Selected Poems (Engelse vertaling)

xxviii INTRODUCTION

when at last he reached his goal and was sing-
ing his great Song to Zion by the ruins he
had longed to see. Certain it is, however, that
many of its lines must have been written while
his desire to reach Jerusalem was yet but a
dream. His poem reaches its appointed end
in his ardent confidence that the age-long hope
of his suffering people will find its fulfilment.

The poet Swinburne has written a few lines
in a poem called "The Triumph of Time",
about another singer of the Middle Ages—
lines which make one think equally of the life,
the love, and the death of Jehudah Halevi:

There lived a singer in France of old

By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold

There shone one woman, and none but she.
And finding life for her love's sake fail,
Being fain to see her, he bade set sail,
Touched land, and saw her as life grew cold,
And praised God, seeing; and so died he.

The French singer loved and sought the lady
of his dreams; but she whom the Rabbi loved,
as Heine has said—"her name was Jerusalem"
Jehudah Halevi has attained the highest honour
to which a writer can aspire—the esteem of
his peers. Harizi, the Hebrew poet-critic of
a generation near his own, describes him as