Hard Rain

āsārāntamṛdupravṛttamaruto meghopaliptāmbarāvidyutpātamuhūrtadṛṣṭakakubhaḥ suptendutārāgrahāḥdhārāklinnakadambasaṃbhṛtasurāmododvahāḥ proṣitairniḥsaṃpātavisāridarduraravā nītāḥ kathaṃ rātrayaḥ

• āsārānta. a hard rain

• mṛdu. soft, tender, gentle

• pravṛtta. come forth, all around

• maruto. wind

• megha. clouds

• upalipta. covered, overlaid

• ambarā. sky

• vidyut-pāta. lightning-flash

• muhūrta. moment, instant

• dṛṣṭa. seen

• kakubhaḥ. horizon, quarter of the heavens

• supta-indu-tārā-grahāḥ. (adj. with nights) gripped by sleeping moon and stars

• supta. sleep

• indu. moon

• tārā. stars

• grahāḥ. grasped, taken

• dhārā. carrying, bearing

• klinna. wet, moist

• kadamba. a tree (Neolamarckia cadamba) with fragrant orange blossoms

• saṃbhṛta. gathered, collected

• surāmododvahāḥ. intoxicating fragrance

• proṣitaiḥ. by a traveler; one absent or gone on a journey; the dead

• niḥsampāta. thick darkness, depth of night

• visāri. spread

• dardura. frogs

• ravā. noise, croak, roar

• nītāḥ. are passed

• kathaṃ. how

• rātrayaḥ. nights (the long compounds describe the nights)

Hard rainthen soft wind,a sky smoking with clouds.Flashes of lightningstroke a horizonthat’s there and then not there.Moon and stars vanished,fragrant wet flowers,darkness creaking with frogs.And a solitary traveler?Can he getthrough the nights?

Earth conspires in the erotic emotions, and the most acute form of eroticism is longing due to separation or absence. In the early Indic world, humans lived in direct relation to the natural orders, so the evocation of elemental or natural forces would be evocation of rasa, deep spirit. Do I detect in so many poems like this not just description, but traces of archaic speech-magic, which could summon the rains by in voking them? In The Essential Haiku, Robert Hass observes something comparable behind haiku: “My personal theory, not especially well-informed, about kigo [seasonal words] is that their origin is shamanic, animistic, and ritualistic, that the words…were intended at one time to call forth the living spirits manifested in those natural phenomena.” As Hass notes, shaman songs passed into folk song.

In India the trained court poets regularly drew on folk-song models. They believed the earliest anthology of their tradition, the Sattasai of King Hāla, contained songs collected from rural villages and possibly tribes that lived by the hunt. Animist beliefs would leave tracks in the poetry. Of Sanskrit poets, Yogeśvara in particular had an ethnographer’s eye and ear and traveled among tribal people who still ritualized their animist beliefs.

Proṣita, the word here for traveler, also refers to those gone on the long journey: the dead. The poem’s structure is a single utterance, one sentence: “How are nights passed by a traveler?” Everything else is a compound word describing the nights, which are “clasped in the sleep [concealment] of moon and stars.” So much detail and passion held in a single breath.