Each couplet approaches the idea of “tonight” in some way-almost always melancholic. Rather, each couplet has to start from semantic scratch, held together only by the rhyme and the refrain. None of the couplets should be related, in the sense that you don’t tell a story or meditate on a single problem. Here is the last couplet from this poem:Īnd I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee.
In the last couplet, it’s traditional to somehow address yourself or make reference to your name or identity. “Trinket”-to gem-“Me to adorn-How tell”-tonight?Īnd so on. Those “Fabrics of Cashmere-” “to make Me beautiful-” The rhyme is “ell” (spell/ expel). The refrain is “tonight.” The first couplet establishes the form, but in every other couplet, the rhyme and the refrain only appear in the second line. Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight? Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight? So here’s the first couplet of a Agha Shahid Ali’s poem ‘Tonight’: There is a rhyme and refrain that appear at the end of both lines of the first couplet.
The form is established by the first couplet. If you had met Shahid, you would also have written at least three or four ghazals by now. You might object here-perhaps insisting that free verse poem is no less real that a formal poems, but I promise- if you had met Shahid, you would have instantly been charmed, and agreed instantly. Starting in the 1990s, Agha Shahid Ali began to insist on the formal restraints of what he called the “real” ghazal. The formal aspects of the ghazal were well known in English by the 1920s, however, with the free verse translations of ghazals in the 1960s, most Western writers thought of the ghazal as a way to describe a series of disconnected couplets. It remains popular as a sung form in parts of the world where the distinction between poetry (words for the spoken voice) and song lyrics (words for the sung voice, with specific melody) is not so distinct. The form has roots in Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, and Hebrew.
The word ‘ghazal’ is pronounced “guzzle” in some languages and “gu-ZAHL” in others, though in both with a guttural “g” almost like the “ch” in “Bach.” Supposedly, the name comes from the sound a wounded gazelle makes as it dies. The ghazal is the oldest poetic form still in use.
0 kommentar(er)
