Verse, Lines & Poetry

OLS v1.0 supports fine-grained verse structure for Psalms, Deggwa hymns, and antiphonal performance.

{
  "type": "hemistich-pair",
  "n": 1,
  "lines": [
    {
      "n": "1a",
      "hemistich": "a",
      "roles": ["role-cantor"],
      "text": { "en": "The Lord is my shepherd" }
    },
    {
      "n": "1b",
      "hemistich": "b",
      "roles": ["role-congregation"],
      "text": { "en": "I shall not want" }
    }
  ]
}

Preserve Literary Structure

Use verse and hemistich structure when line identity affects chanting, antiphony, citation, or comparison. Ordinary prose that merely wraps across lines should remain a single utterance.

Line numbers are identifiers within the containing work, not array indexes. Keep them stable when adding a translation or changing typography. If two languages divide a phrase differently, preserve each language’s literary structure and record explicit alignment rather than forcing identical line breaks.

For antiphonal text, assign roles to each line as shown above. Assign a role to the containing group only when every line is genuinely performed by the same role.