My reader's pardon, if I scratch her ear with the verse I bring her—verse she has been accustomed to hearing from the mouths of village women and village men on a wedding night, or at a funeral, or on a harvest day, and has grown up to regard as vulgar and commonplace, and to be too careful of her time to let us waste it in reading about it. Her pardon, if I come to tell her that in this living verse there are flashes of beauty that deserve attention, and if I ask her to leave the poetry of the diwans for a little while and come with me to hear the poetry of a folk who perhaps neither write nor read. She will find that, in place of the bramble she has loved, she will meet with roses and the flowers of the field.

Ours is not the only literature among literatures to contain, beside the poetry published in it, popular songs passed from tongue to tongue for generations, songs of no known author, changing from time to time according to the singers and the circumstances. No literature is without this; but ours is perhaps the only one that has turned its face away from them and refused to adopt them, and so has denied our poets the profit of what is in them. Would English poetry, I wonder, not have been the loser had the popular songs called Ballads (and our songs are just such) not entered its heritage in the age of the Romantics and after?

Before me now is a collection of these songs, such as we hear as we go about this part of the world, gathered by a Finnish scholar named Aapeli Saarisalo from the two villages of al-Buqay'a and al-Bassa on the border of Palestine, and entitled by him "Songs of the Druzes"—naming the whole after a part. I shall speak of a single aspect of these songs, confining my citations to what appears in the book, though it leaves a number of the sweet poems untouched.

These songs were composed for singing, dancing, the dabke, and the like; their English name, Ballads, points to this, for the source of the word means: dancing. Hence we notice in them much repetition of ideas, stanzas, lines, expressions, and words. And as a result of their surviving through many ages, certain changes have come over their parts: stanzas have been dropped, distorting the run of the thought, and new stanzas have been inserted that do not always fit the song as a unity. From time to time, too, we find mention of modern inventions, which the village artists were pleased to work into the body of the songs they inherited: so they make the lover send his greeting to his girl by automobile, for the speed of its going; ask her to have her picture taken and send him her photograph, that he may treasure it above his eyes; describe the airplane; and so forth.

Although many of these songs were composed to be sung at weddings, the prevailing theme is the description of the beloved's coldness, her desertion, and her tormenting of her doting swain's heart—even in the wedding songs themselves. Thus we find the lovesick poet describing to us something of what he has suffered from love:

His eyes have been ruined: (My eye—weeping has increased its swelling; mountains of kohl cannot allay its swelling) Nay, the light in them has gone out and they have gone blind (My eyes, at parting from the beloved, are blind; from so much weeping and sorrow they are blind)

And he has gone mad; people call him, from the violence of his love for her, a madman; he has wandered the horizons with no Kaaba but her (I have become a dervish, roaming for love of you)

He suffers morning and evening, and endures as none other has endured (Not Joseph endured a patience like mine, nor Noah, nor Job on the day that he was tried)

So the world darkens in his eyes, and he tries to break free, crying out to God: (Your world has closed in upon us; from You we ask deliverance) and he asks Him either to help him or to let him die and give him rest (And if, O my Creator, there is no deliverance for me from this distress, I beg You—I want no living; take back what You entrusted)

So he goes on lamenting his ill fortune, and weeps, and the doves weep with him (Alas for me: the doves keened, and I keened too)

And he keeps mourning until he understands that this is love's inevitable end, and that he must bear it patiently

"O my soul, why do you complain of her love? O my heart, why are you burnt by her love? O my mind, why are you maddened by her love? Such is the reward of him who sought love"

He must, then, be content with what his love has come to, and remain faithful where he has met with nothing but ingratitude. And here he is, proving his enduring love—a love at times unruly, at times meek: he grieves over the desertion and finds the beloved's disdain harder than the torment of the keeper of Hell "Parting from loved ones is harder than the torment of Malik" and "Malik sent word and said to me: I shall not come your way; the fire of pining at your beloved's side is enough for you";

Yet for all that, he seldom hurries after her; he is content to send the doves to follow her, and to beg God to send a breeze that will bring her back to him. And he goes on singing of his love for her despite her coldness and the ruin of his soul in her passion.

"O lovely one, know that I love you; my soul and my inmost parts have perished loving you; though they