Sanatan AppVedic Hymns, Part I (SBE32): Preface to the First Edition... | Internet Sacred Text Archive
If we declare ourselves free from all authority, either grammatical or metrical, we may either sacrifice all grammar to metre, or all metre to grammar. We may introduce the strictest rules of metre, determining the length or shortness of every syllable, and then ignore all rules of grammar and quantity, treat short syllables as long, or long ones as short, and thus secure the triumph of metre. Or, we may allow great latitude in Vedic metres, particularly in certain pâdas, and thus retain all the rules of grammar which determine the quantity of syllables. It may be said even that the result would really be the same in either case, and that the policy of 'thorough' might perhaps prove most useful in the end. It may be so hereafter, but in the present state of Vedic scholarship it seems more expedient to be guided by native tradition, and to study the compromise which the ancient students of the Veda have tried to effect between grammar on one side and metre on the other.
Now it has generally been supposed that the Prâtisâkhya teaches that there must be a long syllable in the eighth or tenth place of Traishtubha and Gâgata, and in the sixth place of Ânushtubha pâdas. This is not the case. The Prâtisâkhya, no doubt, says, that a short final vowel, but not any short syllable, occupying the eighth or tenth place in a Traishtubha and Gâgata pâda, or the sixth place in a Gâyatra pâda, is lengthened, but it never says that it must be lengthened; on the contrary, it gives a number of cases where it is not so lengthened. But, what is even more important, the Prâtisâkhya distinctly adds a proviso which shows that the ancient critics of the Veda did not consider the trochee as the only possible foot for the sixth and seventh syllables of Gâyatra, or for the eighth and ninth, or tenth and eleventh syllables of Traishtubha and Gâgata pâdas. They distinctly admit that the seventh and the
ninth and the eleventh syllables in such pâdas may be long, and that in that case the preceding short vowel is not lengthened. We thus get the iambus in the very place which is generally occupied by the trochee. According to the Prâtisâkhya, the general scheme for the Gâyatra would be, not only
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but also
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and for the Traishtubha and Gâgata, not only
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but also
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And again, for the same pâdas, not only
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