Go small at once — as small as an elephant calf, so that you can get in fast — and settle on the pleasure-hill I told you of before, the one with the comfortable ridge; then you are the one to send a look inside the house, a look that is a flash of lightning kept so faint it is like a line of fireflies winking. **The stanza is a set of instructions and every clause is a condition on the next.** Shrink, so as to fit; sit, so as to be still; dim yourself, so as not to wake anybody. Mallinātha reads it that way throughout and turns two of the epithets into reasons: रम्य is निषीदनयोग्य, fit to sit on, not merely lovely; and शीघ्रसम्पात he settles out of the Śabdārṇava's four senses as प्रवेश, entering, so the compound means 'for the sake of getting in quickly'. **He names three rules and one cross-reference.** The genitive हेतोः, which looks like an ablative and is not, he fixes with Pāṇini 2.3.26 षष्ठी हेतुप्रयोगे — where the noun हेतु is used, the sixth case goes with it. The doubled अल्पाल्प he fixes with 8.1.12 प्रकारे गुणवचनस्य, which doubles a quality-word to say the quality holds only in a manner, so the phrase means 'faintish' rather than 'fainter and fainter'. अन्तर्भवनम् he takes as the avyayībhāva he had already made it at 2.10. And प्रथमकथिते he does not merely gloss but checks: “तस्यास्तीरे” इत्यादिना पूर्वोद्दिष्टे, 'indicated before by तस्यास्तीरे and the rest' — which is the opening of **2.17**, four stanzas back, where the hill was described. It is the first time in either canto that he identifies a back-reference by quoting the stanza it points to. **What he does not do is name a figure.** He unpacks विद्युदुन्मेषदृष्टि with स एव, one thing said to be another, which is the school's own formula for a रूपक, and leaves it unnamed; and he ends instead with a picture of his own, in ordinary life and not in poetry: यथा कश्चित्किञ्चिदन्विष्यन्क्वचिदुन्नते स्थित्वा शनैः शनैरतितरां द्राघीयसीं दृष्टिमिष्टदेशे पातयति तद्वत् — 'as a man looking for something stands somewhere high and slowly, slowly, casts a very long look at the place he wants: like that'. It is the same move he made at 2.11 with the woman on the night road: the poem gives a strange image and he answers with an ordinary one.
uncheckedthe reader's reading, following Mallinātha's gloss; the reading of रम्य as निषीदनयोग्य, the choice of प्रवेश from the Śabdārṇava's four senses of सम्पात, the three sūtras, the identification of the back-reference by quotation, and the closing picture of the man on the height are all his. That the stanza is a chain of conditions, and that the स एव of his last vigraha is the रूपक formula he declines to name, is the reader's“yathā kaścit kiñcid anviṣyan kvacid unnate sthitvā śanaiḥ śanair atitarāṃ drāghīyasīṃ dṛṣṭim iṣṭadeśe pātayati tadvad ityarthaḥ”
O cloud, shrink at once — go small as an elephant calf, so that you can get in quickly — and settle on the pleasure-hill I spoke of before, the one with the comfortable ridge; then you are the one to send a look inside the house, a glance that is a flash of lightning kept so faint that it is like a line of fireflies winking. The stanza is a chain of instructions and every clause is a condition on the next: shrink, so as to fit; sit, so as to be still; dim yourself, so as not to wake the house. Mallinātha reads it that way throughout and turns two epithets into reasons — रम्य is निषीदनयोग्य, 'fit to sit on', not merely lovely, and शीघ्रसम्पात he settles out of the Śabdārṇava's four senses of सम्पात as प्रवेश, 'entering', so the compound means 'for the sake of getting in quickly'. He names three rules — the genitive हेतोः by 2.3.26, the doubled अल्पाल्प by 8.1.12, the compound अन्तर्भवनम् by the avyayībhāva of 2.10 — and one cross-reference, quoting 2.17 for the hill.
- Mallinātha, Sañjīvinī — 2.21, whole-verse gloss
- Vedam Venkataraya Sastri, Āndhra Meghasandeśam — 2.21 తాత్పర్యము; vendor/vedam-meghasandesam-telugu-ocr.txt