THE MALAY PANTUN. 17 
ness of connection between the picture and the thought it illus- 
trates. A literal translation of course would make this point much 
clearer than the verses quoted above, but even some of these, trans- 
lated into Malay, would not be much out of the way in a Pantun. 
In the noisy blue-bottles and the slanderers, in the lazy fishes and. 
the king feasting at Haou we have pictures and thoughts, which a 
European mind can as well connect as the picture of the creeper 
that winds round the tree and the thought of the snake that coils. 
round the flower in the pantuns of the “ Guarded Rose.”? But in 
“ May-time” the first lines are of that class which, to use Dr. 
Winstedt’s expression, “sound inane enough on a gramophone- 
record, but may well have given the spirit of the hour and place 
of its original context.” Parallels for the green upper robe and 
yellow lower robe could be found in many pantun. 
The points of resemblance between many Chinese verses and 
Malay pantun appear to be so numerous and so close that the 
thought of fortuitous coimcidence seems hardly satisfactory. Per- 
haps Chinese scholars could help us to fathom the meaning of the 
introductory lines in many a Chinese verse and their inner connec- 
tion with the following lines in the same way as Dr. Winstedt has 
done for the pantun in his preface to “* Pantun Mélayu.” 
I once went through my collection of pantun with a clever 
Malay munshi from Sumatra and learned something about the 
meaning of the second lines, but very little of their connection with. 
the first pair. ‘The munshi indeed declared the first couplets to be 
meaningless, and observing my apparent incredulity, pointed 
triumphantly to the passage in the “ Pélayaran Abdullah: ” 
“Ada pun jalan ségala pantun itu émpat-empat mistar ada- 
nya; bérmula nustar yang di-atas dua itu, tiada érti-nya.,,. 
mélainkan ia-itu ménjadi pasang-nya sahaja; maka yang dua 
mistar di-bawah, itu-lah yang ada bérértt, ada-nya.”’ 
Ménjadi paseng-nya the munshi declared to mean that they 
were only there “to carry the rhyme.” Undoubtedly there is a 
grain of truth in Abdullah’s statement, at least as far as modern 
Malays and pantuns are concerned. A glance over the quatrains 
of “ Pantun Mélayu ” will show that the principle of assonance is. 
frequently dispensed with, and as regards the “ veiled and unveiled. 
thought ” I would venture to add the “compulsion of rhyme” to- 
the long list of explanations enumerated by Dr. Winstedt to solve 
the difficulties of the European student when he meets with an 
apparently meaningless first pair of lines. 
“ Out of a big repertory of old-world verses the singer chooses 
one suitable for the purpose or possibly invents a new verse or 
changes and adapts an old.” ‘“ Favourite quatrains have under- 
gone a little Odyssey of adventure up and down the Malay Archi- 
pelago.”* The real meaning of a pantwun lies in the second coup- 
1. Pantun Melayu, Nos, 306-313. 
2. From the preface to ‘‘Pantun Melayu.’’ ° 
R. A. Soc., No. 85, 1922. 
