ആര്തിഹര സ്തോത്രമ്

A cry to Shiva from inside affliction, composed by the seventeenth-century saint Sridhara Ayyaval. It opens by asking Shambhu to turn on the poet a gaze cool with compassion, a rain of nectar, and to take away his burning. What gives the hymn its force is its argument: I sink under sorrows, and that suits me, being a house of sins — but that I should sink while standing before you does not suit you. Verse after verse presses the same claim, that the Lord's own reputation as one whose remembrance ends grief is what is at stake. It closes by taking refuge outright, asking to be protected even as the wicked are, out of the partiality God shows his own.