Verse 21

²¹At play, when I closed my eyes as if gone deep into stillness, he would come up startled and startled again in a rush of love, and butt me with the wet soft tip of his little horn. ²²When the offering was laid out and he spoiled the sacred grass and I scolded him, he would be frightened and stop his running at once and sit still, holding all his senses in, like a sage's son. ²³What austerity can this earth have practised, that she is marked all over by the rows of small soft hoofprints of that gentle black fawn, prints slight and lovely and most auspicious, which point out to me, sick and beggared by the loss of my wealth, the road my wealth has taken, and which make of her, decked out on every side, a place for the twice-born who want heaven or release to sacrifice to the gods?

²⁴Or is it that the revered lord of the stars, who is tender to helpless creatures, is guarding this young deer out of pity, whose mother died in fear of the lion and who has strayed from my hermitage? ²⁵Or is he giving life again to me, whose heart is a lotus pool scorched by the flames of the forest fire of fever at the loss of my child, and to whom the doe's son came, with those rays of his that cool and quiet, thick with love, made of the water of deathlessness from his own face?