ശ്രീ ദത്ത വേദപാദ സ്തുതിഃ

A hymn built on a strict form: Vāsudevānanda Sarasvatī writes the first half of each verse himself and completes it with a quarter lifted verbatim from the Veda, so that his own sentence has to arrive exactly where the received line begins. It opens with agnim īḷe, the first words of the Ṛgveda, and closes verses with tad viṣṇoḥ paramaṃ padam, with sa no mṛḷa mahāṁ asi, and at the twentieth with dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāt, the Gāyatrī's own last quarter. The seams are where the interest lies, because the borrowed line keeps forcing the poem into the Vedic register just as the personal complaint gets loudest — the fourth verse asks him to destroy the disease of the heart, the seventh says the two forms of illusion have him drowning, and the ninth admits he is not the sort who leaves death behind by knowledge and asks for desire to be cut off instead.