Persian metres

Persian metres are the patterns of long and short syllables in which classical Persian poetry is composed.

Over the past 1000 years the Persian language has enjoyed a very rich literature especially of poetry. Until the advent of free verse in the 20th century, this poetry was always quantitative, that is the lines were composed in various patterns of long and short syllables. The different patterns are known as metres (US: meters). A knowledge of metre is essential for the correct recitation of Persian poetry, and also very often, since short vowels are not written in Persian script, for the correct interpretation of the meaning of a verse in cases of ambiguity. It is also helpful for those who memorise the verse.

The metres used in Persian have traditionally been analysed in terms of Arabic metres, from which they are supposed to have been adapted. However, in recent years it has been recognised that for the most part Persian metres developed independently from those used in Arabic, and there has been a movement to analyse them on their own terms.

An unusual feature of Persian poetry, which is not found in Arabic or Latin and Greek verse, is that instead of two lengths of syllables (long and short), there are three lengths (short, long, and overlong). Overlong syllables can be used instead of a long syllable plus a short one, or at the end of a verse in place of a long syllable.

Persian metres were used not only in classical Persian poetry, but were also imitated in Turkish poetry of the Ottoman period, and in Urdu poetry under the Mughal emperors. That the poets of Turkey and India copied Persian metres, not Arabic ones, is clear from the fact that, just as with Persian verse, the most commonly used metres of Arabic poetry (the ṭawīl, kāmil, wāfir and basīṭ) are avoided, while those metres used most frequently in Persian lyric poetry are exactly those which are most frequent in Turkish and Urdu.

Until recently Persian metres were always described using the same terms as in Arabic poetry, using the system known as 'arūd (Persian pronunciation: 'arūz) devised by the Arab grammarian Al-Khalil in the 8th century AD. Thus for example the rhythm of Ferdowsi's epic poem the Shahnameh (u – – u – – u – – u –) was thought to be a modification of the Arabic metre mutaqārib, which is similar (u – x | u – x | u – x | u –). (In this notation, u is used for a short syllable, – for a long one, and x for an anceps, which may be either long or short.) Another possibility, however, since this metre was not used in Arabic until the Islamic period, is that it was borrowed from Persian into Arabic.

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