Somebody asked me recently why the Nepali poems their grandmother could recite all sound like songs, and the ones being written now do not. It is a fair question and the usual answer — that poetry modernised — explains nothing.
The useful answer is that rhyme and metre were doing specific jobs. When poets stopped using them, those jobs did not disappear. They had to be done another way, and that is really what the change was about.
What the metre was for
Before print was ordinary, a poem had to survive in memory. Metre and rhyme are memory technology. A line with a fixed number of beats and a predictable ending is enormously easier to hold and to pass on, and a listener who has heard the pattern once can feel a missing syllable without being able to name what is wrong.
This is why the older Nepali forms feel songlike. Many of them effectively were songs. The folk metres came out of singing, and jhyaure in particular carries a rhythm people already had in their bodies before any poem was written in it.
So when Bhanubhakta put the Ramayana into Nepali verse in the nineteenth century, the form was not decoration. It was the delivery mechanism. A metrical text could travel through people who could not read.
Devkota's argument, which was made in the form
The interesting turn comes with Devkota, and it is easy to miss because it looks like a formal choice.
Muna Madan is written in jhyaure — a folk metre, not one of the classical Sanskrit-derived forms that serious poetry was expected to use. At the time that was close to provocation. Folk metre was for songs and villages; a long narrative poem was supposed to sound elevated.
By choosing jhyaure for a story about a man leaving for Lhasa and a wife waiting, Devkota was making a claim about whose life counts as a subject. The metre says: this is an ordinary life, told in the rhythm ordinary people already use, and it is worth a serious poem. That is an argument conducted entirely through form, and it is one reason the book is loved rather than merely respected. I have written more about that choice on his profile.
Note what has already happened here. The form is no longer neutral. Once a metre can be an argument, poets start choosing metres for what they mean rather than for what they are traditionally for — and once that is true, dropping metre entirely is available as a move.
Then Bhupi Sherchan removed it
By the middle of the twentieth century the machinery had changed. Print was ordinary. Poems could be read silently, kept, reread. The memory job that metre had been doing was now being done by paper.
What remained was the sound, and the expectations that come with it. A regular metre makes almost anything sound settled. It resolves. A line that lands on a rhyme feels concluded whether or not the thought is finished — which is a wonderful quality for a poem about faith or love, and a serious problem for a poem about disappointment.
Bhupi Sherchan's subject was substantially disappointment: a country not becoming what it said it was becoming, public language that did not match private experience. Writing that in a comfortable metre would have undercut it. The form would have kept saying this resolves while the content said it does not.
So the metre goes, and what replaces it is the line break. In free verse the break becomes the main instrument — where you end a line decides what gets emphasis, what gets held back, and how long the reader waits. It is a quieter tool and a more precise one, and it can refuse to resolve, which was the entire point.
Those years are also when the organised movements were forming under censorship and reaching quite different conclusions about how poetry survives a state that reads it, which I have written about in Three Ways Out.
What was actually lost
I do not think this was pure progress, and most accounts are too comfortable about it.
Free verse lost the audience that could not read. A metrical poem passes through a village. A free-verse poem in a literary magazine does not — it requires literacy, access, and usually a particular kind of education. Nepali poetry became more sophisticated and considerably smaller at the same time.
It also lost the check that metre provides. Metre is a constraint, and constraints catch weak lines: a line that does not scan announces itself. Free verse has no such alarm, so a slack line can sit in a poem indefinitely looking like a decision. A great deal of contemporary Nepali poetry, mine included on bad days, is prose with the returns pressed early.
And it lost the pleasure. There is a physical satisfaction in a rhyme arriving on time that free verse does not replace and does not try to.
Why the old poems still sound better aloud
Because they were built for it, and the new ones were not.
This is worth saying plainly rather than treating as nostalgia. If you read Bhanubhakta aloud it works, because aloud is the condition it was designed for. If you read a contemporary free-verse poem aloud it often flattens, because its effects are visual — the shape on the page, the weight of the break, the white space around a short line. Reading it out loud is a bit like describing a photograph.
Neither is better. They are built for different rooms.
Where this leaves anyone writing now
Free verse is not the absence of form. That is the misunderstanding that produces the slack lines. It is a form where the pattern has to be invented for each poem rather than inherited, which is harder rather than easier.
My own poems are free verse and mostly short, and the thing I find myself watching is exactly what the old metres handled automatically: where the line ends, and whether the poem is allowed to resolve. A poem that resolves too easily lies. That is a lesson the older forms could not teach, because resolving was what they were for.
If you want to hear the difference rather than read about it, take one poem from Bhanubhakta and one from Bhupi Sherchan and read both out loud. The gap between them is a century of deciding what a poem is for.
Mine are under Nepali poems, and there is a related problem — what happens to any of this in English — in what falls out of a Nepali poem in translation.