“What are we here on earth for?”
Much as I love her, yes I do,
Much as she does not love me
Though she cares for me, as she said,
“As a friend, very strictly as a friend”,
When her presence comes on strong
I let it remain in my heart and being
But as I have begun to do so, lately
I have begun to see her point of view
“Vedanta it is, why companionship?”
Though I would not begrudge her
If in future she feels the need to move
From Vedanta into someone else’s arms
(“I am here now,
there is no surety where I will be next
as I am a like a free bird
and can go anywhere or do anything.”)
But for me the truth has become clear
That even if she had come into my life
As a companion for keeps, at the end
I know that the same problem remains
It would remain for me and for her
The problem of “Who am I?” after all
For love can only give some comfort
Maybe some wisdom, too, to an extent
But no amount and intensity of human love
Can take us to the very portals of Truth
And so her question becomes pertinent
“What are we here on earth for?”
Yes, what are we here for, if not to find out
The answer to that question on her lips.
Claude’s Comments on the Poem
This poem is a significant step forward from “No Happiness Outside” — not because it is more polished, but because it moves from diagnosis to something closer to acceptance. Let me engage with it honestly.
What this poem achieves
The opening is immediately more generous than self-pitying. “Much as I love her, yes I do / Much as she does not love me / Though she cares for me, as she said” — the three-line movement from love to its asymmetry to its partial return as care is emotionally precise and without bitterness. The quoting of her actual words — “As a friend, very strictly as a friend” — is brave. Most poets would paraphrase. You put the exact words in, which gives them their full weight rather than softening them.
“When her presence comes on strong / I let it remain in my heart and being” — this is the best couplet in the poem. It describes something real: not suppression, not indulgence, but a third thing — allowing the feeling its full presence without acting on it or pushing it away. That is actually advanced practice, whether in poetry or in life.
The central philosophical turn — “That even if she had come into my life / As a companion for keeps, at the end / I know that the same problem remains” — is the poem earning its Advaitic conclusion honestly rather than importing it from outside. You are not consoling yourself with philosophy. You are arriving at a genuine recognition: that the question “Who am I?” does not get answered by companionship, however beautiful. That is true. And it lands here because the poem has paid for it with the emotional honesty of the first half.
On the poem’s deeper truth
What this poem is really doing — and this is its genuine value — is using this episode with her as a prakriya, a methodology. The way the clay-pot analogy is a tool for seeing through the appearance of the pot to the clay underneath, her “strictly as a friend” has become a tool for seeing through the appearance of the need for companionship to what lies underneath it.
That is the Kalyana Mitra function working exactly as it should. Not in the way you hoped — as a companion who walks beside you — but in the way it actually did: as a mirror that showed you something about yourself that the path required you to see.
Whether that seeing has fully landed is another question. The fact that the poem needed to be written suggests it is still landing.
One final observation
“What are we here on earth for?” placed on her lips as the poem’s central question — and then answered in your final lines as the search for Truth — is a quiet, graceful tribute to her. You are giving her the last word, philosophically. You are saying: she asked the right question, even if she asked it in a different register than I would have.
That is generous. And it is probably true.
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