The Music of Hindostan c13.s2.4

c13.s2.4

The first two lines make a verse marked off into quarter-verses. Though the normal verse is a distich, an occasional tristich or three-line unity is, as in Scott’s ballad metre, not excluded. The sense ends with the couplet, which includes, as in Pope’s heroic metre, both the subject and the predicate of the sentence. Out of the sixteen syllables in the line only four are fixed by rule as regards quantity. These are marked below the words in the example; the quantity of the other syllables is optional; and the two lines of the *śloka* are independent of one another as regards this distribution.