The moon's rays, cool as nectar, came in through the window lattice. Her eye went out to meet them, out of the fondness it had for them before, and came back exactly the way it went. Now she covers that eye, from sheer weariness, with lashes heavy with water — neither awake nor asleep, like a lotus growing on dry ground on a day the clouds have taken.
**The stanza is a sequence of movements with no reasons given, and Mallinātha gives both reasons.** Why did the eye go out? पूर्ववदानन्दकरा भविष्यन्तीति बुद्ध्येति भावः — in the belief that the rays would be joy-giving as they used to be. Why did it come straight back? तदा तेषामतीव दुःसहत्वादिति भावः — because at that moment they were more than she could bear. Neither is on the page. The verse says only *went* and *turned back*, and what stands between them, the discovery that moonlight is unbearable to a woman alone, is the whole of what the stanza is about. **Two इति भावः notes in four lines is the densest he has been about a character's mind in either canto**, and both are about the same two syllables, गतम् and संनिवृत्तम्.
**The comparison at the end is a double sense the commentary only half explains.** न प्रबुद्धाम् न सुप्ताम् — of a woman, not awake and not asleep. Of a lotus, not opened and not folded shut. Mallinātha writes out the lotus's pair and leaves the woman's alone: अविकसिताम्, not opened out, because the cloud is over the sun; अमुकुलिताम्, not closed up, because it is still day. **The clouded day is what makes the two negatives possible at all**: a lotus in the sun is open and a lotus at night is shut, and only an overcast day leaves it in neither state. And the cloud that produces the state is the one being spoken to.
**Then he does something to the words themselves.** उभयत्रापि नञर्थस्य नशब्दस्य “सुप्सुपा” इति समासः — in both places, the word न, which carries the force of the negative नञ्, forms a compound by *supsupā*. That is a vārttika, one of Kātyāyana's supplementary lines under Pāṇini 2.1.4 सह सुपा, and it allows a word that already has a case ending to compound with another such word. On his reading नप्रबुद्धाम् and नसुप्ताम् are one word each — and the stanza printed above his comment prints them joined, where `text.md` prints them apart. **The two witnesses divide the same syllables into a different number of words**, which is a shape of divergence the corpus has not carried before: not a variant reading, but a variant word boundary. Nothing whatever is at stake in the sense.
**And the stanza is the sixth item of a list.** He closes: एतेन विषयद्वेषाख्या षष्ठी दशा सूचिता — by this, the sixth state, the one called विषयद्वेष, aversion to the objects of the senses, is indicated. She turns her eyes from moonlight; that is what aversion to the objects of the senses looks like when a poet writes it. **The ordinal is the new thing.** Since 2.26 he has closed every stanza with a named state of love-in-separation — मनःसङ्ग, attachment of the mind, at 2.26; सङ्कल्प, longing, at 2.27; जागर, sleeplessness, at 2.28; कार्श्य, wasting, at 2.29 — and never said which number any of them was. Saying *sixth* here fixes all four behind it and the two ahead: the labels run second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and the two stanzas after this carry the seventh and the eighth. **Seven stanzas running, each closed with the next item of a numbered list, in order and without a repetition.** No figure is named for any of them, and none is named here, though the stanza ends on an इव.
uncheckedthe reader's reading, following Mallinātha, Sañjīvinī's gloss. His are: गवाक्षविवरगतान् for जालमार्गप्रविष्टान्, रश्मीन् for पादान्, पूर्वस्नेहेन for पूर्वप्रीत्या and the belief behind it, अभिमुखं यथा तथा for the adverb, यथागतं तथैव प्रतिनिवृत्तम् and the unbearableness behind it, दृष्टिम् for चक्षुः, अश्रु for सलिल, दुर्दिने for साभ्रे, दिवसे for अह्नि, the lotus's two senses of the negatives, the सुप्सुपा compound of both, स्थिताम् supplied for the simile, and एतेन विषयद्वेषाख्या षष्ठी दशा सूचिता. That the two इति भावः notes are the stanza's argument, that the overcast day is what makes both negatives true at once, that the two witnesses divide the words differently, and that the ordinal fixes the count on the stanzas around it, are the reader's; the seven state-labels from 2.26 to 2.32 are checked against `vendor/meghaduta-sanjivini.itx`, where they read मनःसङ्गानुवृत्तिः सूचिता, सङ्कल्पावस्थोक्ता, जागरावस्थोक्ता, कार्श्यावस्थोक्ता, विषयद्वेषाख्या षष्ठी दशा सूचिता, लज्जात्यागो व्यज्यते and चित्तविभ्रमदशा सूचिता, in that order and one to a stanza. Which manual's list of ten these come from is not settled here: no source in this repository names it, and the run does not assert one“etena viṣayadveṣākhyā ṣaṣṭhī daśā sūcitā”
The moon's rays, cool as nectar, came in through the window lattice. Her eye went out to meet them, out of the fondness it had for them before, and came back exactly the way it went. Now she covers that eye, from sheer weariness, with lashes heavy with water — neither awake nor asleep, like a lotus growing on dry ground on a day the clouds have taken. The stanza is all movement and no explanation, and everything that explains it is put in the commentary as a thought withheld — why the eye went out, why it fled back — so that on the page there is only a look that reaches for the moonlight and cannot hold it.
- Mallinātha, Sañjīvinī — 2.30, whole-verse gloss