THE PAIN OF ECSTASY

Sleep needs no velvet beds, love knows not caste. True religious feeling causes wounds of love deep within; the devotee has no escape from its poignant pangs of ecstasy. Beauty divine kills man with its fatal flashes, and he lives fluttering like a bird pierced with the hunter’s arrow. The pain of ecstasy is his prayer. He has seen that Beauty which is seen everywhere and yet is forever beyond the reach of the senses. I spread my arms in the empty air to embrace it, but my hands cannot clasp it; my arms remain empty, trembling with an unfulfilled desire.

‘In a dream you met, I rushed to clasp you. But there was only a flash, a glimpse, that eluded my grasp. Only my arms were quivering in the air with a

strange ecstasy!

-Bhai Vir Singh
‘He has killed me now, by one arrow shot at me from His arched eyebrow, I lie dead. There is no cure for me now, for the arrow has gone through my heart.’

Bhai Nand Lal