herself by asking to be carried.  Such assertiveness is incompatible with the kind of humble adoration necessary for communion with God.  To prove this, therefore, Radha’s pride must be destroyed and Krishna resorts to this seemingly brusque desertion.  Action, in fact, which by human standards would be reprehensible is once again a means for imparting spiritual wisdom.  In a similar way, Krishna’s departure for Mathura and final abandonment of the cowgirls was accorded a religious interpretation.  At one level, his departure symbolized ‘the dark night of the soul,’ the experience which comes to every devotee when, despite the most ardent longing, the vision fades.  At another level, it illustrated how life must be lived when God or Vishnu was no longer on earth.  If Krishna’s love-making was intended to symbolize the ultimate rapture, his physical absence corresponded to conditions as they normally existed.  In instructing the cowgirls to meditate upon him in their minds, Krishna was only attuning them to life as it must necessarily appear after he has left the human stage.

It was these conceptions which governed the cult of Krishna from the twelfth century onwards and, as we shall shortly see, informed the poems which were now to celebrate his love for Radha.

[Footnote 46:  Note 15.]

[Footnote 47:  Note 16.]

[Footnote 48:  Note 17.]

[Footnote 49:  I.e. the whole of Krishna’s career after his destruction of the tyrant.]

[Footnote 50:  Roy Campbell, The Poems of St. John of the Cross (London, 1951), 11-12.]

(ii) The Gita Govinda

The first poem to express this changed conception is the Gita Govinda—­the Song of the Cowherd—­a Sanskrit poem written by the Bengali poet, Jayadeva, towards the close of the twelfth century.  Its subject is the estrangement of Radha and Krishna caused by Krishna’s love for other cowgirls, Radha’s anguish at Krishna’s neglect and lastly the rapture which attends their final reunion.  Jayadeva describes Radha’s longing and Krishna’s love-making with glowing sensuality yet the poem reverts continually to praise of Krishna as God.

  If in recalling Krishna to mind there is flavour
  Or if there is interest in love’s art
  Then to this necklace of words—­sweetness,
    tenderness, brightness—­
  The words of Jayadeva, listen.

He aims, in fact, at inducing ’recollection of Krishna in the minds of the good’ and adds a description of the forest in springtime solely, he says, in order once again to recall Krishna.[51] When, at last, the poem has come triumphantly to its close, Jayadeva again exhorts people to adore Krishna and ’place him for ever in their hearts, Krishna the source of all merit.’