Some very famous poems among them.
Some are so stacked with rhymes and nonsense,
It’s hard to believe their images
Deserve a separate existence,
The sense seeming so to the sounds bent,
Until you come upon them scattered
Or elsewhere, as in a translation—
Not the swooping down of the sparkling,
Pearliest shooting meteor, nor
The splashing of a water-bucket
When the rope breaks—and then you think, oh!
They were apposite as different,
And the stacking of close-packed phonemes
Merely aligned and protected them,
Proportional similarity
That protects the creature and makes it
Beautiful—Wa lā nqidādu
L-kawkabi l-munsāhī
Wa lā nbitātu l-jaw’abi
L-mundāhī—the sounds no mere puns,
But so overlapping, well-woven,
The chain-mail armor of the warrior
And the scales defending the dragon
Against him, against every warrior
Come to slay the dragon, who yet lives.
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