A NANING RECITAL. 
27 
29. Lines 303-306. The sense of this verse is probably a risque 
suggestion that the bride and bridegroom have already met 
together, while the old man, the speaker, was delayed by his 
winding (imaginary) journey downstream. 
30. Lines 310-323. A fuller account of the adat of Xaning mar- 
riage is given in my paper ‘A Xaning Wedding-speech’, in 
Journal Xo. 72. 
A Note on the Pantun ami the prosody 
of the Teromba. 
The quatrains of the prelude and peroration are rough and 
rather bucolic verse, poor specimens of the Pantun art. They may 
be well compared with the very similar quatrains used at an Acheh 
wedding, and quoted by Snouck Hurgronje( 1 ) with the following 
ing words 
‘ the first two lines are* not in any way connected in 
point of sense with the second pair but serve chiefly to supply rhym- 
ing words.’ 
This criticism is now hardly acceptable; and it seems possible 
without very strained interpretation to trace something more than 
mere assonance in the structure of most of the Pantun in the text. 
An attempt has been made in translation to bring out what element 
of sense-connection could be discovered in the couplets, but lost 
topical or local allusions (in lines 1 and 2, or 286 and 287, for 
example) make it impossible to recover the full intention of their 
author. 
Marsden in dealing with Malay versification ( 2 ) recognised on- 
ly two forms — the shaer and the pantun, and remarked: “Rhyme 
is an essential part of Malay metrical composition, blank verse being 
unknown to the Malays”. This judgment takes no account of such 
compositions as the present Teromba, or of the metrical passages 
that occur in romances like Awang Sulong Merah Muda or Malim 
Deman. The truth is, as Mr. Wilkinson has noticed, that ‘ much 
Malay prose-literature is in a transition stage’; it contains metrical 
and, occasionally, rhyming passages; it was composed not for read- 
ing but for recitation by a rhapsodist; and its appeal was to the 
ear and not to the eye. 
The language of the Teromba is clearly metrical (in the sense 
of ‘measured’) throughout, and analysis shows the essential prin- 
ciple of the verse to be the recurrence in the lines of a regular 
number of stressed or accented syllables. The number varies — 
according to the length of the lines — from two to four. For ex- 
ample in the lines 
(1) The Achehnese, Vol. 1, page 312. 
(2) A Grammar of the Malayan Language, page 120. 
R. A. Soc., No. 83, 1921. 
The Pantun. 
The prosody 
of the 
Teromba. 
