śrī lakṣmīdharāṣṭakam

Eight verses to Jagannatha under the name Vasudeva, and the metre carries them: auspicious, dark, cool, tender, Radhika's beloved, spotless Madhava — a chiming of like endings that runs through every line of every verse. What fixes the hymn to Puri is the detail. He is lord of the Blue Mountain and citizen of Shripuri, the dwarf at Gundicha, the wealth of the ghosha procession, seen upon the chariot, fond of the brahma-daru, and called by the household name Kalia. The fifth verse turns aside to Ramachandra and the sixth to Narasimha before the refrain returns to Vasudeva. Its seventh makes a request no other hymn here makes: give me wages in your city, and quickly — the poet asking not for liberation but for a place in the service of that temple.