Baarah Maahaa

The Baarah Maaha ("Twelve Months") is a twelve-month composition in which seasonal and bridal imagery carry the soul's longing: 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. The form is widely associated with North Indian devotional and folk poetry, and Guru Arjan turns it wholly toward the divine. Sikh readers have long read the wife as the soul and the absent Beloved as the One, with the twelve months carrying 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.)