While these dear maids in beauty’s bloom,
    With want opprest, with rags o’erspread,
  By sordid labors at the loom
    Must earn a poor, precarious bread.

  Those feet that never touched the ground,
    Till musk or camphor strew’d the way,
  Now bare and swoll’n with many a wound. 
    Must struggle thro’ the miry clay.

  Those radiant cheeks are veil’d in woe,
    A shower descends from every eye,
  And not a starting tear can flow,
    That wakes not an attending sigh.

  Fortune, that whilom own’d my sway,
    And bow’d obsequious to my nod,
  Now sees me destin’d to obey,
    And bend beneath oppression’s rod.

  Ye mortals with success elate,
    Who bask in hope’s delusive beam,
  Attentive view Mohammed’s fate,
    And own that bliss is but a dream.

Mohammed Bed Abad.

[33] Seville was one of those small sovereignties into which Spain
     had been divided after the extinction of the house of Ommiah.  It
     did not long retain its independence, and the only prince who ever
     presided over it as a separate kingdom seems to have been Mohammed
     Ben Abad, the author of these verses.  For thirty-three years he
     reigned over Seville and the neighboring districts with considerable
     reputation, but being attacked by Joseph, son to the Emperor of
     Morocco, at the head of a numerous army of Africans, was defeated,
     taken prisoner, and thrown into a dungeon, where he died in the year
     488.

SERENADE TO MY SLEEPING MISTRESS[34]

  Sure Harut’s[B] potent spells were breath’d
    Upon that magic sword, thine eye;
  For if it wounds us thus while sheath’d,
    When drawn, ’tis vain its edge to fly.

  How canst thou doom me, cruel fair,
    Plung’d in the hell[C] of scorn to groan? 
  No idol e’er this heart could share,
    This heart has worshipp’d thee alone.

Aly Ben Abd.

[34] This author was by birth an African; but having passed over to
     Spain, he was much patronized by Mohammed, Sultan of Seville.  After
     the fall of his master, Ben Abd returned to Africa, and died at
     Tangier, A.H. 488.

[B] A wicked angel who is permitted to tempt mankind by teaching them
    magic; see the legend respecting him in the Koran.

[C] The poet here alludes to the punishments denounced in the Koran
    against those who worship a plurality of Gods:  “their couch shall
    be in hell, and over them shall be coverings of fire.”

THE INCONSISTENT[35]

  When I sent you my melons, you cried out with scorn,
    They ought to be heavy and wrinkled and yellow;
  When I offer’d myself, whom those graces adorn,
    You flouted, and call’d me an ugly old fellow.