explanation (razo):

This is the first of several troubadour love poems written for my good friend Benefse al-Rashida. The idea behind these poems was to write standard troubadour poems but basing their imagery on Arabic love poetry from the same timeframe; a number of studies in the past fifty years have suggested that the earliest troubadours (like William IX of Aquitaine) were influenced by eastern music and poetry - most especially that the 'unattainable' women in troubadour poems could refer to Muslim women that would be socially untouchable by the troubadours, on both sides of the equation.

My first exposure to this idea was in Lynn Ramey's Christian, Saracen, and Genre in Medieval French Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001) though the idea has been proposed by various scholars for several decades (along with the notion that the 'lady' in troubadour love poetry is just an allegory for salvation in the Holy Land or a quest to discover one's own self).

I don't normally provide rhyming translations (there's a lot of potential meaning that can get lost in artistic rather than direct translation) but I think I wrote the modern English version first. A slightly Middle English-icized version of the poem exists in a 15th c. (or so) book I made as I cast myself before thy shrine.