A Two-Colored Brocade

The Imagery of Persian Poetry

Annemarie Schimmel

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780807856208, 9780807820506
• eBook ISBN: 9781469616377
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Annemarie Schimmel, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Persian literature, provides a comprehensive introduction to the complicated and highly sophisticated system of rhetoric and imagery used by the poets of Iran, Ottoman Turkey, and Muslim India. She shows that these images have been used and refined over the centuries and reflect the changing conditions in the Muslim world.

According to Schimmel, Persian poetry does not aim to be spontaneous in spirit or highly personal in form. Instead it is rooted in conventions and rules of prosody, rhymes, and verbal instrumentation. Ideally, every verse should be like a precious stone — perfectly formed and multifaceted — and convey the dynamic relationship between everyday reality and the transcendental.

Persian poetry, Schimmel explains, is more similar to medieval European verse than Western poetry as it has been written since the Romantic period. The characteristic verse form is the ghazal — a set of rhyming couplets — which serves as a vehicle for shrouding in conventional tropes the poet’s real intentions.

Because Persian poetry is neither narrative nor dramatic in its overall form, its strength lies in an “architectonic” design; each precisely expressed image is carefully fitted into a pattern of linked figures of speech. Schimmel shows that at its heart Persian poetry transforms the world into a web of symbols embedded in Islamic culture.

Part 1 Formal Requirements of Persian Poetry

1 Meter and Genres

I’d like to hide myself in my poem, so that I can kiss your lips when you read it.

Among the formal requirements of Persian poetry¹ the most salient to the reader’s eye and ear are metrical structures. To appreciate and—if one is reading the original verse—to understand a poem it is necessary to determine the meter of each poetical work. Classical Persian uses quantitative meters which were taken over from Arabic, where sixteen different meters were known and used. Some of these are almost never used in Persian, Turkish, or Urdu poetry, and others were changed in various ways to comply with the exigencies of Persian morphology and grammar.

The metric system is called ʽarūḍ (Persian-Turkish pronunciation ʽarūż), and one distinguishes long, short, and overlong syllables: mādar - -, “mother”; pisar ⌣ -, “son”; uftād’- - ⌣, “he fell.” In a number of words the long vowel can be shortened: kāh or kāh, “straw”; kūh or kuh, “mountain.” An excellent introduction into the whole system, with numerous fine examples, is Finn Thiesen’s work,² which covers every possible aspect of metrics so well that we need not enter here into a lengthy discussion in that connection.

Every poem consists of units of two-lined verses, bayt (which also means “house,” so that Rumi can claim that his beloved does not fit into any “house” or “verse”).³ Each bayt is made up of two hemistichs, miṣraʽ, which may or may not rhyme; but the two initial hemistichs of a ghazal and a qaṣīda always rhyme. Sometimes the hemistich is again split up into two rhyming halves, so that an almost songlike form of four short units emerges. This is called musammaṭ:

Sarmāya-i mastī manam | ham dāya-i hastī manam
bālā man u pastī manam | chūn charkh-i dawwār āmadam.

I am the capital of intoxication, and also the wet nurse of being,
I am high and lowliness, I came like the revolving sky.⁴

Thus says Rumi, who was fond of the form, which is reminiscent of four-lined Turkish folk poems (and can almost be scanned according to stress, as it had grown out of the rhythm of drums and other instruments).

Many poets had their favorite meters, and a special charm in good poetry is the perfect congruence of meter and content. Though classical poets, especially Ḥafiẓ, wrote their verse with such delightful fluency that barely any hiatus is felt, later poets often tried their hands at hard, “stony” (sangīn) meters to prove that they were able to produce lengthy poems under the most difficult metrical conditions (and, if possible, with extremely rare rhyme words). On the other hand, one sees great masters who were able to reproduce conversation in everyday language in complicated meters which seem to disappear into the conversational tone: suffice it to think of the ease with which Rumi offers conversations in his Mathnawī or even in his lyric verse, or how the Turkish poet Mehmet Akif (d. 1936)⁵ describes scenes from daily life so fluently that the reader is actually not aware of the strict metrical patterns that underlie his poems.

Classical Persian poetry comprises several genres which usually are sharply distinguished from each other. However, in all of them the rhyme plays the decisive role.⁶ Rhymeless poetry is not found in premodern times, and rhyming is also often an integral part of prose in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu traditions.

The rhyme can consist, as it usually does in Arabic, of a single rhyming letter preceded by any vowel, such as l: ʽādil, fāḍil, bulbul, etc. Or, as is much more frequent in Persian, it is formed by a long or overlong syllable, such as -dam, -ār, etc. One often finds a whole word, parts of a sentence, or even a full sentence matched in rhyme. This is called radīf, “over-rhyme.”

Bahār āmad bahār āmad bahār-i mushkbār āmad,
ān yār āmad ān yār āmad ān yār-i burdbār āmad,

The spring has come, the spring has come, the spring that carries musk has come,
That friend has come, that friend has come, that friend that bears our load has come,⁷

is a verse which, besides being a nice musammaṭ (verse with internal rhyme) shows also some other technical peculiarities. The rhyme word is -ār, the words -ār āmad are the radīf.

The same rhyme should not be repeated too soon.

One sometimes wonders whether the use of certain rhyme patterns, especially in qaṣīdas, may not be connected with certain topics; but no study of this aspect of poetry has been made. It may also be that the convention of imitating famous models is the reason for the amazing number of long poems rhyming in -ār (alone or with added radīf).

The best known form in Persian and Persianate poetry is the ghazal, a short poem with monorhyme in the rhyme scheme aa xa xa xa xa, etc. Ideally it should comprise seven to twelve verses, but there are also shorter and longer ghazals, the short one often consisting of five bayt.

The literary form of the ghazal was introduced in Europe in 1819 by the German orientalist poet Friedrich Rückert, who offered the German reading public a superb poetical version of twenty-four ghazals by Maulana Rumi in German ghazal form. From that time onward the ghazal became an accepted literary form in German, just as the sonnet and ritornelle had already been adopted, and it enjoyed for several decades such a popularity among German poets (unfortunately mostly mediocre ones) that the sober author Karl Immermann satirized these poets in his famous lines

Von den Früchten, die sie aus dem Gartenhain von Schiras stehlen,
essen sie zu viel, die Armen, und vomieren dann Ghaselen.⁸

They steal from its gardens the fruits of Shiraz,
overgorge—poor souls!—and vomit ghazals.

The theme of the ghazal is love, be it worldly or divine, but to the untutored reader the poem often seems to lack a “logical” development. It appears to be bound together mainly by the rhyme, and Goethe is certainly not too far off the mark with his remark that “this form instead of collecting the spirit scatters it, as the rhyme points to completely different [and seemingly unconnected] things. That results in the poem’s looking like a quodlibet, or prescribed end rhymes, but to produce something exquisite in this style, the best talents are required.”⁹

In the Introduction I mentioned various metaphors for the structure of the ghazal—atomistic, carpetlike, musical, contrapuntal, crystalline. In certain cases, for instance in a few of Rumi’s poems, a ghazal seems a logically closed entity in which one can easily observe a thought progress; in others he, like many of his compatriots, is simply carried away...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Two-Colored Brocade
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chronological Survey of Poets Mentioned in This Book
• A Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• Part 1 Formal Requirements of Persian Poetry
• part 2 Themes from History, Literature, and Legend
• Part 3 The Book of Nature
• Part 4 Themes from Life and Letters
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index Koranic Quotations
• Index of Authors and Works
• Index of Technical Terms and Concepts
• General Index