Haṁsadūta
"The Swan as Messenger" — Rūpa Gosvāmī's poem of 142 verses in a single metre, śikhariṇī. Kṛṣṇa has left Vraja for Mathurā. Rādhā, come to the Yamunā with her friends, faints on the bank, and Lalitā, seeing a white swan, sends it to Mathurā with a message. Half the poem is the road: the swan is told the way through the holy places of Vraja, where every hill and grove remembers Kṛṣṇa; then how to know him in the royal city amid the splendour of the Yādavas; and only then the message itself — of the gopīs, of Vraja, of Rādhā, who is still alive. The genre is old — Kālidāsa's Meghadūta with its cloud-courier — but the messenger here carries not a wife's longing for her husband but vipralambha, the separation that the same author's Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi treats as the summit of love.
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