Page:One Hundred Poems Kabir (1915).djvu/20

xx mediate between two orders, going out in loving adoration towards God and coming home to tell the secrets of Eternity to other men; so the artistic self-expression of this consciousness has also a double character. It is love-poetry, but love-poetry which is often written with a missionary intention.

Kabir’s songs are of this kind: outbirths at once of rapture and of charity. Written in the popular Hindī, not in the literary tongue, they were deliberately addressed--like the vernacular poetry of Jacopone da Todi and Richard Rolle--to the people rather than to the professionally religious class; and all must be struck by the constant employment in them of imagery drawn from the common life, the universal experience. It is by the simplest metaphors, by constant appeals to needs, passions,