Ghazal Form (Class Notes 3/1)
2 min readMar 1, 2021
- Components are as follows (5)
- 1) Malta- opening couplet
- 2) Qafia- rhyme scheme
- 3) Radif- refrain
- 4) Prosody — sound or measure of speech
- 5) Makhta- the signature couplet
- The opening couplet (matla) sets up a scheme rhyme (qafia) and refrain (radif) by having it occur in both lines — this scheme occurs only in the second line of each succeeding couplet
- Each couplet in a ghazal is autonomous — thematically and emotionally complete in itself
- Each couplet does not have to relate to the others, they are independently focused
- Ghazal poetry can be rearranged without damage to the writing- aka it would still make sense. This challenges the typically flow of poetry. (page 212 in “An Exaltation of Forms”)
- Because couplets are not related and can be rearranged, it makes this form of poetry somewhat intimidating to analyze — hard to predict, interpret.
- A narrator is not being created, rather, the repetitions create a story that doesn’t have a start and end point but has many indeterminacies, thus many points.
- “Stringently formal disunity” (Finch & Varnes 210)
- Not originally an English form, originated from 7th century Arabia and was repeated orally. The form we are reading does not accurately represent ghazals due to this fact.
- Concerned with the counting of syllabi, not the stress of them
- Urdu meter- divides foot into sound units composed of long vowels and consonants.
- Ghazal was originally an oral form- works with the quantitative pattern.
- Example: Poem: Daniel Hall’s Souvenir — — 1) radif is “language” 2) couplets are autonomous but it also is being unified by the repetition of “language,” there is a paradox because the lines are disunified yet are held together by the radif.
