Early in the text, repeated nine times as the refrain to Song ii, there is a playful anagrammatic charade, a kind of pun in which a single string of syllables has two different meanings depending on how those syllables are divided. Jayajayadevahare, as it would be heard in recital or written in manuscript, can be simultaneously understood as both: “Victory! Victory! O God! O Hari!” and “Victory! O Jaya· deva! O Hari!”

In five of the classical framing verses, Jaya·deva uses a common noun or literal adjective which the connoisseur of poetry would recognize as the technical term for the meter in which that particular stanza was composed. So, for example, in a quatrain written in the prthvi meter, Radha is described as incarnating the voluptuous nymphs of Indra’s paradise on “earth” (prthvi). The aesthetic impact of the pun is amplified by the use of the proper names of six of those nymphs as common adjectives to describe Radha’s eyes, brow, face, thighs, gait and skill in lovemaking (10.15). It’s an in-joke, requiring substantial technical knowledge of poetics to get it. It would afford the rasika an opportunity to take pleasure in his own erudition. In such punning the intellectual appeal of rhetoric supersedes the emotional effect of content.

In comparison with such contemporaneous poets as Go·vardhana, whose “Seven Hundred Elegant Verses” (Aryasaptasati) abounds in paronomasia, Jaya·deva’s use of puns is relatively limited. The poet does, however, frequently employ a vocabulary with a wide enough semantic range to suggest multiple meanings, polysemous words like raga which can indicate “passion,” “love,” the color “red,” or a ________