On its border dwells a tribe,—
How will you come through it?
O Myrat mine, Myrat mine,
A stretch of water is coming,—
How will you cross it?
On its banks dwells a tribe,—
How will you come through it?
Thus a mother to her son; his answer is of the same kind; and so back and forth for nineteen stanzas, when the poem closes with two stanzas sung by the son happily returned from war. With this parallelism of form goes a parallelism of thought not unlike the implied simile in poetry of the schools; witness the hawk and the relatives, quoted just above, or these improvised verses:—
What has scattered the golden-seeming leaves?
Is it the white birch? It is indeed!