Persian metres
Persian metres are the patterns of long and short syllables, 10 to 16 syllables long, used in Persian poetry.
Over the past 1000 years the Persian language has enjoyed a rich literature, especially of poetry. Until the advent of free verse in the 20th century, this poetry was always quantitative; lines were composed in various patterns of long and short syllables. The different patterns are hence known as metres. A knowledge of metre is often essential for the recital Persian poetry—and, since short vowels are not written in Persian script, to convey the correct meaning in cases of ambiguity.
Metres in Persian have traditionally been analyzed in terms of Arabic metres, from which they were believed to have been adapted. However, in recent years it has been recognized that most Persian metres developed independently from those in Arabic, and there has been a movement to analyze them on their own terms. An unusual feature of Persian poetry not found in Arabic, Latin, or Ancient Greek verse is that instead of two lengths of syllables, there are three lengths. Overlong syllables can be used instead of a long syllable and a short one.
Persian metres were used not only in classical Persian poetry, but also imitated in Turkish poetry of the Ottoman period, and in Urdu poetry under the Mughal emperors. That the poets of Turkey and India imitated Persian metres is clear from the fact that, just as with Persian verse, the most commonly used metres of Arabic poetry are avoided, while those metres used most frequently in Persian lyric poetry are those most frequent in Turkish and Urdu.
Quantitative verse
Classical Persian poetry is based not on stress but on quantity, that is, on the length of syllables. A syllable ending in a short vowel is short, but one ending in a long vowel or a consonant is long. Thus a word like ja-hān 'world' is considered to have a short syllable plus a long one, whereas far-dā 'tomorrow' consists of two long syllables. A word like na-fas 'breath' is usually considered to have a short syllable plus a long one, but if a vowel follows, as in na-fa-sī 'a breath', the second syllable is short.A characteristic feature of classical Persian verse is that in addition to long and short syllables, it also has "overlong" syllables. These are syllables consisting of any vowel + two consonants, such as panj 'five' or dūst 'friend', or a long vowel + one consonant, for example rūz 'day' or bād 'wind'. In the metre of a poem, an overlong syllable can take the place of any sequence of "long + short". They can also be used at the end of a line, in which case the difference between long and overlong is neutralised.
In modern colloquial pronunciation, the difference in length between long and short vowels is mostly not observed, but when reciting poetry the long vowels are pronounced longer than the short ones. When a recording of Persian verse is analysed, it can be seen that long syllables are on average pronounced longer than short ones, and overlong syllables are longer still.
In this article, the following scansion symbols are used:
- u = a short syllable
- – = a long syllable
- –u = an overlong syllable
- x = anceps, that is: some metres allow either a long or short syllable at the beginning of a line.
- u u = biceps, that is, a pair of short syllables that can be freely replaced by one long syllable. Mainly this occurs when a line ends in u u –, rarely elsewhere.
Metrical patterns
Masnavi
The first type is poems in rhyming couplets, known as masnavi. These are almost always written in one of seven different metres consisting of 11 syllables, and each couplet has its own separate rhyme. The 11-syllable tradition may go back to pre-Islamic times, since 11-syllable poetry seems to have been common at that time.Some of the poems written in the masnavi form are very long, up to 50,000 couplets. The most commonly used metres are the following :
Some shorter poems also, such as many of those in Saadi's Golestān, are also written in rhyming couplets in one or another of these metres, a famous example being Banī Ādam from the Golestān, which consists of three rhyming couplets in the first of the above metres.
The 12th-century poet Nezami famously wrote a set of 5 masnavīyāt, each in a different one of the above metres, totalling nearly 29,000 couplets in all. Such a quintet was known as a khamsa or khamse, and the practice was later imitated by other poets such as Amir Khosrow of Delhi and Khwaju Kermani of Shiraz.
Lyric poetry
The second type of Persian poetry is lyric poetry, such as the ghazals of Hafez, or the spiritual poems in Rumi's collection known as the Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. These tend to be in longer metres, usually of 14 to 16 syllables long, in tetrameter form.About 30 different metres are commonly used for lyric poems, but 70% of the poems are written in one of the following seven metres:
The shorter metre 4.5.11 is frequently used for masnavīyāt, but can also be used for lyric writing, such as in eight of Hafez's ghazals.
Occasionally a metre is made up of two short sections, the second a repetition of the first, such as the following:
The majority of lyric poetry is composed in the form of couplets, in which the first couplet is rhyming couplet, and then the same rhyme is used at the end of every couplet until the end of the poem. A minority of lyric poetry is composed in stanzas with more complicated rhyme schemes.
Ruba'i
The third type of poetry is the ruba'i or quatrain, such as the rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In these, either of two 13-syllable metres are used, which are variants of each other. These metres are only used for rubaiyat. A single long syllable may freely be substituted at the end of the verse where the pattern has "u u", and also sometimes in syllables 3 and 4:The rhyme scheme for a ruba'i is AA BA; in this respect it resembles lyric poetry rather than a masnavi.
Metric variations
In all classical Persian poetic forms the same metre is used throughout a poem, the only variations being:the combination – u can be replaced by one overlong syllable;
at the end of a line, or before a dieresis, the rhythm u u – can be replaced by – –;
in the beginning of a line u u is often replaced by – u ;
the final syllable of a line always counts as long, whatever its shape.
In Persian poetry it is not possible to have more than two short syllables in a row. The pattern – u u – u u –, which is very common in Latin and Greek poetry, is also never found in Persian. Unlike in Arabic poetry, anceps syllables, i.e. the syllables of arbitrary length, are not found in any place in the line, except the first syllable if the second one is short and the third one is long. This anceps first syllable can be seen in metres 3.1.11, 3.1.15, 3.1.16 and 4.5.11 in the table of common metres below.
In addition to the above metric variations, another source of variety is the word accent, which changes from line to line, thus avoiding monotony.
The traditional description
Until recently Persian metres were always described using the same terms as in Arabic poetry, using the system known as ʿarūḍ devised by the Arab grammarian Al-Khalil in the 8th century AD. Thus for example the rhythm of Ferdowsi's epic poem the Shahnameh was thought to be a modification of the Arabic metre mutaqārib, which is similar. Another possibility, however, since this metre was not used in Arabic until the Islamic period, is that it was borrowed from Persian into Arabic.Since Persian metres are generally different from Arabic ones, often the match between Arabic and Persian is not exact. Thus in the traditional system, both of the metres below are considered to be adaptations of the Arabic metre hazaj :
Another point is that the four most popular Arabic metres are virtually never used in Persian, while three of the basic Persian metres are not found in Arabic.
In addition, one of the characteristics of Arabic poetry, namely the anceps positions, do not apply to the Persian version of the Arabic metres. In Persian, except in certain metres where the first syllable only may be either long or short, the length of the syllables in any metre is either long or short but never variable.
A new approach
The description of Persian metres was revolutionised with the publication in 1975 of an article in the journal Iran by L. P. Elwell-Sutton, later expanded into a book The Persian Metres and summarised in his entry ʾArūż in the Encyclopædia Iranica. Elwell-Sutton argued against the idea that Persian metres are simply an adaptation of Arabic ones, and on the whole his view has been accepted by subsequent scholars. As François de Blois writes in Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey: "Many Persian metres, particularly those used in lyric poetry, do not correspond to any Arabic metre, this despite the fact that the traditional Persian prosodic theory has given them elaborate Arabic names and attempted to 'derive' them from the standard Arabic metres with which they share a name."What has been less readily accepted by other scholars is Elwell-Sutton's contention that the Persian metres as a whole carry on a tradition derived from pre-Islamic Persian poetry. According to De Blois there is no evidence that pre-Islamic poetry was quantitative rather than accentual. His view is that "the pioneers of Persian poetry, besides borrowing, or rather adapting, some of the Arabic metres, also developed a number of new, purely Persian metres of an Arabic type."
Elwell-Sutton's classification
After examining the metres of over 20,000 Persian poems, Elwell-Sutton realised that the vast majority of them could be analysed in terms of just five repeating patterns.Using these patterns it is possible to classify any metre using three numbers. Thus the metre – u – – – u – – – u –, used in Rumi's Masnavi, can be seen as a variety of the second pattern, and can be classified as 2.4.11 ; and – – u u – u – u – –, used in Nezami's Leyla o Majnun, is classified as 5.1.10.
This system of labelling makes it possible to refer to the different metres in a simpler way than the traditional system, where the metre of Omar Khayyam's quatrains is divided into 24 different patterns with labels such as hazaj-e musamman-e axrab-e maqbūz-e makfūf-e majbūb.
Elwell-Sutton also calculated the frequency of occurrence of the various metres. He found that although over 100 different metres exist, 99% of classical Persian poems use one of a group of about 30 common metres, of which some are more frequent than others.