A century later, the greatest exponent of rasa-dhvani theory, Abhinavagupta, wrote about this verse:

The suggestions of other properties … are endless; for example, his banishment from the kingdom, etc. And since these suggestions are countless, they cannot be conveyed [simultaneously] by means of the denotative functions of words. Even if these innumerable suggested properties were to be conveyed [by denotation] one by one, since they will not be had in one single act of cognition, they will not be the source of a wondrous aesthetic experience and hence they will not give rise to a great beauty. But if these properties are suggested, they will assume countless forms (kiṃkiṃ. rūpaṃ na sahate) because in the suggestion their separateness will not be clearly perceived. In this way they will become the source of a strikingly beautiful aesthetic pleasure that is analogous to the flavor of a wonderful drink, or cake, or sweet confection [where the individual ingredients cannot be separately tasted but yet add to the flavor of the final product]. For it has been said already [by Anandavardhana] that a word which is suggestive reveals a beauty “which cannot be conveyed by another form of expression.”⁴⁹

Rasa-dhvani can operate at the level of a word, a sentence, or an entire work. According to Anandavardhana, rasa is “an object on which no words can operate directly,” and therefore dhvani is the only way to manifest rasa.⁵⁰ So Anandavardhana might have said to an aspiring writer: suggest, don’t tell. Dhvani is literally “reverberation,” and is often compared to the “sounding of a bell” or “a needle falling through a pile of lotus leaves.” If we hear the phrase, “A village on the Ganga” (in Sanskrit, gangayam ghoshah, literally “a village in the Ganga”) we understand that the village cannot literally rest on the water, and that we are talking about a village located on the banks of the Ganga. This would be an example of figurative speech. But Anandavardhana would argue that this phrase about the holy river also carries a suggestion — or causes in the listener the manifestation — of coolness, sanctity. This underlying, affective meaning does not emerge from the denotative or figurative aspects of the phrase. This kind of suggestion functions in all speech, is present even in mundane language, but poets knowingly and intentionally concentrate vyanjana to construct a coherent, sustained engagement within the reader, and thus to manifest dhvani, and hence rasa. Patrick Colm Hogan writes:

Rasadhvani, the “truest” form of dhvani, it is an experience — along the lines of what we would call “a moment of tenderness” or “a pang of sadness.” It is, in short, an experience of rasa … [These rasas] are evoked through the clouds of non-denumerable, non-substitutable, non-propositional suggestions which surround these texts.⁵¹

The very sounds and rhythms of language — which preexist meaning — contribute to our experience of rasa. Abhinavagupta says that when we hear poetic language

without waiting for our understanding of the expressed meaning, [the stylistic qualities] set about building up the rasas, giving us a foretaste (āsvāda) of them. This is as much to say that as the rasas are suggested by style (saṅghaṭanā), the ground is laid for the relishing of a rasa at the very beginning of the appropriate style before our understanding of the meaning has come into play; and that it is on this account that the rasa, even at the later moment, after we have understood the expressed meaning and when the rasa has assumed its full flavour, does not appear to have arisen later [than our understanding].⁵²

Anandavardhana observes, “When ornamented by even one from among the varieties of dhvani, speech acquires a fresh colour, even though it follows a subject matter that has been treated by poets of the past.”⁵³ Since the properties manifested by dhvani are countless, “poetical material … finds no limit …”

Not even Vacaspati [the god of speech] in a thousand efforts could exhaust it, any more than he could exhaust the nature of the universe.

For just as the nature of the universe, although it has manifested this marvellous proliferation of matter through the succession of past ages, cannot be said now to be worn out and unable to create anything new, just so is the situation in poetry, which, although it has been worked over by the minds of countless poets, is not thereby weakened, but increases with ever new artistic abilities.⁵⁴

Anandavardhana accepted that there may be poetic texts in which the suggested meaning isn’t the dominant pleasure, or even present at all; he rather disdainfully refers to the latter as chitra kavya, picture poetry, flashy poetry: “Poetry which lacks rasa or an emotion (bhāva) as its final meaning, which is composed only by relying on novelties of literal sense and expression, and which gives the appearance of a picture, is citra …” Poetry that “gives the appearance of a picture” refers to very difficult pictorial arrangements in verse, similar to visual pattern poetry and topiary verses in the West — Sanskrit writers wrote stanzas in which interlocking syllables, if connected by drawn lines, revealed the shapes of drums, swords, wheels, and so on.⁵⁵ This chitrabandha is probably where the more general term chitra kavya originates. Anandavardhana continues, “[This poetry also includes] verbal citra, such as difficult arrangements, yamakas (echo alliterations), and the like. Semantic citra … may be exemplified by poetic fancy (utprekṣā) and such figures … It is not real poetry, for it is an imitation of poetry.”⁵⁶

Now that Anandavardhana has shown us how vyanjana works in poetry to produce dhvani and rasa, he tells us, “Now that instruction is being offered to modern poets in the true principles of poetry, while citra may be much used in the efforts of beginners who are seeking practise, it is established for mature poets that dhvani alone is poetry.”⁵⁷

So rasa is what I felt that afternoon I discovered Hemingway at our kitchen table in Bombay, when the bleak undertow of his stories, roiling with unspoken emotion, flung me into an exaltation, a state of delight. Hemingway’s famous taut rhythms, the stripped simplicity of his diction, those repetitions of sound that he meticulously builds into his prose, all these enhance the iceberg-sized dhvani of what he leaves unsaid. Every word, every pause, every hesitation makes the dhvani of a story.

Flannery O’Connor writes:

The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.⁵⁸

The only way to explain to you what I experienced when I first read Hemingway is to tell you to read those stories. And even then, you will read different stories. We may read the same texts, but the dhvani that manifests within you will be unique. Your beauty will be your own. If you reread a story that you read ten years ago, its dhvani within you will be new. Poetry’s beauty is infinite.