Devkota and Night Prayer

The literary creations of Mahakavi Devkota have appealed wide range of audience with
their numerous themes.

Devkota has portrayed the night in two different forms in his various poetic creations:
one, he has depicted the night in its own form as a natural phenomena, with its own color
and characteristics. The starry sky with moon at its center and the astral dim light
spreading on earth has its own beauty. Devkota describes such beauty vividly in his
poems. It also becomes the source of poetic inspiration for a creative genius like him.
Besides this, he symbolizes the night in the form of chaos out of which creation begins.
The night is the storehouse of creative energy, which consists all the materials necessary
for creation. These two depictions aesthetic significance of the night and the night as
the source of creative energy from physical description to deep symbolic connection
have heightened the aesthetic sensibility of reading Devkota. He does not depict night
simply as the absence of daylight

Devkota's depiction of the night as source of creative force echoes the creation myths as
depicted in different sources. Christian myth states, "In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the
surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." (Bible, Genesis
I) It was the same formless, empty, and dark element from where the life began.
Likewise, the Nasadiya Sukta of Rig Veda explains that the creation of the universe the
gods, lights, stars, the earth, etc. began from the womb of night.
At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.
The sun, the most illumined object, the source of light too, Rig Veda states, emerged
from the night.

From these observations, it can be inferred that night and darkness are not similar entities,
they are not synonymous to each other. Night has its own light, which comprises light
and other entities within it. It is spiritual awakening. Whereas darkness is absence of light,
a symbol of ignorance in spiritual terms. In his poems .. Devkota sees the light of night.
He treats the night as spiritual phenomena, and talks about its beauty. He envisions the
night as the state of meditativeness that ensures spiritual solace to its persona. In
"Prarthanaki Nishi", Devkota writes, "
/ / ! !
!" Here, the persona experiences the spiritual beauty at the time of
meditation or prayer at night when a ray of light gives divine glow in the face.