Sang-Thong A Dance-Drama from Thailand

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King Rama II. Sang-Thong A Dance-Drama from Thailand

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Sang Thong

A DANCE-DRAMA FROM THAILAND

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Some time ago I came across a young Thai woman reading Sang Thong in a lovely singing voice. No one else was in the room. Her reading was in the thamnawng style, which children learn early in their school years as they begin to study poetry, giving distinctive rhythm and melody to different types of Thai poetry. Shyly the young Thai woman, who had been brought up in the countryside, ventured that she had been considered a good reader when she was a child. Having spent many hours watching lakhon, she had acquired its thamnawng style.

Rama II and his poets wrote Sang Thong to be sung aloud. They used a form called klon bot lakhon, in which the syllables in a line vary between six and nine. In recent years, klon bot lakhon, like other forms of poetry, has been written in two double columns. Thus what Westerners would consider a "line" begins in the left column; the next line begins on the same level in the right column. The klon hot lakhon form uses rhymes, sometimes occurring between ends of lines, but more frequently between the end of a line in one column and the middle of a line in the other column.

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