The Universe of the Ghazal

The Form at a Glance

• Length: Minimum 5 stanzas, Max: undetermined
• Stanzas: Couplets
• Rhyme Scheme: The opening couplet (called the Malta) sets up a rhyme scheme (quafia) and refrain (radif) that occurs in both lines. From then on, this refrain only occurs in the second line of each couplet.
• The final couplet (makhata): “Signature” couplet where the poet invokes his/her name pseudonymously or otherwise.

Unique to the 7th century form of the Arabic Ghazal and its contemporary descendants is that “each couplet is autonomous, thematically and emotionally complete in itself: one couplet may be comic, another tragic, another romantic, another religious, another political” (210). In fact, “there is no context as such,” rather there is only “a technical context, a formal unity based on rhyme and refrain and prosody” (210).

One of my favorite aspects of well written Ghazals is that the refrain creates an orbit, pulling the trajectories of meaning of each semi-autonomous couplet into a small semantic universe. While this has the potential to become monotonous, the refrain creates a universe in which attraction is formal, the refrain expanding and contracting its polysemy to engage the trajectory of each line. Indeed, you can (usually) rearrange its couplets without losing this effect. While trajectories of meaning are reoriented, the refrain makes its own gravity, drawing those new meanings in new directions but still ultimately toward its chant-like repetition.

Ali, Agha Shahid. “Ghazal: To Be Teased Into Disunity.” An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, Edited by Anne Finch and Kathrine Varnes, U. of Michigan P, 2002, pp. 210–216.