The only adequate expression of the fullness of this devotion is a song. Actually, it is a song in two senses: first, by his poetic enhancement of ordinary language, the figural (alankaric) virtuosity of Jaya·deva takes the language as close to music as possible; second, in some regions of India like Orissa, the poem became inextricably associated with singing. Accordingly, the “Gita·govinda” is a festival of words. It is an enchanted garden, not primarily of sights, but of sounds: it is a world of the ultimate aural enchantment. Reading the text makes it increasingly clear that this is a work that devotes extraordinary attention to its own language, and constantly draws attention to it. What is happening in the poem—the expression of Radha’s anguish, of Krishna’s desire, of the joy of their union—is happening in its language, in the manner in which sounds are chosen, strung, and gathered, syllables are repeated through alliteration, surprisingly pleasurable changes are wrought by shifts in meter. Jaya·deva is not telling a story in the ordinary sense; it is not a story of the peculiar way we read in order to know what peculiar, unexpected incidents will follow. It is a story of the unpeculiar, the general, the ordinary—of love and separation and union—that happens to human beings all the time. From one angle, there is nothing remarkable about it: it is the eternal story of love. From another angle, there is hardly anything more remarkable in human life, an experience which illuminates all others, and life itself. The literary problem is not that people cannot feel this remarkable fullness, but it is a fullness that is particularly hard to bring into language. It is the language of ultimate musical- ity which alone is adequate to that task. The “Gita·govinda” _________