Free Verse Support

Friends, there is a new feature available in Geet Gatiroop to analyse the rhythm that is present (or absent) in a free-verse poem. The basis of this feature is the following article on Kaavyaalaya: Basic Structure of Hindi Poetry – Rhythm in Free Verse

How to use the Free Verse feature 

A portion of the poem “Jeevan Deep” by Vinod Tewary, has been used here for the examples.

यह विशाल ब्रह्मांड
यहाँ मैं लघु हूँ
लेकिन हीन नहीं हूँ।
मैं पदार्थ हूँ
ऊर्जा का भौतिकीकरण हूँ।
नश्वर हूँ,
पर क्षीण नहीं हूँ।
मैं हूँ अपना अहम‌
शक्ति का अमिट स्रोत, जो
न्यूटन के सिद्धान्त सरीखा
परम सत्य है,
सुन्दर है, शिव है शाश्वत है।
मेरा यह विश्वास निरन्तर
मेरे मानस में पलता है।
मेरा एक दीप जलता है।

To use the Free Verse feature, click the “Free Verse” checkbox below the generated visualization.

Short black lines will show up beside the maatraa count of every line.

To combine lines which go together as per meter, click the short black dash.

The line will be combined with the line below. The total maatraa count of the combined lines will be displayed. To disconnect lines, click on the vertical combining line.

You can specify the basic periodicity of your poem in the “Base Count” box below the visualization. For example, for this poem “Jeevan Deep” the periodicity is of 16 maatraas.

By giving the Base Count, you can see how off or within the periodicity is the total maatraa of the combined lines. If the total maatraa count is off the basic periodicity, it will be displayed in red, along with an indication of how many maatraas are missing or are extra.

Accordingly, you can edit the lines of your poem as you find appropriate. The earlier features of adjusting the maatraa allocation for deergh swar and half letters can also be used for your free verse.

For example, in this poem excerpt, the second set of combined lines is coming to 65 maatraas. This is 1 maatraa more than 64, which is a multiple of 16.

This is due to the word ऊर्जा in the 5th line (ऊर्जा का भौतिकीकरण हूँ). ऊर्जा takes equal amount of time to say as ऊजा। This means, the half र consumes zero maatraa here. We can set it to zero by clicking on the half र।

Result –

To know about the role of rhythm in free verse in greater detail, please read this article.

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Some of you have asked for an offline version of Geet Gatiroop that you can download and use on your computer without the internet. We are working on this and as soon as it is ready, there will be a post here on this blog, and you will receive an email if you have subscribed for Geet Gatiroop updates.

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