THE GHAZAL

Author's Comments


The Ghazal is a poem of five to fifteen couplets made up of a short mono-rhyme. The first two lines rhyme with a corresponding rhyme in the second of each succeeding couplet of aa ba ca and so on. The Ghazal usually deals with themes of love in a melancholy mood.

According to Agha Shahid Ali, the Ghazal expert who practised his poetic craft in USA Universities before his death in 2001 proffered these basic points on how to create a Ghazal:

No enjambments between couplets

What links couplets is a strict formal scheme

The entire Ghazal employs the same rhyme and refrain

The refrain may be a word or a phrase

Each line must be of the same length inclusive of the rhyme and refrain
(the metrical or syllabic - the key to maintaining consistency in length)

The last couplet may be (usually is) a signature couplet in which the poet
may evoke his/her name in the first, second, or third person

The scheme of rhyme and refrain occurs in BOTH lines of the first couplet
(that is how one learns what the scheme is) and then in only the second
line of every succeeding couplet (that is, the first line of every succeeding
couplet has no restrictions other than to maintain the syllabic or metrical
length.

There is an epigrammatic terseness in the Ghazal, but with immense lyricism,
evocation, sorrow, heartbreak, wit

What defines the Ghazal is a constant longing.