Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal | Page 6

frequent sighs, she looks towards the kadamba jungle. Why has Rai (Radhika) become thus? serious is her error, she has no fear of men, where are her senses, or what god has possessed her? Constantly restless, she does not cover herself with the corner of her robe: she sits still for a while, then rises with a start, her ornaments fall with a clang. Youthful in age, of royal descent, and a chaste maiden to boot: what does she desire, (why) does her longing increase? I cannot understand her motives: from her conduct, this I conceive, she has raised her hand to the moon: [Footnote: She has formed some extravagant desire.] Cha.n.di / Das says with respect she has fallen into the snare of the black one (K.rish.na)."
This poem vividly expresses the first symptoms of love dawning in the girl's heart, and from a religious point of view the first awakenings of consciousness of divine love in the soul. It is difficult for the European mind, trained to draw a broad distinction between the love of God and love for another human being, to enter into a state of feeling in which the earthly and sensual is made a type of the heavenly and spiritual, but a large-souled charity may be perhaps able to admit that by this process, strange though it be to its own habits and experiences, there may have been some improvement wrought in the inner life of men brought up in other schools of thought; and my own experience, now of fourteen years standing, enables me to say that Vaish.navism does, in spite of, or perhaps in virtue of, its peculiar modus operandi, work a change for the better on those who come under its influence.
Two more hymns on the same subject follow, and in No. 5 Radha herself breaks silence.
"In the kadamba grove what man is (that) standing? What sort of word coming is this: the plough of whose meaning has penetrated startlingly the path of hearing? With a hint of union, with its manner of penetrating making one well-nigh mad: My mind is agitated, it cannot be still, streams flow from my eyes: I know not what manner of man it is who utters such words: I see him not, my heart is perturbed, I cannot stay in the house: My soul rests not, it flutters to and fro in hope of seeing him: When she sees him, she will find her soul, quoth Urdbab Das."
I have left myself no space to finish this Pallab, or to make remarks on the peculiarities of the language, which in the older masters would more properly be called old Maithila than Bengali. It is nearly identical with the language still spoken in Tirhut, the ancient Mithili, and in Munger and Bhagalpur, the ancient Magadha, than modern Bengali. As the Aryan race grew and multiplied it naturally poured out its surplus population in Bengal, and it is not only philologically obvious that Bengali is nothing more than a further, and very modern development of the extreme eastern dialect of Hindi. All these considerations, however, I hope still further to develop at some future time.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal, by John Beames
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