as the poet takes the hearer also from the ordinary world into sudden recogni-
tion of the divine. Other songs recount with wonder how the one who is the Lord
of the three worlds is yet unable, in his child’s body, to step across the threshold
of the house without tripping, and others describe his delightful childish appear-
ance and his mischievous behavior, his miraculous defeat of murderous demons
and his propensity for stealing butter (Bryant 1978; Hawley 1983).
Still others speak of his adolescent love play with the young cowherding gopı ̄
women and particularly with his lover Ra ̄dha ̄ – married to another yet unable
to resist her Lord; of his irresistible flute playing and his amorous appearance
and of the vicissitudes of love. Indeed, transforming the language and emotions
of erotic love (madhurya) into devotion to God as other devotional saints before
him had done, Su ̄rda ̄s speaks as one of the gopı ̄s, describing Kr.s.n.a’s (Hari’s)
appearance to a companion:
Look, my friend, look at Hari’s nimble eyes.
How could the shimmer of lotuses and fishes,
Even the darting wagtails,
Compare in charm with this?...
Look at that beauty: slender, mind-entrancing curls,
How they ramble uncontrolled
Over eyebrows just below...
Hari is a mirroring, the image of all desire.
(Hawley and Juergensmeyer 1988: 106)Desire and the love of union inevitably yield the pain of separation (viraha)
which serves as another theme within Su ̄rda ̄s’s songs, some addressing the
longing in temporary separation and some set in the time after Kr.s.n.a has left
Vr.nda ̄van and the land of Braj for Mathura, never to return. His companion
Uddha ̄v comes to the gopı ̄sto try to persuade them to take up yogic austerities
in Kr.s.n.a’s absence, but they show him clearly that they have already mastered
fasting, sleepless and one-pointed meditation, and more through their undying
love. Within the corpus of Su ̄rda ̄s’s songs are also songs of supplication and
complaint (vinaya) apart from the narrative world of Kr.s.n.a’s incarnation
(Hawley 1984) in which the poet speaks directly in his own voice, lamenting:
Life has stumbled, stumbled and unraveled,
Roped to politics and salary and sons.
Without my even noticing, my life has ambled off
And gotten tangled in a snare of illusion so foolproof
that now I cannot break it or loosen its grip...
(Hawley and Juergensmeyer 1988: 115)Much of the imagery of these songs and also of the practices of Kr.s.n.a devo-
tion focus on the remembrance and reenactment of the stories of Kr.s.n.a’s incar-
nation and on cultivating the emotions experienced by all the characters who
love Kr.s.n.a in various ways within this divine drama – those who serve him, his
parents, his companions, and his gopı ̄lovers. The Sanskrit Bha ̄gavata Pura ̄n.a,
190 nancy m. martin