Note 4 — URVASI[4]
Reading edition
Urvasi, in older (i.e. Sanskrit) mythology, is a famous courtesan and dancing-girl at the court of Indra, King of the Gods. Her adventures were many; she was often sent to lure sages aside from their devotions, lest they obtained super-divine powers and threatened the dominion of the Gods (see stanza 4). But in Tagore’s poem she is very much more than her legendary character. The poem is a tangle—Indian mythology, modern science, European romance. She is the cosmic spirit of life, in the mazes of its eternal dance; she is Beauty dissociated from all human relationships; she is that world-enchanting Love which (though not in Dante’s sense) “moves the sun and other stars,” is Lucretius’s hominum divumque voluptas, Alma Venus, is Swinburne’s “perilous goddess,” “sea-foam-born.”
I have adopted a quasi-metrical form which I hope will indicate the general outline of the stanza in which this magnificent ode is written.