TO THE DIVINE BELOVED

Dr. K. Pramila Sastry

Love for God is something which crosses the barriers of space and time, integrates several religions and knits different parts of the world into an integral whole. It unites ethics and aesthetics to get fulfillment in paintings, sculpture and especially poetry. Poets from three different origins – i.e., Medieval Christianity, Madhura Bhakti of Vaishna cult and Sufi-mysticism….have all of them one thing in common….i.e., human endeavour to reach the Divine through Love. Love is a universal feeling, but not a base passion when it comes out of the mundane level of being a selfish and ego-oriented emotion and gets converted and concentrated into a devotee’s all absorbing love for God; it extends the horizons of religion and enriches literature. For instance, Christianity thinks that God is the Supreme Creator, the Father; strictly speaking, it cannot be conceived that the Christian devotees have any other figure before them, but that of God, the Father. But numerous saint-poets from St.John of the Cross, belonging to different climes and times, have written such superb poetry, imagining God as the lover. On the other hand, the American puritans have adored the jealous and angry God of the old testament. But poets from the time of Edward Taylor have sought an exception, writing in the trend of metaphysical poets. Later Emily Dickinson, though brought up in a staunch Puritan family, has written numerous love poems addressed to man and God, occasionally becoming the bride of God as a Catholic nun or indulging in a gay abandon of erotic imagery and sensuous language, competing with the Indian poets of Madhura Bhakti. Mixing the sacred and the profane, approaching the Super-sensuous through the senses, great mystic poets open the doors of perception and transform all traits of the finite existence into infinite dimensions. That is why Hinduism is not the forte of the philosophy of neti, neti (not this, nor that) insisting on an Attributeless Absolute alone; but it has given birth to sects like that of Ramanuja and Chaitanya accepting love as a medium of approach towards God. On the other hand, Islam which condemns idol worship in its approach to God, conceives of God as an abstraction devoid of any feeling, has given birth to many Sufi-mystics. Many Sufi mystics have revelled in the idea of imagining God as a Beloved and utilised human forms as stepping stones to the love of Divinity:

In the fair and ugly forms of worldly

We see the effulgence of God

manifest in them;

Our hearts are turned to God and eyes

Towards beloveds.

- Mir Valiuddin

Emerging from the three above-mentioned backgrounds, a number of poets have written poetry enriching perceptive vision with conceptual clarity. When the transcendent and the evanescent feelings get caught in apt diction, when the absolute ideas receive concrete imagery and the ineffable experience gets expression in an emotional outpouring of superb poetry, then God is conceived of as the Love or the Beloved. This paper confines itself to this common ground of comparison; however, a sort of contrast is also involved. The theme is divine, but the expression takes resort to its roots i.e., the religious origin of each poet. Religion is not a set of philosophical concepts, but a boundary-marker to the life of people which sets a way of living. It defines social roles to the people in a particular community; in its ultimate form emerges as a language of symbols. Thus, the same poets, who write poetry with similar love and devotion to God culminating in a celestial marriage, talk of their experience through a particular cultural milieu, and address themselves to the world in general, through their respective cultural upbringings. The feelings are universal, but religion and culture individualistically bind the modes of expression. This is the evolution of the universal from the particular or the vice-versa.

Saints, poets and mystics have perceived love as a reaffirmation of life. According to Plato, our love for beautiful things on earth is due to the search of our soul for the Absolute Beauty. That is why our instinctive conceptions of passion are sanctified and ordinary senses are endowed with the flow of divinity. One may say with Tagore: “No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. These delights of sights and hearing and touch will bear thy light.” For Tagore, deliverence does not lie in renunciation and he would rather fill the cup of his life to the brim. The senses are numerous lumps, to be sacredly placed at the altar of the Lord’s temple. In such instances, the poet integrates emotion with intellect, which enables him to have a sort of creative insight springing from a sort of an unconscious part of the psyche. Mystic poets have a tendency to subsume their emotions, usually worldly, into aspects of divine love. For instance, Andal refers to directing the natural desires toward God (in the form of Krishna). Incidentally this is a prayer performed in the early morning in keeping with the Tamilian Vaishnava tradition:

Oh Lord, in the still, small hours

before the dawn

We will come to your presence;

We will be bondmaids for yourself alone;

Be pleased to redirect this way our

other desires;

Hail to Thee.

- K. Santhanam

The two aspects of love, belonging to the world and God are not controversial and contrasting but complementary to each other. If ordinary emotions are rendered holy by the poets, the reverse takes place in an Upanishadic utterance. The entire universe is conceived of as of an apparently dual nature, in the union of the male and the female: “He divided himself into a Twain, and this Twain was like the female and the male in close embrace.” (Brihadaranyaka). While the whole universe in its spacial aspects is described thus, the same terminology is used by Tagore to show the temporal and permanent aspects of time; “God kisses the finite in love and man the infinite”. (Tagore ‘Stray Birds’).

Love of God permeates different literatures as a dye. We see Platonic words in St. Paul when he says, “I live not but Christ lives in me”. In the same vein, St. John of the Cross writes, “Each lives in the other, and each is the other, and the two are made one in a transformation of love”. The same identification between the poet and God receives a more dramatic expression in Kabir, an emblem of the confluence of both the trends of Sufi-mysticism and Vaishnavite Bhakti. Here, in the poem “The day is dear to me above all days, for the Beloved is a guest in my house” (Kabir), he is a woman in love visited by his Lord and God. In a typically Indian tradition, as a housewife, Kabir washes His feet. Then, comes the final moment of surrender and identification: “I lay before Him as an offering my body, my mind, and all that I have”. The same feeling of love and the host’s obligations are revealed in a poem of Emily Dickinson; but while Kabir’s presentation is picturesque and extended, Emily Dickinson’s is suggestive crisp and cryptic in her poem, “The soul that hath a Guest/Dost seldom go abroad”. In her typical way, she refers to God as “Divine Crowd at Home”, “The Emperor of Men”- who is visiting upon her, and courtesy forbids her to “go abroad”. The merger of man and God into one Being is referred to by the Sufi-mystic Jami in his own way. Here it is conceived of as an entrance into the city of love where there is no room for two, but only one:

All that is not one must ever

Suffer with the wound of Absence,

And whoever in Love’s City

Enters, finds room for one

And but in Oneness Union

- Jami

The same oneness is depicted as a pleasant participation between two love-birds by Omar Khaiyam; this is a merger with the Beloved; is something which cannot be realized by opening the door with a key, nor can it be seen through veils; but it is done as the poet says “Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee/There was – and then no more of Thee and Me.”

It has been the experience of many mystics that the rapture and ecstasy of union in love do no last long. In a mystic’s life, there is always an experience of separation resulting in a feeling of dejection and desolation. Many reasons are attributed to it, and what St. John of the Cross says seems to be accepted in general. He writes, “As to actual union … there is not and cannot be in this life, any abiding union in the faculties of soul, but only that which is passing.” St. Augustine also describes the restlessness involved in the urge of reunion: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee …” It is a human limitation that the ectasy does not last long, and the devotees grope in gloom, feeling desolated and dissatisfied with the incomplete union. But the poets have enriched this plight with passionate outpourings of emotional content described in the pangs of separation and waiting in love, called Viraha and Pratiksha in Sanskrit. In Madhura Bhakti, every devotee, irrespective of sex, becomes a maiden stricken with pangs of love. Thus, the heroine in Alone with the Spouse Divine (written by Venkata Parvateeswara Kavulu) complains that when she is in concentrated trance, lost in devotion, meditating on the sublime image, putting everything else to naught, her lover has played tricks of histrionics on her and disappeared. She implores the “embodiment of love not to go away leaving her in a miserable plight”. In this poem, the poets do not take resort to poetic paradoxes or metaphors. Here, it is a careful culling together of details to suit the occasion and successfully bring before the reader’s eyes a lover-stricken woman, lost in her own paradise, which is too slippery for her to enter into. For instance, the heroine pitifully deplores that she has not committed a mistake “except standing in awe, as hairs bristle over” over all her body. She is just trying to install the image of the Lord in her heart and has indulged in no other falsehood.

Except allowing the image

Of none other than all knowledge

And container of cosmic whole

Buoy up in half-closed limpid eyes.

Here along with depicting the devotion of the heroine, the poets have shown consummate draftsmanship in painting the picture, stroke after stroke, as if it were with paint and brush. While the feelings are explicit in these poems, Kabir presents the feelings of separation through the picture of a bashful bride who conceals her feelings:

My body and mind are grieved

for want of Thee,

O my Beloved, come to my house,

When people say I am thy bride,

I am ashamed. - Kabir

While in the above poem, written by a Shaivite poet, the emotion is kept in abeyance, to the disciples of Chaitanya, like Chandidas, love is no longer a feeling, but a spontaneous abandon. In Chandidas’s “City of Love”, love reins supreme: “I would make my residence in the city of love,\ I shall build there a hut with love.” In her dedication to love, the heroine of the poem has love for her bed, pillow, playmate, and love is her religion, she will bathe in the lake of love and “wear the collyrium of love”. The poet reaches the pinnacle of his poetic achievement when he chooses, according to his cultural upbringing, the sacred ornament of a married woman, a nose-ring, which dallies in the eyes of the heroine in consonance with her feelings of love:

I shall make a nose-ring of love

Which will wave to and fro,

by the corner

of the Eye,

Says Chandidas as,

I too will wear the collyrium

Of love.

The same celestial happiness in love is displayed in the poem Alone With the Spouse Divine. The part played by the nose-ring in Chandidas’s poem is enacted by “the solemn thread sanctified with turmeric” here as in South India, the yellow thread round the neck is a symbol of marriage, and is sacred to a married woman: “The solemn thread sanctifies with turmeric is linked with continuous conjugal bliss”- The whole poem brings out a happy mood of absolute satisfaction of desire. In a similar celestial marriage, Emily Dickinson celebrates the merger of the individual life into the divine Trinity through the sacrament of marriage:

Given in marriage unto Thee

Oh celestial Host………..

Bride of the Father and the son,

Bride of the Holy Ghost.

In exemplifying a similar union with God, Mirabai takes the example of “sohaga” dust and gold:

Fearlessly my heart is given to the

Divine Beloved

Like the fire Sohaga dust mixed to

gold, so I joined my Girdhar.

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