Jayadeva

Jayadeva was a Sanskrit poet of eastern India, traditionally associated with the court of King Lakshmanasena of Bengal and with the Jagannath temple at Puri in Odisha. His dates are not fixed by any record: he is placed only in the twelfth century, and the birth year used to order him in this archive (1150) is an estimate for sorting, not a biographical fact.

He is remembered for the Gita Govinda, a sequence of twelve cantos (sargas) of songs about the love of Krishna and Radha, in which the pastoral story of their separation, quarrel and reunion is also an image of the soul's longing for the divine. It became one of the most widely sung and imitated texts of devotional Hindu poetry. It is given here in Sir Edwin Arnold's English verse rendering, The Indian Song of Songs (1875), as reprinted in Indian Poetry (Kegan Paul, eighth impression, 1904).