A rubāʿī (Persian: رباعی, romanized:rubāʿiy; plural: رباعيات, rubāʿiyāt) or chahārgāna (Persian: چهارگانه)[1] is a poem or a verse of a poem in Persian poetry (or its derivative in English and other languages) in the form of a quatrain, consisting of four lines (four hemistichs).
The usual metre of a Persian ruba'i, which is used for all four lines of the above quatrain by Rumi, is, as follows:[7]
– – u u – u – u – – u u –
In the above scheme, quantitatively, "–" represents a long syllable, and "u" a short one. As variations of this scheme, any sequence of – u, except the final syllable of each line, can be replaced by a single "overlong" syllable, such as gēkh, tīf, luṭf in the poem above, containing either a long vowel followed by a consonant other than "n", or a short vowel followed by two consonants. An overlong syllable, as mentioned, can freely be substituted for the final syllable of the line, as with bād above.
Another variation, as a poetic licence rule, is that occasionally a sequence of two short syllables (u u) can be replaced by a single long one (–).
A third variation is to use the same metre as above, but with the sixth and seventh syllables reversed:
Quatrain VII from the fourth edition of FitzGerald's Rubaiyat
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.[8]
FitzGerald's translation became so popular by the turn of the century that hundreds of American humorists wrote parodies using the form and, to varying degrees, the content of his stanzas, including The Rubaiyat of Ohow Dryyam, The Rubáiyát of a Persian Kitten, The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr.[citation needed]
In extended sequences of ruba'i stanzas, the convention is sometimes extended so that the unrhymed line of the current stanza becomes the rhyme for the following stanza.[9] The structure can be made cyclical by linking the unrhymed line of the final stanza back to the first stanza: ZZAZ.[10] These more stringent systems were not, however, used by FitzGerald in his Rubaiyat.
The Persian noun is borrowed from Arabic rubāʿiyy (رباعي) "consisting of four, quadripartite, fourfold" whose root consonants r-b-ʿ (ر ب ع) also occur in the numeral arbaʿah (أربعة, 'four').
See: Cowan, J. M., ed. 1994. The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (4th edition). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Skelton, Robin (2002). The Shapes of Our Singing: A Comprehensive Guide to Verse Forms and Metres from Around the World. Spokane, WA: Eastern Washington University Press. p.106. ISBN0-910055-76-9.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Rubaʿi, and is written by contributors.
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