On crafting poems

A chance conversation on an email thread reminded me of some lines about poetry by W.B. Yeats:

We sat together at one summer’s end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, “A line will take us hours maybe; 

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.”

These lines on the difficulty of crafting poetry—not just rhyming, rhythmic utterances but real poetry—reminded me in turn of two Sanskrit verses on the same topic. The Sanskrit literary tradition is acutely self-aware of its linguistic nature (one of the words for literature or literariness / литературность, is vāṅ-maya, literally “speech-stuff”), as befits an intellectual and cultural universe that has perhaps paid more systematic attention to the Word and the World than any other from its very inception. The two verses, and my attempts at translating them, follow:




kāvyaṃ karomi na hi cārutaraṃ karomi
yatnāt karomi yadi cārutaraṃ karomi |
bhūpāla-mauli-maṇi-maṇḍita-pāda-pīṭha
he sāhasāṅka kavayāmi vayāmi yāmi || 1 ||


kāvyaṃ karoṣi kimu te suhṛdo na santi
ye tvām udīrṇa-pavanaṃ vinivārayanti |
gavyaṃ ghṛtaṃ piba nivāta-gṛhaṃ praviśya
vātādhikā hi puruṣāḥ kavayo bhavanti || 2 ||


1) I make poems. I don’t make them too well.
I make them with much effort, if I make them well.
Indomitable lord whose footrest is adorned by gems from kings’ diadems—
Do I compose literature? Do I weave? Do I leave?


2) You make poems. Why indeed, you have no sympathetic listeners
who can restrain you, impetuous, puffed-up.
Go drink some ghee and sit in a windowless room;
Only gouty windbags become poets.


The anonymous poet of the first verse shares Yeats’s opinion on the difficulty of producing real poetry. If they are right, then this poet must have labored long and hard at this verse, for it is remarkable. The first half consists of short, clipped sentences with nothing poetic about them except for their prosody—at first glance. Only during a second reading does the parallel structure and rhyme hidden in the lines come through. The second half begins with a long compound taking up an entire pada, earth-protector-crown-jewel-ornamented-foot-stand, which stands in stark, deliberate contrast to the earlier clipped verbal sentences. Also worth noticing in this compound are the aural effects: the repetition of the sounds maṇ, and perhaps more impressively, the fact that every single word in the compound begins with a labial consonant. The verse concludes with three successive verbs, each one constructed by lopping off the first syllable of the previous verb. (This pattern of successively smaller words is called gopuccham, or “cow’s tail”.) The first of these three verbs is kavayāmi, a synthetic form that means the same thing as kāvyaṃ karomi (“I make poems”) but expresses it in an elegant, unified manner.


The second verse is obviously a somewhat frivolous response written in imitation of the first, and I have taken a few liberties with its translation. The “gouty windbag” refers to the word vātādhika, which is apparently a specific kind of person prone to gout according to the medical texts of the Āyurveda tradition; the prescribed cure for this condition is ghee. Such sarcasm is not what we would first think of when we think of poetry today, but satire and intelligent ad hominem attacks were a large part of poetry in practice. Nevertheless, this is a smart verse that plays off different ways in which the wind can be invoked. Additionally, it points to an extremely important feature of poetry as consumed in the Sanskritic world: the necessity of the sahṛd, the “sympathetic listener”, the good-hearted, sensitive soul who possesses a real taste for literature. The collective judgment of literary connoisseurs was the touchstone for literariness.