After two weeks of initiation to ʿarūż, we are ready for some practice. This week, we will read some of the most famous lines from classical Persian poetry and determine their metres.   In any classical Persian poem, the metre (وزن vazn, which literally means ‘weight’ in Arabic) remains consistent throughout. The first tip, therefore, …

Continue reading “A Short Introduction to the Persian Metre (ʿarūż) – part 3”

Last week I talked about how the Persian metre is based on syllable length, and what short, long, and extra-long syllables are. Analysing a line of poetry down to syllables, and a syllable down to its consonant(s) and vowel, however, is a western methodology that has also been embraced by modern Iranians and Turks. Before …

Continue reading “A Short Introduction to the Persian Metre (عروض ʿarūż) – part 2”

Before the birth of blank verse with modernism, poetry across the world was written according to fixed rhythmic structures, referred to as ‘metres’ in English, from the Greek word μέτρον (métron) ‘measure’. The concept consists of measuring the number of syllables per line and the length (when it applies) of each syllable, so as to …

Continue reading “A Short Introduction to the Persian Metre (عروض ʿarūż) – part 1”

Picking up where we left off a couple of weeks ago, Iskandar takes us through the next lines of Mawlana’s Masnavi, with a close line by line reading interspersed with discussion of the wider themes and imagery that run through the text.   آتش است این بانگ نای و نیست باد هر که این آتش …

Continue reading “Sufi Themes and Imagery through Mawlānā’s Naynāma: Part 2”