Vedic Metre in its Historical Development c13.180

c13.180

It appears on the whole that ‘iambic rhythm’ lay for the Vedic poet in the past: it was part of an inheritance upon which he desired to improve. The existence of this rhythm in the very earliest forms of Vedic poetry seems to set a great gap between it and the apparently non-quantitative verse of the Avesta. At the same time we are not yet entitled to assume that there existed at an earlier period verse more rigidly iambic in character than that preserved to us in the earliest hymns of the Rigveda. Any conjectures as to the character of pre-Vedic verse would be premature until the corresponding forms of trimeter verse have been examined.