Love Lyrics

Ámaru’s sophisticated seventh-century CE “Hundred Poems” are as much about the social aspects of courting, betrayal, feminine indignance and masculine self-pity as about sensuality. Bhartri·hari’s anthology “Love, Politics, Disenchantment” is the oldest of the three, from the fourth century. Interwoven throughout his three hundred idiosyncratic stanzas is a constant sense of skepticism about sensuality and love, economic and social power, and rejection of society and culture. In the eleventh century, Bílhana composed his intense “Fifty Stanzas of a Thief,” a thief’s rhythmic remembrance, in the moments before his execution, of robbing a princess’s affections, and the clandestine pleasures of their love in both separation and enjoyment. The flavor of all these poems is the universalized aesthetic experience of love.