Sanskrit
सखेति मत्वा प्रसभं यदुक्तम् हे कृष्ण हे यादव हे सखेति । अजानता महिमानं तवेदम् मया प्रमादात्प्रणयेन वापि ॥
sakheti matvā prasabhaṃ yad uktam he kṛṣṇa he yādava he sakheti ajānatā mahimānaṃ tavedaṃ mayā pramādāt praṇayena vāpi
Translation
If, thinking Thee but friend, importunate, O Krishna! or O Yâdava! O friend! I cried, unknowing of Thy majesty, And careless in the fondness of my love;
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
The hymn’s register drops without warning from cosmic titles to embarrassed memory: Arjuna quotes his own past words back to Krishna — “he kṛṣṇa, he yādava, he sakhā,” hey Krishna, hey Yadava, hey friend — the exact casual vocative he must have used a hundred times before this chapter. Everything the hymn has just spent five verses establishing (first cause, beyond being and non-being, greater than Brahmā) is now measured against those words, and the gap between them is the entire content of what follows: not fear this time, but retroactive mortification at having addressed the infinite as “friend” without knowing what he was actually talking to.