Baarah Maahaa

The Baarah Maaha ("Twelve Months") is a beloved genre of North Indian devotional and folk poetry: the song of a wife (the virahini, the woman separated from her beloved) who pines through all twelve months of the year, each month's weather coloring her longing. Guru Arjan takes this intimate, popular form and turns it wholly toward the divine. The wife is every soul; the absent Beloved is the One; and the twelve months become twelve moods of the spiritual life — longing, forgetting, scorching separation, the rains of grace, the cold of isolation, and at last reunion and rejoicing. (A note for the reader: the bride-and-Husband imagery is the poem's vehicle, not its point — it is the timeless language of the soul aching for its Source, and applies to every reader regardless of who they are.)