Skandha, Shloka, Stanza, Sutra

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 6 pages

Four terms for the divisions of a text, two Sanskrit and two from English prosody, defined so they stop being interchangeable. A skandha is a chapter: the Bhagavata Purana, the most popular of the eighteen principal Puranas, consists of some 18,000 shlokas in twelve skandhas — a note adds that in the Puranas Skanda or Kartikeya corresponds to Mars. A shloka is a verse, generally formed in four half-lines of eight syllables or two lines of sixteen, the Sanskrit epic metre of thirty-two syllables.

Stanza, literally a stay or abode or room, is a division of a poem of two or more lines arranged as a unit, its structure determined by the number of lines, the dominant metre and the rhyme scheme — so that four lines of iambic pentameter rhyming abab make a quatrain. The entry runs through the common forms named by line-count, tercet or terza rima and ottava rima, and those named for their inventors or best-known users, the Spenserian stanza and the In Memoriam stanza popularised by Tennyson; it also distinguishes strophe, often used interchangeably but sometimes reserved for a unit without regular metre and rhyme, or for a unit of a Pindaric ode. Worked examples close it, the Rubaiyat quatrain rhyming aaba among them.

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