The Lady of the Forest

The hymn opens with a man calling into the trees.

"Aranyani! Aranyani! Lady of the forest, who always seems to be slipping out of sight. Why do you never come and ask for the village? Are you not afraid out there?"

Nobody answers him. The one he is calling does not come to villages, and she does not show herself to people who shout. The hymn is only six verses long, and after that first question the poet stops asking and starts to listen.

At first there is one sound. Somewhere in the grass an insect is calling, deep and loud, as a bull bellows. Then a second one answers it, thin and high. They go back and forth, the low voice and the shrill one, until the whole wood seems to be ringing.

"Hear that," says the poet. "It is like the tinkling of little bells. The Lady of the Forest is being praised, and she is glad."

Then he looks, and the forest plays with his eyes.

"There, between the trunks. Are those cattle grazing? And behind them, is that a house?"

He looks again and cannot tell. It seems to be so, and that is as far as he will go. The light is failing. From somewhere deep among the trees comes a long creaking and rattling, the noise that carts make when they are unloaded and sent off at the end of the day.

"It is evening," he says, "and it sounds as if the Lady of the Forest were letting her wagons go."

Evening in the forest is full of voices, and the poet counts them off one by one.

A man is calling his cow. That is a real voice, an ordinary one, somebody from the village who has come looking for an animal that strayed.

A tree comes down with a crack. That is real too. Someone has been cutting wood late.

And then there is the third sound, the one that everybody who has stayed among the trees after dark has heard.

"Was that a scream?" says the man who is spending the night in the forest. "I am sure someone screamed."

The poet does not say that anyone did. He says only that this is what a person thinks, at evening, when he is out there alone. The hymn leaves the cry where it is, unexplained.

Then, as if he had felt the listener's hand tighten, he says the most comforting thing he knows.

"Aranyani does not kill. Not unless some other comes near, someone who means murder. A man eats her sweet fruit, as much as he wants, and then he lies down and rests wherever he pleases."

That is the whole of what she does to people. She feeds them and lets them sleep. The danger in the forest belongs to whatever else is walking in it, the hymn says, and not to her.

By now the question he began with has turned around. He asked her whether she was afraid. He was the one who heard screams. She has rung her bells and sent her carts home and gone on being exactly what she was.

So he ends as a guest ends, with thanks.

"I have praised her now, the Lady of the Forest. She smells sweet, she is fragrant with balm. She is the mother of the wild animals. She never ploughs, and she always has food."

He asks her for nothing. In a book full of prayers for cattle and sons and victory, this hymn makes no request at all. The man came to the edge of the trees, called a name, heard the forest at dusk, and said what he had heard.

She never did answer him. Six verses, and the Lady of the Forest does not speak a word in any of them.