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Begin at the shore, O seeker, and look at the water. What lies before you is not a lake and not a river but a sea without a far edge, and the tradition tells you at once what sea it is: this is the great nectar-ocean of love for Hari, bahala-hari-mahā-prema-pīyūṣa-sindhu, love so dense and so sweet that it has taken the shape of an entire ocean. And then, slowly, the wonder breaks over you: the ocean is Herself. This whole expanse of prema is Śrī Rādhā. There is no part of Her that is not made of love for Kṛṣṇa, and so to gaze on Her at all is to gaze upon love wearing a body.

Look, then, at what plays upon that water. Her two eyes, krīḍan-mīna-dvaya: a pair of fishes at play, restless, flashing, never still, darting day and night through the rasa, and so long, the old teachers say, that they reach almost to Her ears. Her lips, sphurad-adhara-maṇi-vidruma: shining coral, the red coral-rock of the sea, a jewel that the water itself has grown. Her heavy hips, śroṇi-bhāra: an island risen in the midst of the ocean, broad and enchanting, dvīpa manohara. And upon that island, O wonder, something moves: smara-kalabha-kaṭāṭopa, the proud swelling temple-lobes of Cupid's baby elephants, and these are Her breasts. So lovely and so commanding are they that the tradition cannot help but turn and scold the elephants outright: curses, curses on the mad elephant's frontal trunks, for the very pride of those great beasts is destroyed and shamed by Rādhikā's breasts. Cupid's young elephants wander the island and are humbled there. Then the deep navel, gambhīra-nābhi: a whirlpool, gambhīrāvarta, the place where the ocean turns and spirals down into its own depth. And last, floating on the very surface of all that nectar, Her lotus-feet, padāmbhoruha, lotus-flowers upon the water, koṭi of lotuses, a million blossoms drifting on the sweetness.

And now hear what the singer does with all of this. He has unrolled the whole ocean of Her, feature by feature, and you might expect him to ask to bathe in it, to drink it, to claim some portion of it for himself. He asks for none of that. His one word is yogyatām eva mṛgye: I seek only the qualification, only the worthiness, to serve. Paricaraṇa, to wait upon, to do the small near service at Her feet, this alone is the whole of his desire. He stands at the edge of an ocean of love and begs not to possess it but to be permitted to attend it.

The tradition lays a careful finger on why this is the only prayer worth saying. So long as even the faintest trace of awe or reverence remains in the heart, the service of Vraja-rasa cannot be touched. Rūpa Gosvāmī's lineage fixes the principle in the Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta, that "tat tu laukika-sad-bandhu-buddhyā prema-bhayādijam": fear and reverence toward Kṛṣṇa must be wholly uprooted, for they injure the very conception of Him as the laukika-sad-bandhu, the dear and near intimate, the good worldly friend. And the same verse gives the way forward: one who would earn prema must long to become the servant of a gopa or a gopī. This is why the singer does not ask to look upon Kṛṣṇa, nor to be granted power or vision; he asks to be made into a servant at the feet of His beloved. Awe holds God off at the distance of a master to be feared. The love of Vraja draws Him close as one's own. So the prayer is not for a thing to be received but for a self to be remade, until even reverence has melted into nearness.

There is one more grace hidden in the singing, and the old teachers will not let it pass unseen. This verse is, to within a few words, the very same as verse 173 of this book. The tradition says he wrote it down a second time on purpose. He is not gathering a treasury of many prayers; he keeps returning, helpless and single-minded, to the one prayer he cannot leave: make me worthy to serve Her feet. The repetition is the measure of the longing. He has only one thing to ask, and he asks it twice because once was not enough to carry the want.

And lest the ocean ever seem to be only beauty and not Person, the singer in his own Bengali singing names Her plainly. She is kuñjeśvarī, the queen of the flowering bowers; the moon of King Vṛṣabhānu's royal line; golden as fresh gorocanā; Hari's own beloved, whose love for Him is nirmala, spotless, a great ocean of the sweetest nectar. She is kṛṣṇa-sukha-sāgarikā and kṛṣṇamayī: the very essence of the ocean of Kṛṣṇa's bliss, and so full of Him that there is nothing in Her that is not Kṛṣṇa. And then comes the signature the tradition gives to Śrī Prabodhānanda, the refrain that is the whole burden of the verse made bare: rādhāra padāravinda sevanete lālasā āmāra, "I desire the service of Rādhā's lotus-feet."

And mark who is speaking. In the Rādhāvallabha telling the prayer comes in a woman's voice, cinve, "I seek," spoken by one who already stands among Her maidens; the one who asks to serve is herself a sakhī, a handmaid at the threshold, longing only for the eligibility to attend. The verse is even headed there as sevā-anveṣaṇa, the seeking-out of service, and it is set to the lilting bhṛṅgadharā meter, the bee-bearing measure, fit for one who hovers like a bee at the edge of so much sweetness and asks only leave to come near.