śrī devarājāṣṭakam

Eight verses to Varadaraja of Kanchi by Kanchipurna, prefaced by two verses in another hand that salute the poet himself as the vessel of the god's grace and as one held in honour by the sage Ramanuja. The hymn works by a single extended image. The round of birth is a desert wilderness, terrible with the tigers of grievous disease, thick with the low scrub of the objects of sense and standing full of the trees of thirst; the man crossing it is the speaker. Against all that it sets nothing but water. The last verse asks only to be sprinkled with the cool spray flung from the waves of the nectar-ocean of the god's glance, carried across by the wind of his compassion.