The bride-and-bridegroom imagery in Kabir is inherited from both the Sufi and the Bhakti streams. The soul is the wife, longing for the absent husband. The longing itself has a mystical function — it burns away what can't be brought to the wedding. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs making exactly this move: "I sleep, but my heart waketh." Kabir compresses it into four lines. The father's house gives her pleasure no more; she is awake to what she wants.Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum; Song of Songs 5:2.
The gates of the sky open when the father's house no longer pleases. The father's house, in bhakti symbolism, is the state of attachment to the natal family — the given identities of caste, kinship, and duty one is born into. When the bride outgrows them, the other house, the husband's, becomes visible. Mirabai wrote almost identical verses, defying her in-laws in 16th-century Rajasthan. Augustine's Confessions has a more abstract version — restless is our heart until it rests in Thee. The given family cannot hold the soul once the other Lover has called.Augustine, Confessions 1.1; Mirabai, Padavali 73.