CXXIX: The Impatience of the Pair to Fly to Each Other’s Arms explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Love and Marriage

  The chapter delves into the passionate, impatient love between a pair, highlighting the overpowering nature of romantic attachment.

Characters to notice

• Bouderie

  Personified as the sulking impulse that cannot persist in the face of true love.

• the Kural

  The text itself is the source of the verses describing the lovers' impatience.

Key passages

• “She Rapture at the very thought and delight at the mere seeing belong not to wine: they belong only unto love.”

  The joy of anticipation and the pleasure of sight are unique to love, not to intoxication.

  Contrasts the ecstasy of love with the effects of wine.

• “When love exceedeth even the measure of a palmyra tree, the desire to sulk can never enter the heart even to the extent of a millet seed.”

  When love is immense, there is no room for even the smallest resentment.

  Uses hyperbolic imagery to emphasize love's dominance over sulking.

• “Even as the eye seeth not the blackness of the pencil when it is being painted, even so I see no blemish in my beloved when he is near.”

  Just as the eye ignores the pencil's blackness during painting, I see no faults in my beloved when he is close.

  Illustrates how proximity blinds one to flaws.

• “Who will jump into a stream knowing that it hath a treacherous undercurrent that will carry him away? and how should I take to sulking who know that I cannot hold on to it when he is near?”

  No one would enter a dangerous stream knowingly; similarly, I cannot maintain sulking when he is near.

  Compares the futility of sulking to a perilous river.

• “There were the sulks in her eye when she saw me: but when I approached, she flew to my arms even quicker than I myself to hers.”

  Though she appeared sulky at first, she rushed into my embrace faster than I could.

  Reveals the lover's immediate surrender to affection.