A short lyric poem of 110 verses, it describes how Rama, hero of the Ramayana epic, sends a message via a swan to his beloved wife, Sita, who has been abducted by the demon king Ravana.

[b] Vedanta Desika (IAST:Vedānta Deśika) is best known as an important acharya in the Srivaishnavite tradition of South India which promulgated the philosophical theory of Viśiṣṭādvaita.

One day they were visited in two separate but simultaneous dreams in which they were instructed to go to Tirupati, an important pilgrimage spot in south India, where they would be given a son.

The next day the temple bell was missing and the chief priest, who had also had a visitation, celebrated the imminent birth of a child sent by the lord.

[8] The actual message to Sita consists of only 16 verses,[9] after which Rama dismisses the swan and the narrator completes the story of the Ramayana.

It is further defined as containing several different gaṇas, i.e., poetical feet consisting of predefined combinations of guru and laghu – long and short – syllables.

[16] When each line is scanned it looks like the following: with the vertical bars representing the natural pauses and the brackets the predefined feet.

Such literature tended to enjoy less national recognition than its predecessors and in modern India literary works of this type are all but forgotten.

Modern Western scholarship on the poem and its author includes books and articles by Stephen P Hopkins,[18] and by Yigal Bronner and David Shulman.