Shrungaara Dhara

Distilling the wine from streams of romance
you yourself are the intoxicatress
filling the heart with the fragrance of love
O lily-maiden, bring on the night…

The pair of blue-lotus eyes
their lingering nets of light
bind and hold my gaze
in the rhythm and waves of your golden body
the flower-pollen brims in my heart

Sunk in the moonbeam waters, the swans are dancing
the honeyed taste of love is felt
on your merit-blessed face, like a moon on a lake
a soft smile stirs up its sweetness

This is a lush, deliberately classical love song, reaching for the ornate Sanskrit vocabulary of shringara, the poetic “flavour” of romance and beauty. The very first line makes the beloved the source of intoxication: she is the “intoxicatress” who distills wine out of the streams of romance itself, filling his heart with love’s fragrance. Calling her a “lily-maiden” and asking her to “bring on the night” sets the whole song in a moonlit, sensual key.

The imagery is drawn straight from the old canon of Sinhala and Sanskrit beauty. Her eyes are “blue lotuses,” the classical ideal, and their radiance throws “nets of light” that bind his gaze so he cannot look away. Her body moves in “rhythm and waves,” golden and graceful, until his heart feels as though it brims with flower-pollen, heavy and sweet.

The last verse lets nature echo her. Swans, the birds of grace, dance on water lit by moonbeams while he tastes “the honeyed sweetness of love.” Her face is likened to the moon reflected on a lake, serene and luminous, and her soft smile “stirs up the rasa,” releasing that connoisseur’s delight the whole song is built to celebrate. What the listener is left with is less a story than a mood, an unabashed, artful hymn to a beloved’s beauty, painted in the jewelled language of classical poetry.