MacDonnell II - Wilbourhall.org

parnaihsrosamanahsetv6yonasyaimam'hoSIMPLE STANZAS 441the whole normal verse of eleven syllables is :(«) ^-^-, ^ ^ -\^y^-^\ or{h) ^-^-^, v^v^l-^-^l«.Apart from corruptions or only seeming irregularities (removableby restoration of vowels) several verses of tliis tyjie have one syllabictoo many or too few;^ e.g. ta no vidvamsa, manma vo cetam]adyd- (12); tam im giro, jdna na|pdtnih^(lOj. Occasionallytwo syllables are wanting after the caesura or the verse is too long bya trochee added at tlie end ;e. g. t4 u sd no, [. .]ma| yajatrah (9) ;ay^m s^ hota, [v^ o] yo dvijdnma (9) rathebhir; yata, rsti mddbhir|fisvaI(13).5. The Tristiibh stanza, the commonest in the RV,,^consists of four verses of eleven syllables divided into twohemistichs. The following are hemistichs of each type:(a) anagastv6, aditi turasahj jyajnam, dadhatuI||(6) asmakam santu, bhiiva gopah pibantu| [somam, ava nd adya| 1|a. A few Tristubh stanzas of only two verses (dvipada) occur(e.g. vii. 17). Much commoner are those of three verses (viraj), thefirst two of which (as in the Gayatri stanza) are treated in theSarnhita text as a hemistich ;the whole of some hymns is composedin this three-line metre (e. g. iii. 25). Fairly frequent are alsoTristubli stanzas of five verses^ divided into two hemistichs of twoand three A'erses respectively. Thdy are always of isolated occurrence,appearing generally at the end of (Tristubh) hymns, but never formingan entire hymn.This anomaly also appears in the metre of later Vedic texts and of^Pali poetry.^The extra syllable in such cases isperhaps due to the verse beinginadvertently continued after a fiftha fourth syllable caesura.syllable caesura as if it were^The deficiency of a syllable in such cases may have been partlydue to the similarity of the decasyllabic Dvipada Viraj (8) with whichTristubh verses not infrequently interchange.*About two-fifths of the RV. are composed in this metre.*The Avesta has a parallel stanza of 4x 11 syllables with caesuraafter the fourth syllable.^These are accounted Atijagati (62) or Sakvari stanzas by theancient metricians when the fifth verse is a repetition of the fourth.If it is not a repetition it is treated in the Sarnhita text as a separateverse (as v. 41, 20; vi. (J3, 11) and is called an ekapada by themetricians.