Arubāʿī (Classical Persian:رباعی,romanized: robāʿī, fromArabicرباعيّ,rubāʿiyy, 'consisting of four, quadripartite, fourfold';[a] plural:رباعيّات,rubāʿiyyāt) orchahārgāna(e) (Classical Persian:چهارگانه) is a poem or a verse of a poem inPersian poetry (or its derivative in English and other languages) in the form of aquatrain, consisting of four lines (fourhemistichs).
In classicalPersian poetry, theruba'i is written as a four-line (or two-couplet / two-distich) poem, with a rhyme-scheme or.[2][3][4][5]
This is an example of aruba'i fromRumi'sDivan-e Shams:
The usual metre of a Persianruba'i, which is used for all four lines of the above quatrain by Rumi, is, as follows:[7]
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 asgēkh,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 withbād above.
Another variation, as apoetic 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:
The verse form AABA as used in English verse is known as the Rubaiyat Quatrain due to its use byEdward FitzGerald in his famous 1859 translation,Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.Algernon Charles Swinburne, one of the first admirers of FitzGerald's translation ofKhayyam's medievalPersian verses, was the first to imitate the stanza form, which subsequently became popular and was used widely, as in the case ofRobert Frost's 1922 poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".[citation needed]
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 both the form and, to varying degrees, the content of his stanzas. These included 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 ofruba'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 hisRubaiyat.
