) that Daphne’s eyes shone with a fire like that of the stars, and this has been a favorite comparison at all times.  Tibullus assures us (IV., 2) that “when Cupid wishes to inflame the gods, he lights his torches at Sulpicia’s eyes.”  In the Hindoo drama Malati and Madhava, the writer commits the extravagance of making Madhava declare that the white of his mistresses eyes suffuses him as with a bath of milk!

Theocritus, Tibullus ("candor erat, qualem praefert Latonia Luna"), Hafiz, and other Greek, Roman, and Oriental poets are fond of comparing a girl’s face or skin to the splendors of the moon, and even the sun is none too bright to suggest her complexion.  In the Arabian Nights we read:  “If I look upon the heaven methinks I see the sun fallen down to shine below, and thee whom I desire to shine in his place.”  A girl may, indeed, be superior to sun and moon, as we see in the same book:  “The moon has only a few of her charms; the sun tried to vie with her but failed.  Where has the sun hips like those of the queen of my heart?” An unanswerable argument, surely!

LOCKS AND FRAGRANCE

When William Allingham wrote:  “Her hair’s the brag of Ireland, so weighty and so fine,” he followed in the wake of a hundred poets, who had made a girl’s tresses the object of amorous hyperbole.  Dianeme’s “rich hair which wantons with the love-sick air” is a pretty conceit.  The fanciful notion that a beautiful woman imparts her sweetness to the air, especially with the fragrance of her hair, occurs frequently in the poems of Hafiz and other Orientals.  In one of these the poet chides the zephyr for having stolen its sweetness while playing with the beloved’s loose tresses.  In another, a youth declares that if he should die and the fragrance of his beloved’s locks were wafted over his grave, it would bring him back to life.  Ben Jonson’s famous lines to Celia: