Om Jai Jagdish Hare

An aarti is not shaped like a poem that starts somewhere and finishes somewhere else. It is shaped for two voices and a room: a refrain, a stanza, the refrain again, around and around while the lamp goes round. Each body stanza here has three lines, and the second is a short echo of the first beginning svāmī — a leader's line, the room's answer, then the completion. The printed text is a transcript of that, which is why the repetitions look like padding on the page and are the whole mechanism in the air.