Krishna in Paradise

Jayadeva, Sir Edwin Arnold (T) · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 6 pages

From Jayadeva's Gita Govinda in Sir Edwin Arnold's verse translation, six pages, presented as poetry with no commentary — the shortest piece in this batch and one of the few in the section that argues nothing at all.

The passage is a song of address. Radha, still abasing her glorious eyes and not yielding all her face, relents until with a softer upturned look she smiles while the Maid pleads; Krishna comes nearer, and the song that follows is given in stanzas. He calls her the angel of his hope and his heart's home, and states the difficulty the whole lyric turns on — that his fear is lost in love and his love in fear, the one bidding him trust his burning wish and come, the other checking him with its memories as he draws near. He asks her to lift up her look and let what it says either end fear with grace or darken love to death. The second stanza asks only that she speak once more, since even if she slays him her heavenly mouth must move and he will hear the dulcet delights of that voice again — the prisoner, as he puts it, praying for his doom so that he may hear his fate divinely come. The third turns the request into a piece of praise by indirection: that in speaking she cannot choose but show her mouth's honeyed wonder, the row of pearly teeth hidden like pearls in red-lipped shells, and he likens himself to the bird that woos the moon.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.5 MB, 6 pages)