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Picture it first as a single, breathing scene. A bee, dark and gold-dusted, drops onto a flower and cannot keep its footing for the sweetness of it; it falls, rises, falls again. That bee is Śyāma. The flower is Rādhā. He comes to Her lotus-feet and lands there, patan patan, falling and falling, and each time He rises only to come down once more, because what He has drunk has gone to His head. He lifts His face to Hers, to the smiling moon of Her countenance, smera-āsya-indu, and in the soft light of that smile two golden lotus-buds stand revealed, the hema-aravinda of Her breasts, sprouting as if the very beams of Her smile had called them open. He has drunk the nectar of Her mouth, vaktrāmbujam pītvā, drunk it with such savour, ati-rasāt, that He is no longer steady in Himself; and now, certain that more sweetness waits hidden within, He reaches with the tips of His nails, nakha-śikhayā, and scratches at those golden buds, atyāveśāt, out of an ecstasy that has swallowed all restraint, as if He would pierce them and enter in.

And over all of it hangs a single trembling word: kim īkṣe. When? When will I be so fortunate as to see this? The whole verse is bent into a wish. It does not say "this happens." It begs, "let me live to watch it happen."

Why a bee, and not simply a lover? Because the tradition reads the bee on purpose, and it reads it twice. First: a bee drunk on honey loses its balance, and a drunken man falls and gets up and falls again; so the Kṛṣṇa-bee keeps landing on Rādhā's lotus-feet and rising from them, again and again, unable to stand still under the weight of the nectar He has drunk. Second: a bee that finds a lotus already closed will scratch at its folded petals, thinking, "surely there is more inside here for me." So Śyāma scratches with His nail-tips at the closed golden buds of Her breasts, hunting the sweetness He is sure lies deeper in. The Gauḍīya teachers in the Ananta Dāsa Bābājī lineage do not let this be mistaken for ordinary thirst. The nectar of Rādhā's lips, they say, is no common sweetness; it is mādana-rasa, the very highest nectar of transcendental love, nothing like the taste of an ordinary girl's lips. And so the thirst feeds itself: the more He relishes, the more thirsty He grows, and the more thirsty He grows, the more He relishes, a circle with no shore.

Now hear who it is that watches, because that is the secret of the verse. The one singing imagines himself a maidservant. It was she who led Svāminī on abhisāra, the love-journey through the night, and brought Her to the trysting kuñja. Śyāma had been waiting there in anxiety, and then a golden light broke across every direction, and He knew She had come. Kṛṣṇa, who is ecstasy itself, grew ecstatic at the sight of Her and drew Her inside. The Gauḍīya teachers note that the vāmyavatī, the one who delights in playful opposition, is on this night her most generous. And the maidservant, understanding that the young Pair wish now to be alone in their love, withdraws from the bower. She does not leave. She stands outside and looks in through the small holes in the vines, and what she sees through that lattice is the bee drinking and falling, falling and drinking, and reaching for the closed buds. The whole picture, then, is framed by a servant's eye, and the deepest thing in it is not the act at the center but the longing at the edge: O let me be near enough, let me be granted to see.

This meeting cannot be told in plain words, and the Gauḍīya teachers know it, so they reach for the song of Caṇḍī dāsa to carry what prose cannot. There, Rādhā's heart fills with delight as though She had recovered a lost jewel, and She takes it to Her breast and cannot bear to set it down even for an instant. Kṛṣṇa is the cakora-bird who has at last attained his moon; He falls into the snare of love like a bumblebee come to the lotus. Their bodies fill with rasa and shiver in ecstasy; the long fire of separation is at last put out. They sit upon a jewelled throne, gazing into each other's faces in bliss, and yet they cannot see, for the tears of joy stand thick in their eyes, and so they remain sweetly bewildered. The southern breeze blows soft and slow, the full moon shines clear, and Caṇḍī dāsa himself stands beside the divine Couple, fanning Them with a yak-tail fan, his voice faltering, broken with the emotion he cannot hold.

The Rādhāvallabha stream, in the Hindi rendering of Swami Śrī Hitdas ji, sets the same scene as eternal pastime, nitya-vilāsa, and pours it into the long roll of the mandākrāntā meter, but it keeps the verse as the servant's bare, aching question, asked in two movements. First: will I ever see it? Will I see the Kṛṣṇa-bee, drunk on the honey of Śrī Priyā's lotus-face, in the fullness of love-absorption, falling again and again at Rādhā's lotus-feet and praying there to be let back inside the kuñja-bower? And then, the second movement, after the bower has opened: and once within, will I see Him take those golden lotus-buds, the breasts of that sweetly-smiling moon-faced One, and part them with the very tips of His nails? Same vision exactly, set down as the plain prayer of one who only wishes to behold.

One thing more the Gauḍīya teachers pause to say, and it is about the poem itself, not only its scene. Just as a truly beautiful woman needs no jewelry and no paint, and is lovely even dressed in tree-bark, so the transcendental beauty of Śrī Rādhikā rises of itself in these verses of praise and draws the heart in even where the meter or the wording or the turning of an image is not perfectly handled. And yet, they marvel, this book wants for nothing on that count either: it shines with an abundance of ecstatic love and is built besides with incomparably beautiful meters and with images of rare loveliness. How cleverly, they say, are these sweet pastimes told.