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Four Royal Meters · वृत्तानि
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Longer lines, fixed shapes
Anuṣṭubh let you improvise. These four do not: every syllable of every line is fixed in advance, and a poet who chooses one is choosing a gait — a stride, a saunter, a slow drift, a tiger’s pace.
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The gait
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Round {{ qRound }} of eight · {{ qScore }} right
Count the syllables before you guess. The number alone almost always tells you.
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साधु! · {{ qScore }} of eight
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Sanskrit does not spell out patterns; it packs them. Eight three-syllable feet cover every possible arrangement of light and heavy, and all eight are stored inside one nonsense word that schoolchildren memorised for two thousand years.
The whole system, in one word
ya-mā-tā-rā-ja-bhā-na-sa-la-gām
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Take any syllable of the mnemonic together with the two that follow it, and you have that syllable’s foot. य gives य-मा-ता = ⏑ – –, म gives मा-ता-रा = – – –, and so on to the end, where ल and ग stand alone for a single light and a single heavy. One word, eight feet, no table to look up — and every meter in this level is written as a string of them.
Meters heard: {{ heardCount }} of four. Read each line aloud twice before moving on — the gait only arrives in the mouth. ॐ