Soka Senasum Wedanawan Lyrics by Victor Rathnayake

Sorrow’s comforting pains,
filled up with love,
the tears in her blue-lotus eyes,
the fortune that life still holds,
the fortune that life still holds.

Singing a song among the strings of the veena,
giving birth to the sweetness of that love in the heart.

Tying strips of golden cloth, dressing up the road,
wishing for a helping hand on the journey of life.

On the shore of longing in my palace of dreams,
flowers of love bloomed and shone.

Your comforting, or your weeping,
lingers there in those blue eyes.

A man is speaking to the woman he loves, and the whole song lives in that tender place where love and sorrow sit side by side. He looks at her and sees both at once: the pain in her, and the comfort he wants to be for her. When he calls grief itself “comforting,” he is saying something Sri Lankan listeners feel instinctively, that even sadness shared with someone you love becomes bearable, almost sweet, because you are carrying it together.

He keeps returning to her eyes, and twice he calls them “blue-lotus” eyes. In Sinhala song the blue water lily, the nil-upul, is the classic image for a beautiful eye, cool and calm and a little sorrowful, the kind of beauty that moves you quietly rather than dazzles. So when he notices the tears resting in those eyes, he is not describing a stranger’s face but the one face that holds his whole world. He tells her that despite the tears, she is the good fortune his life still has ahead of it.

The middle of the song fills with gentle, hopeful images. He imagines playing a melody on the veena and stirring up the sweetness of their love. He pictures tying strips of golden cloth along the road and decorating the path, the way Sri Lankans dress a lane for a wedding or a welcome, and the meaning is simple, he wants to make the long road of life beautiful for the two of them and is asking for her hand to steady him on the way. Then he turns to his own dreams, a palace of dreams with a shore made of longing, and on it the flowers of love open and glow. It is his way of saying that everything he hopes for has her at the center of it.

The song closes back where it began, on her eyes. Whether she is being comforted or whether she is weeping, all of it gathers and stays in that blue gaze. That is what he is left holding, the sense that her sorrow and her solace are both his to share, and that a love like this is steady enough to walk a whole life beside.