The Songs of Bilitis

"Bilitis" was a Phoenician poetess who lived at the beginning of the sixth century before Christ on the slopes of the Taurus mountains, where forests abounded. She was a village girl who tended her sheep, spun wool, and on fine days played with her companions in the fields.

At sixteen years of age, Bilitis emigrated to Mytilene, off the shores of Asia, and in that city the poetess lived the loose life of a courtesan; but her society in that age did not condemn her conduct with the harshness with which we today judge the intimacy of a sex with its own sex... Bilitis has left us marvelous songs about her beautiful little Mnazika, who returned her love for ten years.

Most probably, when Bilitis had grown old, she wished to sing to herself the memories of her childhood and her girlhood, and so she left us a collection of her masterpieces, which Professor Heim discovered engraved on the walls of her tomb — the French historian Pierre Louÿs translated them into French and studied her life in 1894, and the book was rendered into Arabic by our poet "Adonis," who with his delicacy of feeling has been able to draw for us living tableaux of the life of the poetess and artist... Here are some samples of the songs of "Bilitis."

We must sing a pastoral song, and pray to the god "Pan," god of the summer wind. I watch over my flock, and like me Selenis grazes hers, in the shade of a swaying olive tree.

Selenis slept on the meadow and awoke: she runs, or hunts for grasshoppers, or gathers flowers and herbs, or washes her face in the warm water of the brook.

And I pluck the tawny wool of the sheep to supply my distaff, and I spin: the hours are slow, and there — an eagle passes across the sky.

The shadow is turning... let us move the basket of flowers and the jar of milk. We must sing a pastoral song, and pray to the god, god of the summer breeze.

In the dark my mother washes me. After the forenoon she dresses me in my clothes and arranges my hair by the lamp. But when I go out in the moonlight, she tightens my girdle and ties it in a double knot.

And she says to me: "Play with the virgins, and dance with the little boys... Do not peep from the window; flee from the talk of young men, and distrust the counsels of widows.

"Like the others, someone will come for you, one night, and carry you off in a great procession of resounding santurs and amorous flutes.

"That evening, when you go away, Bilito, you will leave me three pieces of bitter gourd: one for the morning, another for noon, and the third, the most bitter, the third for feast days."

In the evening, as I sat before the door of the house, a young passerby went by. He looked at me, and I turned my face away from him; he spoke to me, and I did not answer.

He tried to come near me, so I took up a sickle and leaned against the wall — and I would have split his face open had he advanced a single step.

Then, drawing back, he smiled and blew me a kiss, saying: "There is your kiss!" — and I screamed, and wept... so hard that I ran to my mother.

I was troubled, as though a scorpion had stung me... and I kept weeping: "He kissed me!"

And my mother kissed me too, and carried me in her arms.