Fifteen Forms of the Song
रूपाणि  Rūpāṇi · the forms it takes

Fifteen forms of the song

Ask what the song is and fifteen answers come back — and not one of them is a compliment. Each names an office it performs: where it came from, what it cuts, what it hands over, where it carries you.

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Fifteen offices, and only four kinds of work between them — it comes from somewhere, it cuts something, it hands something over, it takes you somewhere. A hymn would have stopped at the first.

The fifteen were strung first in a language where every one of the fifteen words ends in the same syllable — a rhyme you could hold in the mouth like a garland of one bead repeated. English will not rhyme that way, so the shape is kept instead: one word each, and the work it names.