Secretly Together

The last comparative chapter attends to the poetic imagery of merging used to describe the meeting of the divine lover and the beloveds. The first section, “Together,” examines how the Amada and her lover drink together and how the gopīs dance with Kṛṣṇa by the Yamunā River. The main question of the theological commentaries is how much the divine and his lovers actually turn into each other, and how this manages to occur even as a gap is retained for the sake of the enjoyment and for allowing the love to flow between them. The second section, “Secretly,” dwells on the secret of how God loves and is loved, as disguised in the intricate metaphors of the poetry. The commentaries on both sides resort to the theopoetic strategy of constructing metaphorical layers that simultaneously reveal and occlude the meaning of God’s love.