No. 191:  “By untangling the hair of her prostrate lover from the notches of her spangles in which it had been caught, she shows him that her heart has ceased to be sulky.”

References to such prostrations to secure forgiveness for inconstancy or cruelty are frequent in Hindoo poems and dramas, and it is needless to say that they are a very different thing from the disinterested prostrations and homage of modern gallantry.  True gallantry being one of the altruistic ingredients of love, it would be useless to seek for it among the Hindoos.  Not so with hyperbole, which being simply a magnifying of one’s own sensations and an expression of extravagant feeling of any kind, forms, as we know, a phase of sensual as well as of sentimental love.  The eager desire for a girl’s favor makes her breath and all her attributes seem delicious not only to man but to inanimate things.  The following, with the finishing touches applied by the German translator, approaches modern poetic sentiment more closely than any other of Hala’s songs: 

No. 13:  “O you who are skilled in cooking!  Do not be angry (that the fire fails to burn).  The fire does not burn, smokes only, in order to drink in (long) the breath of (your) mouth, perfumed like red patela blossoms.”

In the use of hyperbole it is very difficult to avoid the step from the sublime to the ridiculous.  The author of No. 153 had a happy thought when he sang that his beloved was so perfect a beauty that no one had ever been able to see her whole body because the eye refused to leave whatever part it first alighted on.  This pretty notion is turned into unconscious burlesque by the author of No. 274, who complains,

     “How can I describe her from whose limbs the eyes that
     see them cannot tear themselves away, like a weak cow
     from the mud she is sticking in.”

Hardly less grotesque to our Western taste is the favorite boast (No. 211 et passim) that the moon is making vain efforts to shine as brightly as the beloved’s face.  It is easier for us to sympathize with the Hindoo poets when they express their raptures over the eyes or locks of their beloved: 

     No. 470:  “Other beauties too have in their faces
     beautiful wide black eyes, with long lashes, but they
     cannot cast such glances as you do.”

No. 77:  “I think of her countenance with her locks floating loosely about it as she shook her head when I seized her lip—­like unto a lotos flower surrounded by a swarm of (black) bees attracted by its fragrance.”

Yet even these two references to personal beauty are not purely esthetic, and in all the others the sensual aspect is more emphasized: 

No. 556:  “The brown girl’s hair, which had succeeded in touching her hips, weeps drops of water, as it were, now that she comes out of the bath, as if from fear of now being tied up again.”

     No. 128:  “As by a miracle, as by a treasure, as in
     heaven, as a kingdom, as a drink of ambrosia, was I
     affected when I (first) saw her without any clothing.”