Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/48

 The Puranas may paint Siva as the body of death, on which dances Kali in her ecstasy, but in the old folk-songs we see Siva putting off the god and becoming a peasant, a beggar, and a hemp-smoker. In these Siva songs, whose singers have usually an Ekatara, or one-stringed lute, the changes and rural events of the year occur as a matter of course. The cephalica flower falls to the ground in showers under the clear autumn sky of Bengal; the breeze seems to blow more softly in the season to which they belong. Siva has a wife, Uma, but he is no provident mate; he is old and rascally, and so poor that he is unable even to find a pair of shell-bracelets for his bride, though she is the daughter of a king, and that king is Mount Himavati. Thus the sorrows of Siva's girl-bride are a common theme, and the feelings of Menaka her mother become in the songs so affecting that the eyes of many a child-wife glisten behind her veil, and the hearts of the mothers cry out for the daughters who have been taken away from them when mere children.

Among the true followers of Siva the form of Uma represents the fineness and delicacy of earthly life, and that of Siva the terror and