A literary history of Persia - The Literary History of Persia, Volume 2

Contents

ALTHOUGH this book of mine is all unmeet,
Light of mine eyes, to lay at thy dear feet,
I think that Alchemy which worketh still
Can turn to gold this copper, if it will,
Enlarge its merits and ignore its ill.

Can I forget how, as it neared its end,
A happy chance permitted me to blend
Rare intervals of worship ill-concealed,
Occasions brief of love but half revealed,
Long days of hope deferred, short hours of bliss,
Into a happiness so full as this?
Now come I, Dearest, for my book to claim
Even so great an honour as thy name!

THE present volume is a continuation or that which I published in the same series four years ago, and carries the Literary History of Persia on from the beginning of the eleventh to the middle of the thirteenth century of our era. This period, comparatively short as it is, includes most of the greatest poets and writers of the Persians, and I hardly anticipate that I shall be accused by any competent critic of discussing it with undue detail. Should I succeed in carrying out my original plan, by continuing the history down to our own times, I believe that the remaining six centuries and a half can be adequately treated in one volume equal in size to this.

Of the defects of this book, now that it is all in type, I am fully sensible. They arise largely from the fact that it was chiefly written during vacations, and that two months or more often elapsed between the completion of one chapter and the beginning of the next. Under present conditions the University of Cambridge is far from being the best place in the world for quiet, steady, regular work; and though the books of reference indispensable for a compilation of this kind were there, leisure was only to be found elsewhere, even as the poet Ṣá'ib says:—

Shigúfa bá thamar hargiz na-gardad jam' dar yak já:
Muḥál-ast ánki bá-ham ni'mat u dindán shavad paydá!

“Never in one place are found the luscious fruit and blossom fine;
Vain it is for one to hope both teeth and dainties to combine!”

In consequence of this, the book, as I am well aware, is marred not only by occasional repetitions, but by a certain disconnectedness and lack of uniformity for which I crave the reader's indulgence. On the other hand I have throughout endeavoured to use original sources and to form independent views, and in this I have been aided by several rare works, inaccessible or hardly accessible to my predecessors, of which I may specially mention the Chahár Maqála (“Four Discourses”) of Nidhámí-i-'Arúḍí of Samarqand, the Lubábu'l-Albáb of Muḥammad 'Awfí, the Mu'ajjam of Shams-i-Qays, and my notes on the Ráḥatu'ṣ-Ṣudúr of ar-Ráwandí, the Jahán-gushá of 'Aṭá Malik-i-Juwayní, the Jámi'u't-Tawáríkh of Rashídu'd-Dín Faḍlu'lláh, and other similar books.

The work itself has had my whole heart, and I would that it could also have had my undivided attention. For Islám and the Perso-Arabian civilisation of Islám I have the deepest admiration; an admiration which it is especially incumbent on me to confess at a time when these are so much misunderstood and misrepresented by Europeans; who appear to imagine that they themselves have a monopoly of civilisation, and a kind of divine mandate to impose on the whole world not only their own political institutions but their own modes of thought. Year by year, almost, the number of independent Muslim States grows less and less, while such as still remain— Persia, Turkey, Arabia, Morocco, and a few others—are ever more and more overshadowed by the menace of European interference. Of course it is in part their own fault, and Asiatic indifference and apathy combine with European “earth-hunger” and lust of conquest to hasten their disintegration. To the unreflecting Western mind the extinction of these States causes no regret, but only exhilarating thoughts of more “openings” for their children and their capital; but those few who know and love the East and its peoples, and realise how deeply we are indebted to it for most of the great spiritual ideas which give meaning and value to life, will feel, with Chesterton's “Man in Green,” that with the subsidence of every such State something is lost to the world which can never be replaced. Yet this is not, perhaps, a question which can be settled by argument, any more than it can be settled by argument which is better, a garden planted with one useful vegetable or with a variety of beautiful flowers, each possessing its own distinctive colour and fragrance. But this at least must be admitted by any one who has a real sympathy with and understanding of the Spirit of the East, that it suffers atrophy and finally death under even a good and well-meaning European administration; and that for this reason Constantinople, Damascus, Shíráz and Fez, for all their shortcomings, do possess something of artistic and intellectual, even, perhaps, of moral value, which Cairo, Delhi, Algiers, and Tunis are losing or have lost. Whether Islám is still bleeding to death from the wounds first inflicted on it by the Mongols six hundred and fifty years ago, or whether the proof given by Japan that the Asiatic is not, even on the physical plane, necessarily inferior to the European may lead to some unexpected revival, is a question of supreme interest which cannot here be discussed.

My deepest gratitude is due to my sister, Miss E. M. Browne, and to my friend and colleague, Mr. E. H. Minns, for reading through the proofs of this book, and for making not only minor verbal corrections, but suggestions of a more general character. To Mr. Minns I am also indebted for interpreting to me the monographs of several eminent Russian Orientalists to which I have referred in these pages, and which, but for his generous help, would have been to me sealed books. Of the general criticisms which he was kind enough to make, one, I think, merits a reference in this place. He tells me that in the first chapter, when treating of Persian Prosody, I have not been sufficiently explicit for the reader who is not an Orientalist as to the nature of the bayt and the fundamental laws of quantity in scansion.

As regards the first of these points, the bayt or verse is, as I have said, always regarded by the Muslims as the unit, and for this reason I consider that it should not, as is often done in European books, be called a “couplet.” That it is the unit is clearly shown by the fact that a metre is called musaddas (hexameter) or muthamman (octameter) when the bayt comprises six or eight feet respectively. Unfortunately the bayt, which is always written or printed in one line in the East, is generally, when transcribed in Roman characters, too long to be thus treated, and has to be printed in two lines, as occurs, for instance, in the bayt printed in the Roman character about the middle of page 15, and again in the bayt occupying lines 5 and 6 on the following page. This fashion of printing, and, in the first case, the fact that the bayt, being the initial verse of a ghazal or ode, has an internal rhyme, is liable to delude the reader into supposing that he has to do with what we understand by a couplet, and not with the unit connoted by the word bayt.

As regards the second point, the rules of scansion in Persian are exceedingly simple, and no gradus is needed to determine the quantity of the vowels. All long vowels (equally un-mistakeable in the written and the spoken word) are, of course, long, and are distinguished in this book by accents. Short vowels are short, unless followed by two consonants, whether both consonants come in the same word, or one at the end of one word and the other at the beginning of the next. All this is easy enough of comprehension to the classical scholar, but what follows is peculiar to Persian. Every word ending in two consonants, or in one consonant (except n, which, being reckoned as a nasal, does not count) preceded by a long vowel, is scanned as though it ended with an additional short vowel. ^xiia This hypothetical vowel (called in the East ním-fatḥa, the “half-fatḥa,” and, most inappropriately, by some French writers “l'izafet metrique”) is actually pronounced by the Indians, but not by the Persians, but it must always be reckoned unless the succeeding word begins with a vowel. The same rule also applies to syllables.

A few examples will best serve to illustrate the above remarks. Words like bád (wind), bíd (willow), búd (was), kár (work), shír (lion), múr (ant) scan as though they were bád^a, bíd^a, &c., i.e., not. The same applies to words like dast (hand), band (bond), gard (dust), which scan as though they were dast^a, band^a and gard^a. Similarly, words like bád-gír (“wind-catcher,” a kind of ventilation-shaft), shír-mard (brave man, lit. “lion-man”), dúr-bín (telescope), dast-kash (glove) scan as though they were bád^a-gír^a, shír^a-mard^a, dúr^a-bín, dast^a-kash. But jahán (world), nigín (signet), darún (inside) scan, because they end in n. So in the verse on page 16, which is written in the apocopated hexameter ramal:—

the scansion is as follows:—

??

There are a few other peculiarities o?? scansion in Persian verse, as, for example, that monosyllables ending in -u, like tú (thou), dú (two), chú (like), &c., may be scanned either short or long, as is the case with the i which marks the iḍáfat, while the monosyllable connoting the word for “and” may be treated either as a long vowel (ṹ), or a short vowel (ŭ), or as a consonant followed by a short vowel (wŭ); but, save in a few exceptional cases, the reader who has familiarised himself with the peculiarities above mentioned will have no difficulty in scanning any Persian verse which he may come across.

The publication of this volume, originally fixed for May 1st of the present year, was inevitably delayed by circumstances into which I need not here enter. This delay I regret, and I desire to offer my apologies for it to my friend Mr. Fisher Unwin, and also my thanks for his readiness to accept an excuse which he was kind enough to regard as valid and sufficient. My thanks are also due to the printers, Messrs. Unwin Brothers, Ltd., of Woking and London, for the singular care with which they have printed a book presenting many typographical difficulties.

EDWARD G. BROWNE.

MAY 16, 1906.

IN a former volume, ^2a intended to serve as an Introduction to this work, and yet to be in a measure independent, I have Scope of this volume. treated of the History of the Persians, chiefly from the intellectual and literary standpoints, from its first beginnings down to the early Ghaznawí Period, in which, about A.D. 1000, the genius of Firdawsí definitely assured the success of that Renaissance of Persian literature which began rather more than a century before his time. The present volume, therefore, deals not with origins, but with Persian literary history in the narrower sense—that is, the literature of the Persians (including so much of the external and intellectual history of Persia as is necessary for a proper comprehension of this) from the time when their language assumed its present form (that is, from the time of the Arab Conquest and the adoption by the Persians of the religion of Islám in the seventh century of our era) down to the present day. This post-Muhammadan literature (which is what we ordinarily mean when we speak of “Persian Literature”) arose gradually after the subjugation of Persia by the Arabs, and the overthrow by Islám of the Zoroastrian creed, and may be said to have begun, so far as documentary evidence exists, about a thousand years ago. During the whole of this period the language has undergone changes so slight that the verses of ancient poets like Ḥandhala of Bádghís (A.D. 820-872) and Rúdagí (end of ninth and beginning of tenth centuries) are at least as easily understood by a Persian of the present day as are the works of Shakespear by a modern Englishman. It is important for all students of Persian to apprehend this fact thoroughly, and to realise that that language has changed less in the last thousand years than English has changed in the last three centuries. The most archaic literary monuments of the Persian language (by which term, throughout this volume, post-Muhammadan Persian is intended) are, indeed, characterised by certain peculiarities of style and vocabulary; but I much question whether there exists any Persian scholar, native or foreign, who could assign even an approximate date to a work of unknown authorship written within the last five centuries and containing no historical allusions which might serve to fix the period of its composition.

I cannot in this volume repeat what I have elsewhere set forth in detail as to the history of Persia in pre-Muhammadan Scope of the Prolegomena contained in the previous volume. and early Muhammadan times. This history was in my Prolegomena carried down to that period when the great 'Abbásid Caliphate of Baghdád, culminating in the splendid reigns of Hárúnu'r-Rashíd and his son al-Ma'mún (A.D. 786-833), was already on the decline; a decline manifested externally by the gradual detachment from effective central control of one province after another, and continuing steadily, if slowly, until Húlágú's Mongol hordes gave it the coup de grâce in A.D. 1258, when Baghdád was sacked and the last real Caliph of the House of 'Abbás cruelly done to death.

For the ordinary student of Persian literature it is sufficient to know, so far as its origins are concerned, that the immediate ancestor of Persian was Pahlawí, the official language of Persia under the Sásánian kings (A.D. 226-651), and, for Sketch of the origins discussed in the Prolegomena. two or three subsequent centuries, the religious language of the Zoroastrian priests; that the extant literature of Pahlawí has been estimated by Dr. E. W. West (perhaps the greatest European authority on this subject) as roughly equal in bulk to the Old Testament, and that it is chiefly religious and liturgical in character; that there exist, besides this literature, inscriptions on rocks, coins, and gems dating from the middle of the third century; that this Pahlawí language, the ancestor of later Persian, is itself the descendant of the Old Persian tongue known to us only through the inscriptions carved on the rocks of Persepolis, Behistun, and other places by order of Darius the Great and subsequent Achæmenian kings; and that the Avestic (so-called “Zend”) language in which the Zoroastrian scriptures are written was a sister-tongue to that last mentioned and to Sanskrit, standing, therefore, out of the direct line of ascent from modern Persian, and represented at the present day by certain provincial dialects of Persia, and, as Darmesteter supposes, by the Pashto or Afghán speech.

Arranged in tabular form, the above facts may be expressed as follows:—

I. Old Persian of Achæmenian Avestic, represented by the Avesta, Period of which the oldest portion is (B.C. 550-330), represented only by inscriptions. that known as the Gáthás, which are generally supposed to date from the time of Zoroaster or his immediate disciples (probably about B.C. 600).

II. The Invasion of Alexander (B.C. 333) inaugurates a period of anarchy, devoid of literary monuments, which lasted five centuries and a half, and was terminated by the establishment of—

III. The Sásánian Dynasty (A.D. 226-651), under which Pahlawí became the official language of the State and of the Zoroastrian Church, this language being the child of Old Persian, and the parent of modern Persian.

IV. The Arab Conquest (A.D. 641-651), resulting in the conversion of the great bulk of the Persian nation to the religion of Islám, and in the practical supersession of Persian by Arabic as the official and literary language.

V. The Persian Renaissance, with which the period included in this volume may be said to begin, and which, beginning about A.D. 850, gathers strength in proportion as Persia succeeds in emancipating herself more and more from the control of the weakening Caliphate of Baghdád, and in re-asserting her political independence.

Such, in outline, is Persian literary history; but while the ordinary student of Persian may well content himself with a Influence of the Arab Conquest on Persia. summary and superficial knowledge of all that precedes the Arab Conquest, he cannot thus lightly pass over the consequences of that momentous event. Once again in this volume, as in that which preceded it (p. 6), I am fain to quote Nöldeke's most pregnant saying, “Hellenism never touched more than the surface of Persian life, but Írán was penetrated to the core by Arabian religion and Arabian ways.”

The Arabic language is in a special degree the language of a great religion. To us the Bible is the Bible, whether we The unique position of the Arabic language. read it in the original tongues or in our own; but it is otherwise with the Qur'án amongst the Muslims. To them this Arabic Qur'án is the very Word of God, an objective, not a subjective revelation. When we read therein: “Qul: Huwa 'lláhu Aḥad” (“Say: He, God, is One”), God Himself is the speaker, not the Prophet; and therefore the Muslim, in quoting his scripture, employs the formula, “HE says, exalted is HE”; while only in quoting the traditions (Aḥádíth) of the Prophet does he say, “He says, upon him be the Blessing of God and His Peace.” Hence the Qur'án cannot properly be translated into another tongue, for he who translates by so doing interprets and perchance distorts. It is only by Christian missionaries, so far as my knowledge goes, that translations of the Qur'án have been published detached from the text; amongst Muslims the most that we find is an interlinear rendering of the Arabic text in Persian, Turkish, or Urdú, as the case may be, such rendering being in general slavishly literal. ^5a In addition to this, the prayers which every good Muslim should recite five times a day are in Arabic, as are the Confession of Faith and other religious formulæ which are constantly on the tongue of the true believer, be he Persian, Turk, Indian, Afghan, or Malay; so that every Muslim must have some slight acquaintance with the Arabic language, while nothing so greatly raises him in the eyes of his fellows as a more profound knowledge of the sacred tongue of Islám. In addition to all this, the language of every people who embraced Islám was inundated from the first by Arabic words, first the technical terms of Theology and Jurisprudence, then the terminology of all the nascent sciences known to the Muhammadan civilisation, and lastly a mass of ordinary words, which latter have often, as the former have almost always, entirely displaced the native equivalent. To write Persian devoid of any admixture of Arabic is at least as difficult as to write English devoid of any admixture of Greek, Latin, or French derivatives; it can be done within certain limits, but the result is generally incomprehensible without the aid of a dictionary. As I write, there lies before me a specimen of such attempts, to wit a communication of nearly one hundred lines made to the Akhtar or “Star” (an excellent Persian newspaper formerly published at Constantinople, but now unfortunately extinct) by certain Zoroastrians or “guebres” of Yazd, and published in the issue of October 27, 1890. The matter is simple, and the abstract ideas requiring expression few; yet the writers have felt themselves compelled to give footnotes explaining (in every case save two by an Arabic equivalent) the meanings of no less than fourteen words, and many other such glosses would be required to make the article intelligible to the ordinary Persian reader. Thus áwízha (pure) must be glossed as kháṣṣ, darad (form) as ṣúrat, khuhr (country) as waṭan, farhikht (courtesy, culture) as adab, and so on, the glosses in all these cases and most others being Arabic words. Another more ambitious, but scarcely more successful, attempt of the same kind is Prince Jalál's Náma-i-Khusrawán (“Book of Princes”), a short history of the pre-Muhammadan dynasties of Persia published at Vienna in A.H. 1297 (A.D. 1880), and reviewed by Mordtmann in vol. xxviii of the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, pp. 506-508. Even the Sháhnáma of Firdawsí, composed nine centuries ago, and, as I think is shown by a study of contemporary poetry, purposely composed in the most archaic style and speech which the author could command, is far from being so free from Arabic words as is often asserted and imagined.

Thus far we have confined ourselves to the consideration of the influence exerted by the Arabs on the Persians in the Arabian Science. domain of language only, but this influence is not less perceptible in other fields. Strongest in Theology and Jurisprudence, it extends also to Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetry, and all the sciences known to the Muslims. These sciences were, of course, in many cases of complex origin, being borrowed by the Arabs (chiefly during the early 'Abbásid period, i.e., the latter part of the eighth century of our era) from other more civilised nations, notably the Persians and the Greeks; and indeed they are divided in such works as the Mafátíḥu'l-'Ulúm (“Keys of the Sciences”) ^6a into two groups, the native or indigenous (Jurisprudence, Scholastic Theology, Grammar, Writing, Poetry and Prosody, and History), and the exotic (Philosophy, Logic, Medicine, Arithmetic, Mathematics, Astronomy and Astrology, Music, Mechanics, and Alchemy). All these, however, were thoroughly assimilated into the complex Arabo-Persian culture of the 'Abbásid capital, Baghdád, and in their entirety constitute what is often, but inexactly, styled “Arabian Science” —a science which, drawn from many different sources, forms a synthesis common to all Muhammadan peoples, and which has exercised and continues to exercise an influence second only to that of the religion of Islám itself in bringing about that solidarity of sentiment so conspicuous in the Muslim world.

For a scientific language, indeed, Arabic is eminently fitted by its wealth of roots and by the number of derivative forms,

Fitness of Arabic for scientific purposes. each expressing some particular modification of the root-idea, of which each is susceptible. Let us illustrate this by two examples, the first drawn from the terminology of Medicine, the second formed after a perfectly sound analogy to express a quite modern idea. The primitive verb has in Arabic some dozen derived forms (commonly called “conjugations”), each expressing some definite modification (causative, intensive, reciprocal, middle, &c.) of the meaning connoted by the original verb. Of these ten conjugations, the tenth is commonly desiderative, and, if we substitute the numbers 1, 2, 3, for the first, second, and third letters of the triliteral root the general form of its verbal noun will be (Isti. 1. 2. á. 3), and of its active participle (Musta. 1. 2. i. 3). Thus from the simple verb ghafara, “he pardoned,” we have in the tenth conjugation istighfár, “asking for pardon,” and mustaghfir, “one who asks for pardon”; from kamala, “he was perfect,” istikmál, “seeking perfection,” and mustakmil, “one who seeks perfection”; and so on. Now the old theory (adopted by the Arabian physicians) as to the ætiology of dropsy was that it was caused by excessive drinking (“crescit indulgens sibi dirus hydrops”), and hence it was named by the Arabs (and consequently by all the Muhammadan peoples) istisqá, “craving for drink,” while the sufferer is called mus-tasqí , both forms belonging to the tenth conjugation of the root saqá, “he gave drink to.” So in quite modern times a need has arisen for an equivalent in Arabic to the European term “Orientalist,” and this has been met by taking the regularly-formed participle of the tenth, or desiderative, conjugation of the root from which comes the word sharq, “the East,” and coining the derivative mustashriq, which can only mean “one who desires” or “is interested in the East.” These instances will suffice to show the facility wherewith new ideas can be denoted in Arabic by forms which, hitherto unused, precisely and unmistakeably indicate the idea to be expressed.

The Arabs themselves (including, of course, peoples like the Egyptians who have adopted the Arabic speech) are intensely,

Pride of the Arabs in their language. and justly, proud of their glorious language, and exclaim with the fullest conviction, “Al-ḥamdu li'lláhi'lladhí khalaqa' l-Lisána'l-'Arabiyya aḥsana min kulli lisán” (“Praise be to God who created the Arabic language the finest of all languages”). Whether or not we are prepared to go as far as this, it is at least certain that no satisfactory knowledge of the languages, literatures, and modes of thought of Persia, Turkey, Muhammadan India, or any other Muslim land is possible without a considerable knowledge of Arabic, and that in particular our appreciation and enjoyment of these literatures grows in direct ratio to this knowledge.

In my previous volume on the Literary History of Persia until the Time of Firdawsí I discussed at some length what Recapitulation of Prolegomena. I have called the Prolegomena to the history of Persian literature in the narrower sense. I spoke there of the three ancient languages of Persia (the Old Persian, the Avestic, and the Pahlawí), and of some of the dialects by which they are now represented. I sketched in outline the earlier religious systems which prevailed in that country (to wit, Zoroastrianism and the heresies of Manes and Mazdak), and the history of the last great national dynasty, the Sásánian. Passing, then, to the Arabs, whose conquest of Persia in the seventh century of our era wrought, as we have seen, such deep and lasting changes alike in the religion, the language, the literature, the life, and the thought of the Persians, I spoke briefly of their state in the “Days of Ignorance” (Ayyámu'l-Jáhiliyyat) or heathendom, ere the Prophet Muḥammad arose, and of their ancient poems, which, dating at least from the end of the fifth century of our era, still remain the classical models which every versifier of Arab speech aspires to imitate when writing in the heroic vein. I then described in a summary manner the advent of the Prophet, the doctrine of al-Islám, the triumph of the Muhammadan arms, the rule of the Four Orthodox Caliphs, and the origin of the great Shí'ite and Khárijite schisms. I endeavoured to depict the semi-pagan Imperialism of the Umayyad Caliphs, and the growing discontent of the subject-races (especially the Persians), culminating in the middle of the eighth century in the great revolt of the Khurásánís under Abú Muslim, the Battle of the Záb, the overthrow and destruction of the Umayyad power in the East, and the establishment of the 'Abbásid Caliphate, which, enduring for some five centuries, was finally destroyed (save for the shadowy existence which it maintained in Egypt until the Ottoman Turkish Sulṭán Selím the First, in A.D. 1517, took from the last scion of this House the titles and insignia which it had hitherto preserved) by the great catastrophe of the Mongol Invasion in the middle of the thirteenth century.

The period included in this volume begins at a time when the glories of “the golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid”

The period discussed in this volume. had long passed away. The early 'Abbásid Caliphs, though they never obtained possession of Spain, otherwise maintained and extended the vast empire won by the first successors of the Prophet—an empire extending from Morocco to Sind and from Aden to Khwárazm (Khiva), and including, besides North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Persia, Afghánistán, Balúchistán, a large portion of Turkistán, a smaller portion of India, and the islands of Crete and Cyprus. The first step towards the weakening and dissolution of this empire may be said to have been taken when al-Ma'mún, the son of Hárúnu'r-Rashíd, rewarded his general Ṭáhir Dhu'l-Yamínayn (“the Ambidexter”), in A.D. 820, with the permanent government of Khurásán for himself and his heirs, who held this province from father to son till they were displaced by the “Brazier” or Ṣaffárí dynasty in A.D. 872. These Ṭáhirids are generally accounted the first post-Muhammadan Persian dynasty; and, though they never claimed to be in any way independent of the Caliphs of Baghdád, the hereditary character of their power clearly differentiates them from the governors and proconsuls of previous times, who were transferred from province to province by the central Government as it saw fit. The transition from the state of an hereditary governor or satrap to that of a practically independent Amír (for the title of Sulṭán was first assumed by Maḥmúd of Ghazna at the period with which this volume opens) was very gradual, and was not always continuous. The Ṣaffárí dynasty was, for instance, less obedient and more independent in its earlier days than the Sámánid dynasty which succeeded it; but nominally even the mighty rulers of the Houses of Ghazna and Seljúq accounted themselves the vassals of the Caliph, regarded him as their over-lord and suzerain, and eagerly sought after those titles and honours of which he was the only recognised and legitimate source. Individual instances of overt disobedience and rebellion did, of course, occur—as, for instance, the march of Ya'qúb b. Layth, the Ṣaffárí, on Baghdád, and his battle with the troops of the Caliph al-Mu'tamid in A.H. 262 (A.D. 875-76); ^10a the attempt of the Seljúq Maliksháh to compel the Caliph al-Muqtadí to transfer his capital from Baghdád to Damascus or the Ḥijáz ^11a about A.D. 1080; and the still more serious quarrel between Sanjar and al-Mustarshid in A.D. 1133, which ended in the Caliph being taken prisoner and, during his captivity, assassinated (in A.D. 1135) by the Isma'ílís, who, as al-Bundárí asserts, ^11b were instigated to this deed by Sanjar himself. The nominal suzerainty of the Caliph of Baghdád was, however, more or less recognised by all orthodox Muhammadan princes and amírs save those of Spain, from the foundation of the 'Abbásid Caliphate, about A.D. 750, till its extinction in A.D. 1258, and during this period of five centuries Baghdád continued to be the metropolis and intellectual centre of Muslim civilisation, and Arabic the language of diplomacy, philosophy, and science, and, to a large extent, of belles lettres and polite conversation.

The great religious and political rivals of the 'Abbásids were the heterodox Fáṭimid anti-Caliphs of Egypt. These repre- The Shí'ite rivals of the 'Abbásids. sented one of the two great divisions of the Shí'a, or “Faction,” of 'Alí—to wit, the “Sect of the Seven,” or Isma'ílís, whose origin and history were fully discussed in the Prolegomena to this volume, together with those of the allied party of the Carmathians. The other great division of the Shí'a, the “Sect of the Twelve,” which is now the State-religion of Persia, only became so generally (though it prevailed for some time in Ṭabaristán, and was professed by the powerful House of Buwayh) on the rise of the Ṣafawí dynasty under Sháh Isma'íl in A.D. 1502, though it always had a strong hold amongst the Persians. Until the Mongol Invasion in the thirteenth century the political power of the Isma'ílís (represented in Persia by the so-called Assassins or Isma'ílís of Alamút) was, however, as we shall presently see, much greater.

The great dividing line in the Muhammadan period of Asiatic history is the Mongol Invasion, which inflicted on the Muslim The Mongol Invasion of the thirteenth century. civilisation a blow from which it has never recovered, and, by destroying the Caliphate and its metropolis of Baghdád, definitely put an end to the unity of the Muslim empire. This Mongol Invasion, beginning early in the thirteenth century with the conquests of Chingíz Khán, culminated in the sack of Baghdád and murder of al-Musta'ṣim, the last 'Abbásid Caliph, by Húlágú Khán in A.D. 1258. The devastation wrought by it throughout Persia was terrific. The irresistible Mongol hordes were bloodthirsty heathens who respected nothing, but slew, burnt, and destroyed without mercy or compunction. “They came, they uprooted, they burned, they slew, they carried off, they departed” (“Ámadand, u kandand, u súkhtand, u kushtand, u burdand, u raftand”) ^12a —such was the account of their methods and procedure given by one of the few who escaped from the sack of Bukhárá, wherein 30,000 were slain; and there were other cities which fared even worse than Bukhárá. The invasion of Tímúr the Tartar, horrible as it was, was not so terrible in its effects as this, for Tímúr was professedly a Muslim, and had some consideration for mosques, libraries, and men of learning; but Chingíz and Húlágú were bloodthirsty heathens, who, especially when resistance was encountered, and most of all when some Mongol prince was slain in battle, spared neither old nor young, gentle nor simple, learned nor unlearned; who stabled their horses in the mosques, burned the libraries, used priceless manuscripts for fuel, and often razed the conquered city to the ground, destroyed every living thing within it, and sowed the site with salt.

Hence, as it seems to me, there is a gulf between what preceded and what followed this terrific catastrophe, which effected in Muslim civilisation, science, and letters a deteriora- Irrevocable harm done by Mongol Invasion. tion never afterwards wholly repaired. So, though less than two centuries and a half of the period which remains to be considered precede the Mongol Invasion, while six centuries and a half succeed it, the former may well claim for their treatment an equal space with the latter.

The earliest dawn of the Persian Renaissance, which culminated in Firdawsí and his contemporaries, was fully The Persian Renaissance. discussed in the Prolegomena to this volume, but a brief recapitulation in this place may not be amiss. According to 'Awfí, the oldest biographer of the Persian poets whose work has been preserved to us, and who wrote early in the thirteenth century, the first Persian qaṣída was composed by a certain 'Abbás to celebrate the entry of the 'Abbásid Caliph al-Ma'mún, the son of Hárúnu'r-Rashíd, into Merv, in A.H. 193 (A.D. 808-9). This extract from 'Awfí's work (the Lubábu'l-Albáb), including four couplets of the poem in question, was published, with translation, by Dr. H. Ethé in his interesting paper entitled Rûdagî's Vorlaüfer und Zeitgenossen (pp. 36-38), but I entirely agree with A. de Biberstein Kazimirski's ^13a view as to the spurious character of this poem. One of the oldest Persian verses which has come down to us is probably that which, as we learn from the “Four Discourses” (Chahár Maqála) of Nidhámí-i-'Arúḍí-i-Samarqandí (composed about the middle of the twelfth century), ^13b inspired Aḥmad al-Khujistání to rebel against the Ṣaffárí dynasty in A.H. 262 (A.D. 875-76), and “stirred within him an impulse which would not suffer him to remain in the condition wherein he was.” The verse is as follows:—

Mihtarí gar bi-kám-i-shír dar-ast
Shaw, khaṭar kun, zi kám-i-shír bi-júy,
Yá buzurgí u náz u ni'mat u jáh,
Yá, chú mardán't marg-i-rúy-á-rúy.

“If lordship lies within the lion's jaws,
Go, risk it, and from those dread portals seize
Such straight-confronting death as men desire,
Or riches, greatness, rank, and lasting ease.”

These verses are quoted by the author of the “Four Discourses” in support of his proposition that “poetry is that art whereby the poet arranges imaginary propositions, and adapts the deductions, with the result that he can make a little thing appear great and a great thing small, or cause good to appear in the garb of evil and evil in the garb of good. By acting on the imagination, he excites the faculties of anger and concupiscence in such a way that by his suggestion men's temperaments become affected with exaltation or depression; whereby he conduces to the accomplishment of great things in the order of the world.”

Persian poetry, then, began to be composed more than a thousand years ago, ^14a under the earliest independent or semi- Wonderful stability of the Persian language. independent rulers who sprung up pari passu with the decline, decentralisation, and disintegration of the Caliphate of Baghdád. The Persian language has changed so little during this long period that, save for a few archaic words and spellings, the oldest verses extant hardly present any difficulty, or even uncouthness or unfamiliarity, to the Persian of to-day. In feeling and sentiment, however, a certain difference is, as it seems to me, perceptible; the older poetry of the Ṣaffárí and Sámání periods is simpler, more natural, more objective, and less ornate and rhetorical. Nothing can be more instructive, as Change of taste and canons of criticism. an indication of the change of taste which three and a half centuries effected in Persia, than to compare two criticisms of the same celebrated verses of the poet Rúdagí (by common consent the greatest Persian poet before the epoch of the Kings of Ghazna), the one contained in the Four Discourses of Nidhámí-i-'Arúḍí (about A.D. 1150), the other in Dawlatsháh's Memoirs of the Poets (A.D. 1487). The poem in question begins:—

Bú-yi Jú-yi-Múliyán áyad hamí,
Bú-yi yár-i-mihrabán áyad hamí,

and its translation is as follows:—

“The Jú-yi-Múliyán we call to mind,
We long for those dear friends long left behind.
The sands of Oxus, toilsome though they be,
Beneath my feet were soft as silk to me.
Glad at the friend's return, the Oxus deep
Up to our girths in laughing waves shall leap.
Long live Bukhárá! Be thou of good cheer!
Joyous towards thee hasteth our Amír!
The Moon's the Prince, Bukhárá is the sky;
O sky, the Moon shall light thee by and by!
Bukhárá is the mead, the Cypress he;
Receive at last, O Mead, the Cypress-tree!”^15a

The extraordinary effect produced on the Amír Naṣr ibn Aḥmad the Sámánid by these verses, and the rich reward which Rúdagí earned for them, seemed natural enough to the earlier critic, who considers that “that illustrious man (Rúdagí) was worthy of this splendid equipment, for no one has yet produced a successful imitation of that elegy, nor found means to surmount triumphantly the difficulties [which the subject presents].” In particular he maintains that in the following verse (not generally included in the current text of the poem, but evidently belonging to it):—

Áfarín u madḥ súd áyad hamí,
Gar bi-ganj andar ziyán áyad hamí.

“Surely are renown and praise a lasting gain,
Even though the royal coffers loss sustain”—

“are seven admirable touches of art: first, the verse is apposite; secondly, antithetical; thirdly, it has a refrain; fourthly, it embodies an enunciation of equivalence; fifthly, it has sweetness; sixthly, style; seventhly, energy.” “Every master of the craft,” he concludes, “who has deeply considered the poetic art, will admit, after a little reflection, that I am right”; and, so far as a foreigner may be permitted to express a judgment in the matter, I am inclined to agree with him. That the verse is apposite cannot be denied: the poet wanted a present from the Amír, and his hint is delicate yet unmistakeable. The antithesis between the loss in money and the gain in glory and fame is well brought out. The refrain, needed only at the end of the verse, is here naturally and effectively anticipated at the end of the first hemistich. The equivalent which the Amír receives for his money is clearly indicated; and the last three “touches,” two of which at least can only be judged in the original, are undeniably present.

Now hear how Dawlatsháh, writing about A.D. 1487,

Degenerate taste of Dawlatsháh. judges these same verses, so highly esteemed by Nidhámí-i-'Arúḍí:—

“This poem [of Rúdagí's] is too long to be cited in its entirety in this place. It is said that it so delighted the King's heart that he mounted his horse and set out for Bukhárá without even stopping to put on his boots. To men of sense this appears astonishing, for the verses are extremely simple, entirely devoid of rhetorical artifices and embellishments, and lacking in strength; and if in these days any one were to produce such a poem in the presence of kings or nobles, it would meet with the reprobation of all. It is, however, probable that as Master Rúdagí possessed the completest knowledge of music [attainable] in that country, he may have composed some tune or air, and produced this poem of his in the form of a ballad with musical accompaniment, and that it was in this way that it obtained so favourable a reception. In short, we must not lightly esteem Master Rúdagí merely on account of this poem, for assuredly he was expert in all manner of arts and accomplishments, and has produced good poetry of several kinds, both mathnawís and qaṣídas, for he was a man of great distinction, and admired by high and low.”

Many persons are accustomed to think of Persian literature as essentially florid and ornate, abounding in rhetorical Persian style not essentially florid. embellishments, and overlaid with metaphor, but this is only true of the literature produced at certain periods and in certain circles, especially under the patronage of foreign conquerors of Mongolian or Turkish race. The History of the Mongol Conquest, by Waṣṣáf, ^17a written about A.D. 1328, is one notable example of this florid style of composition; while the Rawḍatu'ṣ-Ṣafá, the Anwár-i-Suhaylí , and other contemporary works produced under the patronage of the Tímúrid princes (by whom it was transmitted to India on the foundation by Bábar of the so-called “Moghul” dynasty) about the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries afford others of a later date. It is, however, amongst the Turks of the Ottoman Empire that this detestable style finds its highest development in writers like Veysí and Nergisí, of whom a modern Turkish critic says that, though a Persian might recognise the fact that they were not writing Persian, a Turk could hardly divine that they were by way of writing Turkish.

In my previous volume on the literary history of Persia, published in 1902, I gave (pp. 452-471) specimens of the verses of some seventeen Persian poets of the oldest or pre-Ghaznawí period, an amount sufficient, in my opinion, to entitle us to Characteristics of early Persian poetry, as regards form and style. characterise in general terms this earliest verse. Unfortunately, with the exception of the thousand couplets of Daqíqí incorporated by Firdawsí in his Sháhnáma, ^18a no mathnawí or other long poem of the Sámánid or pre-Sámánid period has come down to us, though we know that such long narrative poems existed, e.g., Rúdagí's version of the well-known tale of Kalíla and Dimna, of which sixteen couplets are preserved in Asadí's Lughat-i-Furs, or Persian Lexicon, compiled about A.D. 1060, and rendered accessible to students in Dr. Paul Horn's excellent edition. What is preserved to us consists chiefly of short fragments (muqaṭṭa'át), quatrains (rubá'iyyát), and a few odes (ghazals), besides which we know that narrative mathnawí poems also existed, as well as qaṣídas (“purpose-poems,” generally panegyrics). These last, however, reached their full development about the time of Firdawsí (A.D. 1000), with which our history begins. Of these forms, the qaṣída (and the qiṭ'a, or “fragment” of the qaṣída) was borrowed by the Persians from the Arabs, whose ancient pre-Islámic poems (e.g., the celebrated Mu'allaqát) are the classical models for this style of composition, which, however, together with the love-poem or ghazal, underwent certain modifications in the hands of the Persians. The quatrain, on the other hand, as well as the mathnawí (or “couplet” poem, where the rhyme is between the two hemistichs composing the bayt, and changes from couplet to couplet), is essentially a Persian invention; and one tradition as to the earliest poem composed in Persian ^18b points definitely to the quatrain (first called dú-baytí and afterwards rubá'í) as the oldest indigenous verse-form produced in Írán. Mystical poetry, so common from the twelfth century onwards, is, at the early period which we are now discussing, rare and undeveloped.

In order to avoid constant digressions and explanations in the following chapters, it may be well to give in this place a Verse-forms and rhetoric of the Persians. general account of the varieties of literary composition recognised by the Persians, the rhetorical figures of which they make such frequent use, and the metres employed in their poetry. Of these and other kindred matters I should have considered it necessary to treat more fully had it not been for the admirable account of them prefixed by my friend the late Mr. E. J. W. Gibb to his monumental History of Ottoman Poetry, of which the first volume opens with a general discussion on Oriental thought, taste, poetry, and rhetoric, which applies not only to Turkish, but also to Persian, and, in large measure, to Arabic and other Muhammadan languages also. These Prolegomena of Mr. Gibb's (especially ch. ii, treating of Tradition, Philosophy, and Mysticism, and ch. iii, treating of Verse-forms, Prosody, and Rhetoric, pp. 33-124) form one of the best introductions to the study of Muhammadan literature with which I am acquainted, and should be read by every student of this subject. Other excellent treatises are Gladwin's Dissertations on the Rhetoric, Prosody, and Rhyme of the Persians (Calcutta, 1801); Rückert's Grammatik, Poetik, und Rhetorik der Perser (originally published in 1827-28 in vols. xl-xliv of the Wiener Jahrbücher, and re-edited by Pertsch in a separate volume in 1874); Blochmann's Prosody of the Persians (Calcutta, 1872); and, for the comparisons used by the erotic poets, Huart's annotated translation of the Anísu'l-'Ushsháq, or “Lover's Companion,” of Sharafu'd-Dín Rámí. Persian works on these subjects are, of course, numerous: Farrukhí, a contemporary of Firdawsí, composed one (mentioned by Dawlat-sháh, pp. 9 and 57 of my edition, and also by Hájjí Khalífa, ed. Flügel, vol. ii, p. 277), entitled Tarjumánu'l-Balágha (“The Interpreter of Eloquence”), while Bahrámí of Sarakhs, who lived about the same time, wrote two treatises, strongly recommended by the author of the Four Discourses (p. 50 of the tirage-à-part of my translation), entitled respectively “The Goal of Prosodists” (Gháyatu'l-'Arúḍiyyín) and “The Thesaurus of Rhyme” (Kanzu'l-Qáfiya). These works appear to be lost, or at least no copies are known to exist; and of extant Persian treatises on these subjects the “Gardens of Magic” (Ḥadá'iqu's-Siḥr ) ^20a of Rashídu'd-Dín Waṭwáṭ (died A.D. 1182) and the already mentioned Mu'ajjam of Shams-i-Qays (the rare old MS. marked Or. 2,814 in the British Museum), which was composed during the thirteenth century (soon after A.H. 614 =A.D. 1217-18), seem to be the oldest.

I shall speak first of Rhetoric ('Ilmu'l-Badáyi'), choosing my examples chiefly from the “Gardens of Magic,” but some- The Science of Rhetoric. times from other sources, and departing from Waṭwáṭ's arrangement where this seems to me to be faulty. I shall also endeavour to illustrate the different rhetorical figures, so far as possible, by English examples, in order that the nature of each figure may be more readily apprehended by the English reader.

Prose (nathr) is of three kinds—simple or unornate ('árí, “naked”); cadenced (murajjaz), which has metre without Recognised varieties of prose. rhyme; and rhymed (musajja'), which has rhyme without metre. Concerning the first variety nothing need be said. The second demands more attention, since its recognition as a separate species of prose depends on what may be described as a theological dogma. Much of the Qur'án is written in rhymed prose, and here and there it happens that a verse falls into one of the recognised metres, as in súra ii, 78-79:—

Thumma aqrartum, wa antum tashhadún,
Thumma antum há'ulá'i taqtulún,

which scans in the Ramal metre, i.e., the foot fá'ilátun repeated six times in the bayt or verse and apocopated to fá'ilát at the end of each miṣrá' or hemistich. Now the Prophet's adversaries used to call him a “mad poet,” which description he vehemently repudiated; and hence it became necessary for his followers to frame a definition of poetry which would not apply to any verse or portion of the Qur'án. And since, as we have seen, certain verses of the Qur'án have both rhyme and metre, it became necessary to add a third condition, namely, that there must exist an intention (qaṣd) on the part of the writer or speaker to produce poetry. It is, therefore, spontaneous or involuntary poetry, occurring in the midst of a prose discourse, and reckoned as prose because it is not produced with intention, which is called murajjaz. The other classical instance, occurring in a traditional saying of the Prophet's, is:—

Al-karímu 'bnu 'l-karími 'bni 'l-karími 'bni 'l-karím,

which also scans in the Ramal (octameter) metre. The third variety of prose (musajja', or rhymed) is very common in ornate writing in all the Muhammadan languages. Three kinds are recognised, called respectively mutawází (“parallel” or “concordant”), muṭarraf (“lop-sided”), and mutawázin (“symmetrical”). In the first kind the rhyming words ending two successive clauses agree in measure (i.e., scansion) and number of letters, as, for example, in the tradition of the Prophet: Allahumma! I'ṭi kulla munfiqin khalaf^an, wa kulla mumsikⁱⁿ talaf^an! (“O God! give every spender a successor, and every miser destruction”); or, as we might say in English, “Give the spender health, and the lender wealth.” In the second kind the rhyming words in two or more successive clauses differ in measure and number of letters, as though we should say in English, “He awakes to reprieve us from the aches which grieve us.” In the third kind (common to verse and prose), the words in two or more successive clauses correspond in measure, each to each, but do not rhyme, as in the Qur'án, súra xxxvii, 117-118: Wa átaynáhuma'l-Kitába 'l-mustabín: wa hadaynáhuma 'ṣ-Ṣiráṭa 'l-mustaqím. An English example would be: “He came uplifted with joy, he went dejected with woe.” The best European imitations of rhymed prose which I have seen are in German, and some very ingenious translations of this sort from the Maqámát, or “Séances,” of Badí'u'z-Zamán al-Hamadhání (died A.D. 1007-8 in Herát) may be seen in vol. ii of Von Kremer's admirable Culturgeschichte, pp. 471-475. The following short extract will serve as a specimen:—

“Seine Antwort auf diesen Schreibebrief war kalt und schneidend— und ich, jede weitere Berührung vermeidend,—liess ihn in seinem Dünkel schalten—und legte ihn nach seinem Buge in Falten,—sein Andenken aber löschte ich aus dem Gedächtnissschrein,—seinen Namen warf ich in den Strom hinein.”

George Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie (1589: Arber's reprint, 1869, p. 184) calls this figure Omoioteleton, or “Like loose,” and gives the following prose example:—

“Mischaunces ought not to be lamented, But rather by wisedome in time prevented: For such mishappes as be remedilesse, To sorrow them it is but foolishnesse: Yet are we all so frayle of nature, As to be greeved with every displeasure.”

Eleven different verse-forms, or varieties of poem, are enumerated by Rückert (ed. Pertsch, p. 55) as recognised in Verse-forms recognised by the Persians. Persian by the author of the Haft Qulzum or “Seven Seas”; to wit, the ghazal or ode, the qaṣída, “purpose-poem” or elegy, the tashbíb, the qiṭ'a or fragment, the rubá'í or quatrain, the fard or “unit,” the mathnawí or double-rhyme, the tarjí'-band or “return-tie,” the tarkíb-band or “composite-tie,” the mustazád or “complemented,” and the musammaṭ; to which may be added the murabba' or “foursome,” the mukhammas or “fivesome,” &c., up to the mu'ashshar or “tensome,” the “foursome,” “fivesome,” and “sixsome” being by far the commonest. There is also the muwashshaḥ, which was very popular amongst the Moors of Spain and the Maghrib, but is rarely met with in Persian. The mulamma', “patch-work,” or “macaronic” poem, composed in alternate lines or couplets in two or more different languages, has no separate form, and will be more suitably considered when we come to speak of Verse-subjects, or the classification of poems according to matter.

The classification adopted in the Haft Qulzum (and also by Gladwin) is neither clear nor satisfactory. The tashbíb, for instance, is merely that part of a qaṣída which describes, to quote Gladwin, “the season of youth (shabáb) and beauty, being a description of one's own feelings in love; but in common use it implies that praise which is bestowed on anything [other than the person whose praises it is the ‘purpose’ or object of the poet to celebrate, to which praises the tashbíb merely serves as an introduction], and the relation of circumstances, whether in celebration of love or any other subject.” The fard (“unit” or hemistich) and the qiṭ'a (“fragment”), as well as the bayt (or couplet, consisting of two hemistichs), have also no right to be reckoned as separate verse-forms, since the first and last are the elements of which every poem consists, and the “fragment” is merely a piece of a qaṣída, though it may be that no more of the qaṣída was ever written, and, indeed, the productions of some few poets, notably Ibn Yamín (died A.D. 1344-45), consist entirely of such “fragments.” Again, the two forms of band, or poem in strophes separated either by a recurrent verse, or by verses which, though different, rhyme with one another and not with the verses of the preceding or succeeding band, may well be classed together; as may also the “foursome,” “fivesome,” and other forms of multiple poem. The muwashshaḥ, again, like the musammaṭ and muraṣṣa', is merely an ornate qaṣída or ghazal of a particular kind. Before attempting a more scientific and natural classification of the varieties of Persian verse, it is, however, necessary to say a few more words about the elements of which it consists.

The unit in every species of poem is the bayt, which consists of two symmetrical halves, each called miṣrá', and com- The Bayt and the Miṣrá'. prises a certain number of feet, in all save the rarest cases either eight (when the bayt is called muthamman or “octameter”) or six (in which case it is called musaddas or “hexameter”). Into the elements composing the foot (viz., the watad or “peg,” the sabab or “cord,” and the fáṣila or “stay”) we need not enter, only pausing to observe that, owing to a fanciful analogy drawn between the baytu'sh-sha'r, or “house of hair” (i.e., the tent of the nomad Arabs), and the baytu'sh-shi'r, or verse of poetry, they, as well as most of the other technical terms of the Arabian Prosody (substantially identical with the Prosody of the Persians, Turks, and other Muhammadan nations), are named after parts of the tent. Thus the tent, or baytu'sh-sha'r, looked at from in front, consists of two flaps (miṣrá') which together constitute the door; and so the word miṣrá' is also used in Prosody to denote each of the two half-verses which make up the baytu'sh-shi'r. Various reasons (which will be found set forth in detail at pp. 20-21 of Blochmann's Persian Prosody) are adduced to account for this curious comparison or analogy, the prettiest being that, as the baytu'sh-sha'r, or “house of hair,” shelters the beautiful girls of the nomad tribe, so the baytu'sh-shi'r , or “verse of poetry,” harbours the “virgin thoughts” (abkár-i-afkár) of the poet. In English the term bayt in poetry is generally rendered by “couplet,” and the word miṣrá' by “hemistich.” This seems to me an unfortunate nomenclature, since it suggests that the bayt is two units and the miṣrá' half a unit, and consequently that four, instead of two, of the latter go to make up one of the former. It would therefore seem to me much better to render bayt by “verse,” and miṣrá' by “half-verse,” though there would be no objection to continuing to call the latter “hemistich” if we could agree to call the bayt, or verse, stichos; in which case the rubá'í, or quatrain, which consists of four hemistichs, or two stichoi (hence more accurately named by many Persians du-baytí ), would be the distich. In any case it is important to remember that the bayt is the unit, and that the terms “hexameter” (musaddas) or “octameter” (muthamman) denote the number of feet in the bayt, and that, since all the bayts in a poem must be equal in length, that combination of hexameters and pentameters which is so common in Latin verse is impossible in Persian. In the course of prose works like the Gulistán a single bayt, or even a single miṣrá', is often introduced to give point to some statement or incident, and such may have been composed for that sole purpose, and not detached from a longer poetical composition. The miṣrá' is in this case often called a fard, or “unit.”

So much being clearly understood, we may proceed to the classification of the various verse-forms. The primary division Classification of Persian verse-forms. depends on whether the rhyme of the bayt is, so to say, internal (the two miṣrá's composing each bayt rhyming together), or final (the bayts throughout the poem rhyming together, but their component miṣrá's not rhyming, as a rule, save in the maṭla', or opening verse). These two primary divisions may be called the “many-rhymed” (represented only by the mathnawí, or “couplet-poem”) and the “one-rhymed” (represented by the qaṣída, or “purpose-poem,” and its “fragment,” the qiṭ'a; the ghazal, or ode; and the tarjí'-band and tarkíb-band, or strophe-poems; to which, perhaps, we should add the rubá'í, or quatrain). What I have called the “multiple poems” (from the murabba' or “foursome” to the mu'ashshar or “tensome”) must be placed in a separate class.

Concerning the many-rhymed poem, or mathnawí, little need be said, since most European poetry which is not written The Mathnawí. in blank verse belongs to this category. The rhyme, as has been said, is contained in the bayt, and changes from bayt to bayt. Tennyson's Locksley Hall furnishes an admirable example in English (taking accent for quantity, which the genius of our language requires), since it represents as closely as is possible what would be technically described in Persian Prosody as a mathnawí poem written in the metre called Ramal-i-muthamman-i-maḥdhúf , or the “apocopated octameter Ramal,” viz.:—

twice repeated in the bayt. Here are the two first bayts (four lines of the English) scanned in this Persian fashion:—

“Cómrades, léave mé | hére a líttlé, | whíle as yét 'tís | éarly
mórn |:

Léave me hére, ánd | whén you wánt me, | soúnd upón thé |
búgle hórn. |

'Tís the pláce, ánd | áll aroúnd ít, | ás of óld, thé | cúrlews cáll, |

Dréary gleáms á | bóut the móorlánd | flýing óvér | Lócksley
Háll. |”

All long narrative and systematised didactic poems in Persian, like the Sháhnáma, or “Epic of Kings,” of Firdawsí; the Panj Ganj, or “Five Treasures,” of Nidhámí of Ganja; the Haft Awrang, or “Seven Thrones,” of Jámí; and the great Mystical Mathnawí of Jalálu'd-Dín Rúmí, are composed in this form, which is of Persian invention, and unknown in classical Arabic poetry, though occasionally employed (under the name of muzdawaj or “consorted”) in post-classical Arabic verse (late tenth century onwards) by Persian writers.^26a

We now pass to the one-rhymed forms of verse, wherein the same rhyme runs through the whole poem, and comes at The Ghazal. the end of each bayt, while the two half-verses composing the bayt do not, as a rule, rhyme together, save in the maṭla', or opening verse of the poem. The two most important verse-forms included in this class are the ghazal, or ode, and the qaṣída, or elegy. The same metres are used for both, and in both the first bayt, or maṭla', has an internal rhyme, i.e., consists of two rhyming miṣrá's, while the remaining rhymes are at the ends of the bayts only. The ghazal differs from the qaṣída mainly in subject and length. The former is generally erotic or mystical, and ṣeldom exceeds ten or a dozen bayts; the latter may be a panegyric, or a satire, or it may be didactic, philosophical, or religious. In later days (but not, I think, before the Mongol Invasion) it became customary for the poet to introduce his takhalluṣ, nom de guerre, or “pen-name,” in the last bayt, or maqṭa', of the ghazal, which is not done in the qaṣída. As an example of the ghazal I give the following rendering of the very wellknown ode from the Díwán of Ḥáfidh of Shíráz which begins:—

Agar án Turk-i-Shírází bi-dast árad dil-i-márá
Bi-khál-i-Hinduwash bakhsham Samarqand u Bukhárá-rá.

“If that unkindly Shíráz Turk ^27a would take my heart within her
hand,
I'd give Bukhárá for the mole upon her cheek, or Samarqand!
Sáqí, ^27b what wine is left for me pour, for in Heaven thou wilt
not see
Muṣallá's sweet rose-haunted walks, nor Ruknábád's ^27c wave-
dimpled strand.

Alas! those maids, whose wanton ways such turmoil in our city
raise,
Have stolen patience from my heart as spoil is seized by Tartar
band.
Our Darling's beauty hath, indeed, of our imperfect love no
need;
On paint and pigment, patch and line, a lovely face makes no
demand.
Of Wine and Minstrel let us speak, nor Fate's dark riddle's
answer seek,
Since none hath guessed and none shall guess enigmas none may
understand.
That beauty, waxing day by day, of Joseph needs must lead
astray
The fair Zulaykhá from the veils for modest maids' seclusion
planned.
Auspicious youths more highly prize the counsels of the old and
wise
Than life itself: then take, O Heart, the counsels ready to thy
hand!
You spoke me ill; I acquiesced. God pardon you! 'twas for
the best;
Yet scarce such bitter answer suits those rubies sugar-sweet and
bland!
Your ode you've sung, your pearls you've strung; come, chant
it sweetly, Ḥáfidh mine!
That as you sing the sky may fling the Pleiades' bejewelled
band!”

The great length of most qaṣídas makes it almost impossible to give an English verse-translation which shall preserve the The Qaṣída. one-rhymed character throughout, though many such translations of Turkish qaṣídas may be seen by the curious in such matters in the late Mr. E. J. W. Gibb's great History of Ottoman Poetry. To preserve the original form (both as regards metre and rhyme) of whatever poem he translated was with this great scholar an unvarying principle; but I, having less skill in verse-making, have felt myself constrained as a rule to abandon this plan, and translate qaṣídas, and sometimes even ghazals, as though they were mathnawís. I am emboldened to make such changes in rhyme and metre by the example of the Orientals themselves, for, as I have observed at pp. 464-5 of the Prolegomena to this volume, at the time when such verse-translations from Arabic into Persian and vice versâ were common feats of ingenuity and tests of scholarship in the two languages, it was usual to adopt a different metre in translating, and to change mathnawí Persian verses (e.g., in al-Bundárí's Arabic translation of the Sháhnáma) into the qaṣída form in Arabic, notwithstanding the fact that both languages have a common system of Prosody, which, of course, does not extend to English. If, then, these masters of style and language permitted themselves these liberties, why should we, who are in every way placed at a disadvantage compared with them, deny ourselves a similar freedom?

However, since we are here speaking of verse-forms, I shall give a few specimens from qaṣídas in the proper monorhythmic form, which I have not found it possible to maintain in my translations for any complete qaṣída, the qaṣída being, as I have said, always of considerably greater length than the ode or ghazal, and often extending to more than a hundred bayts. My first specimen consists of six bayts taken from a marthiya (threnody, or qaṣída of mourning) composed by Shaykh Sa'dí of Shíráz on the sack of Baghdád by the Mongols and the cruel murder of the last 'Abbásid Caliph, al-Musta'ṣim bi'lláh, and his family. The text, which is interesting as showing the effect produced on the mind of a contemporary Muslim by this horrible catastrophe, is taken from vol. i of Ẓiyá Bey's Kharábát (Constantinople, A.H. 1291, p. 156). The metre is again the apocopated octameter Ramal. I give the six first of the twenty-one bayts which the poem comprises—

Specimen of a Marthiya, or Threnody.

Asmán-rá ḥaqq buwad gar khún bi-rízad bar zamín
Bar zawál-i-mulk-i-Musta'ṣim, Amíru'l-Mú'minín.

“Well it were if from the heavens tears of blood on earth should
flow
For the Ruler of the Faithful, al-Musta'ṣim, brought so low.

If, Muḥammad, at the Judgement from the dust thy head thou'lt
raise,
Raise it now, behold the Judgment fallen on thy folk below!
Waves of blood the dainty thresholds of the Palace-beauties
whelm;
While from out my heart the life-blood dyes my sleeve with hues
of woe. ^30a
Fear vicissitudes of Fortune; fear the Sphere's revolving change;
Who could dream that such a splendour such a fate should
overthrow?
Raise your eyes, O ye who once upon that Holy House did
gaze,
Watching Kháns and Roman Cæsars cringing to its portals go.
Now upon that self-same threshold where the Kings their fore-
heads laid,
From the children of the Prophet's Uncle ^30b streams of blood do
flow!”

The above, however, is far less typical of the classical qaṣída, beginning with the tashbíb already described, and passing, in the The typical Qaṣída. bayt known technically as the guríz-gáh, or “transition-verse,” into the madíḥa, or panegyric proper, than a very fine qaṣída (No. 29 in Kazimirski's edition, pp. 73-76) by the poet Minúchihrí, a younger contemporary of Firdawsí. This poem comprises seventy-two bayts, of which I give only a selection, indicating in each case the position of the translated verses in the complete text by prefixing the number which they bear in it. The metre is the apocopated hexameter Hazaj, which I have been obliged to shorten by one syllable in my translation. It begins—

Aláyá khaymagí, khayma firú hil,
Ki písh-áhang bírún shud zi manzil.

1. “O tentsman, haste, and strike the tent, I pray! The caravan's already under way;

The Tashbíb, or Exordium. 2. The drummer sounds already the first drum; Their loads the drivers on the camels lay.

3. The evening-prayer is nigh, and lo! to-night The sun and moon opposed do stand at bay,

4. Save that the moon climbs upwards through the sky, While sinks the sun o'er Babel's mountains grey,

5. Like to two scales of golden balance, when One pan doth upwards and one downwards weigh.”

The poet next describes his parting with his sweetheart, whom he addresses as follows:—

6. “‘O silver cypress! Little did I think To see so swiftly pass our trysting-day!

7. We are all heedless, but the moon and sun Are heedful things, whose purposes ne'er stray.

8. My darling, wend thee hence, and weep no more, For fruitless are the hopes of lovers aye.

9. With parting Time is pregnant; know ye not Needs must the pregnant bring to birth one day?’

10. When thus my love beheld my state, her eyes Rained tears like drops which fall when lightnings play.

11. That she crushed pepper held within her hand And cast it in her eyes thou wouldest say.

12. Drooping and trembling unto me she came Like throat-cut bird, whose life-blood ebbs away,

13. Around my neck like sword-belt flung her arms, And on my breast like belt depending lay.

14. ‘O cruel,’ cried she; ‘by my soul I swear My envious foes rejoice through thee this day!

15. Wilt thou, what time the caravan returns, Return therewith, or still in exile stay?

16. Perfect I deemed thee once in all thy deeds, But now in love imperfect, wel-a-way!’”

The poet again endeavours to console his beloved, who finally departs and leaves him alone. He looks round the caravansaray, and sees “neither beast nor man, neither rider nor pedestrian,” save his own camel, fretting “like a demon chained hand and foot.” Having arranged its harness, he mounts, and it springs forward on the path whereby the caravan has departed, “measuring with its feet the stages like a surveyor measuring the land.” He enters the desert— “a desert so cold and rugged that none who enters it comes forth again”—and describes the biting wind “which freezes the blood in the veins,” and the silver patches of snow on the golden sand. Then comes the dawn, blinding him with its glare, and causing the snow to melt “as one who wastes of consumption,” and the sticky mud to cling to his camel's feet like strings of isinglass. At length the caravan which he has striven to overtake appears encamped before him in the plain; he sees the lances of the escort planted in the ground like ears of wheat in a cornfield, and hears the tinkle of the camel-bells, sweet to his ears as the nightingale's song.

He then continues:—

48. “Then to my gallant beast I cried aloud, ‘O friend of talent! Slower now, I pray!

49. Graze, sweet to thee as ambergris the grass! Walk proudly, thou whom iron thews did stay!

50. Traverse the desert, climb the mountain ridge, Beat down the stages, cut the miles away!

51. Then set me down at that Wazír's high court

The Guríz-gáh, or Takhalluṣ.

52. Whose lofty aims great things and small display.’ ^32a

56. Mír Mas'úd ^32b glories in his glorious time As did the Prophet in Núshirwán's day.^32c

57. The purse as rich as Korah ^33a to him comes, The beggar comes in suppliant's array;

58. The beggar leaves him gold-lined as a purse, The purse it is which empty goes away.”

In conclusion I give the last seven bayts of this qaṣída,

The Madiḥa, or Panegyric proper. wherein the poet craves his patron's favour and generosity, and prays for his long life. A hint that a reward would be acceptable to the poet (which always comes near the end of the poem), is called, when neatly introduced and expressed, ḥusn-i-ṭalab, or “beauty of demand.” The last three bayts of the poem also illustrate the figure called ḥusn-i-maqṭa', or “beauty of conclusion,” which, in Gladwin's words (p. 62), “is when the poet exerts himself in the concluding verses, and ends with something striking, in order that the reader may leave off with satisfaction, and be induced to excuse any inaccuracies which may have occurred in the course of the poem.” He adds very truly that “in the qaṣída the husn-i-maqṭa' is generally used in imploring blessing.”

66. “O Master! Hither do I come in hope To gain some gleanings from thy bounteous sway.

67. To thee come flocking ever men of parts, For like to like doth surely find the way.

68. Provide me with some place, and thou shalt see Di'bil and A'shá ^33b envious of my lay!

69. But if of serving thee I be deprived, My pen I'll burn, my fingers hew away.

70. So long as sounds the dove's and woodcock's cry, And name of hawk and Símurgh ^33c with us stay,

71. Thy frame be lasting and thine eye be bright, Thy heart be pure, thy luck increasing aye!

72. God give me Bashshár's ^34a talent, and the tongue Of Ibnu Muqbil, thee to praise alway!”

We now come to the qiṭ'a, and for this few words will The Qiṭ'a or Fragment. suffice. Essentially (as its name implies) it is, as has been already said, merely a detached “fragment” of a qaṣída, but it may be an uncompleted fragment—a torso, so to speak; or it may be so far complete in itself that the poet never intended to add to it. Nay, in some cases its style and subject-matter are such that it was evidently intended from the first to be an independent poem. The following “fragment” by Anwarí (died A.D. 1191) may suffice as a specimen:—

“‘Have patience; patience will perform thy work
Quickly and well,’ to me a comrade said;
‘The water to the river will return;
Thine aims shall speed as never they have sped.’
I said: ‘Suppose the water does return,
What boots it, if the fish meanwhile be dead?’”

This “fragment” is evidently complete in itself, and no addition to it can ever have been contemplated.

The rubá'í or quatrain, again, is formally two bayts (whence called dú-baytí) or four hemistichs (whence called rubá'í) from The Rubá'í or Quatrain. the beginning of a qaṣída or ghazal written in certain varieties of a particular metre, the Hazaj; but, like the epigram, it is always complete in itself. FitzGerald's beautiful renderings of the quatrains of 'Umar Khayyám have rendered this verse-form so familiar that it is hardly necessary to say more of it in this place. As I have observed, however, that some admirers of FitzGerald's 'Umar imagine that quatrains can be linked together to form a poem, I should perhaps emphasise the fact that the effect of continuity in FitzGerald's version is due to his arrangement and selection of the rubá'ís which he translated, and that quatrains are always quite independent and complete in themselves, and, in the collected works of Persian poets, are never arranged otherwise than alphabetically, according to the final letter of the rhyme. The quatrain metres, as we said above, are generally special derivatives of the Hazaj, and the first, second, and fourth miṣrá's must rhyme, while the third need not, and generally does not. The two following quatrains extemporised by Mu'izzí for the Seljúq Maliksháh (whose Poet-laureate he afterwards became) are not, perhaps, of any special literary merit, but are historically interesting, since we have in the Four Discourses (pp. 67-70 of the tirage-à-part) the poet's own account, given to the author of that work, of the circumstances under which they were composed. He says:—

“My father Burhání, the Poet-laureate (may God be merciful to him!) passed away from this transitory to that eternal world in the Instance of improvisation from the Chahár Maqála. town of Qazwín in the early part of the reign of Maliksháh, entrusting me to the King in this verse, since then become famous:—

Man raftam, u farzand-i-man ámad khalaf-i-ṣidq;
Úrá bi-Khudá ú bi-Khudáwand sipurdam. ^35a
‘I am flitting, but I leave a son behind me,
And commend him to my God and to my King.’

“So my father's salary and allowances were transferred to me, and I became Maliksháh's Court-poet, and spent a year in the King's service; yet was I unable to see him save from a distance, nor did I get one dínár of my salary or one maund of my allowances, while my expenditure was increased, I became involved in debt, and my brain was perplexed by my affairs. For that great minister, the Nidhámu'l-Mulk (may God be merciful to him!), had no opinion of poets, because he had no skill in their art; nor did he pay any attention to any one of the religious leaders or mystics.

“One day—it was the eve of the day on which the new moon of Ramaḍán was due to appear, and I had not a farthing to meet all the expenses incidental to that month and the feast which follows it —I went thus sad at heart to the Amír 'Alí Farámarz 'Alá'u'd-Dawla, ^36a a man of royal parentage, a lover of poetry, and the intimate companion and son-in-law of the King, with whom he enjoyed the highest honour, and before whom he could speak boldly, since he held high rank under that administration. And he had already been my patron. I said, ‘May my lord's life be long! Not all that the father could do can the son do, nor does that which accrued to the father accrue to the son. My father was a bold and energetic man, and was sustained by his art, and the martyred King Alp Arslán, the lord of the world, entertained the highest opinion of him. But what he could do that cannot I, for modesty forbids me. I have served this prince for a year, and have contracted debts to the extent of a thousand dínárs, and have not received a farthing. Crave permission, then, for thy servant to go to Níshápúr, and discharge his debts, and live on that which is left over, and express his gratitude to this victorious dynasty.’

“‘Thou speakest truly,’ replied Amír 'Alí: ‘we have all been at fault, but this shall be so no longer. The King, at the time of Evening Prayer, will go up to look for the moon. Thou must be present there, and we will see what Fortune will do.’ Thereupon he at once ordered me to receive a hundred dínárs to defray my Ramaḍán expenses, and a purse containing this sum in Níshápúr coinage was forthwith brought and placed before me. So I returned, mightily well pleased, and made my preparations for Ramaḍán, and at the time of the second prayer went to the King's pavilion. It chanced that 'Alá'u'd-Dawla arrived at the very same moment, and I paid my respects to him. ‘Thou hast done exceedingly well,’ said he, ‘and hast come punctually.’ Then he dismounted and went in before the King.

“At sundown the King came forth from his pavilion, with a crossbow in his hand and 'Alá'u'd-Dawla on his right hand. I ran forward to do obeisance. Amír 'Alí continued the kindnesses he had already shown me, and then busied himself in looking for the moon. The King, however, was the first to see it, whereat he was mightily pleased. Then 'Alá'u'd-Dawla said to me, ‘O son of Burhání, say something appropriate,’ and I at once recited these two verses:—^37a

Ay Máh! chú abruwán-i-Yárí, gú'í,
Yá nay, chú kamán-i-Shahriyárí gú'í,
Na'li zada az zar-i-'iyárí, gú'í,
Bar gúsh-i-sipihr gúshwárí, gú'í.

‘Methinks, O Moon, thou art our Prince's bow,
Or his arched eyebrow, which doth charm us so,
Or else a horse-shoe wrought of gold refined,
Or ring from Heaven's ear depending low.’

“When I had submitted these verses, Amír 'Alí applauded, and the King said: ‘Go, loose from the stables whichever horse thou pleasest.’ When I was close to the stable, Amír 'Alí designated a horse which was brought out and given to my attendants, and which proved to be worth 300 dínárs of Níshápúr. The King then went to his oratory, and I performed the evening prayer, after which we sat down to meat. At the table Amír 'Alí said: ‘O son of Burhání! Thou hast not yet said anything about this favour conferred on thee by the lord of the world. Compose a quatrain at once!’ I thereupon sprang to my feet and recited these two verses:—

Chún átash-i-kháṭir-i-mará Sháh bi-díd,
Az khák mará bar zabar-i-máh kashíd;
Chún áb yakí tarána az man shuníd,
Chán bád yakí markab-i-kháṣṣam bakhshíd.

‘The King beheld the fire which in me blazed:
Me from low earth above the moon he raised:
From me a verse, like water fluent, heard,
And swift as wind a noble steed conferred.’

“When I recited these verses 'Alá'u'd-Dawla warmly applauded me, and by reason of his applause the King gave me a thousand dínárs. Then 'Alá'u'd-Dawla said: ‘He hath not yet received his salary and allowances. To-morrow I will sit by the Minister until he writes a draft for his salary on Iṣfahán, and orders his allowances to be paid out of the treasury.’ Said the King: ‘Thou must do it, then, for none else has sufficient boldness. And call this poet after my title.’ Now the King's title was Mu'izzu'd-Dunyá wa'd-Dín, ^38a so Amír 'Alí called me Mu'izzí. ‘Amír Mu'izzí,’ said the King [correcting him]. And this noble lord was so zealous for me that next day, by the time of the first prayer, I had received a thousand dínárs as a gift, twelve hundred more as allowances, and an order for a thousand maunds of corn. And when the month of Ramaḍán was passed, he summoned me to a private audience, and caused me to become the King's boon-companion. So my fortune began to improve, and thenceforth he made enduring provision for me, and to-day whatever I have I possess by the favour of that Prince. May God, blessed and exalted is He, rejoice his dust with the lights of His Mercy, by His Favour and His Grace!”

This anecdote further illustrates the importance attached in earlier days to the faculty of improvisation in poets, and several Improvisation highly esteemed in early times. other striking instances are given in this same book, the Chahár Maqála. Thus (pp. 56-58) when Sulṭán Maḥmúd of Ghazna had cut off the locks of his favourite Ayáz in a moment of drunken excitement, and, partly from remorse, partly from the after-effects of his drinking-bout, was next day in so evil a temper that none dared approach him, the Poet-laureate 'Unṣurí restored him to good humour by this quatrain:—

Gar 'ayb-i-sar-i-zulf-i-but az kástan-ast,
Chi já-yi bi-gham nishastan u khástan-ast?
Já-yi ṭarab u nisháṭ u may khwástan-ast,
K'árástan-i-sarv zi pírástan-ast.

“Though shame it be a fair one's curls to shear,
Why rise in wrath or sit in sorrow here?
Rather rejoice, make merry, call for wine;
When clipped the cypress ^38b doth most trim appear.”

Another extemporised quatrain of Azraqí's (Chahár Maqála, pp. 71-72) had an equally happy effect in calming the dangerous anger of his patron, the young King Ṭughánsháh, whose temper had given way in consequence of his having thrown two ones instead of the two sixes he desired at a critical point in a game of backgammon. This quatrain ran:—

Gar Sháh du shish khwást, du yak zakhm uftád,
Tá ẓan na-barí ki ka'batayn dád na-dád;
Án zakhm ki kard ray-i-Sháhinshah yád
Dar khidmat-i-Sháh rúy bar khák nihád.

“Reproach not Fortune with discourteous tricks
If by the King, desiring double six,
Two ones were thrown; for whomsoe'er he calls
Face to the earth before him prostrate falls.”^39a

These two last quatrains have two points in common; first, the four miṣrá's all rhyme in both cases, whereas the third is in the quatrain commonly not rhymed; secondly, both exhibit the rhetorical figure technically called ḥusn-i-ta'líl (“poetical ætiology”), where a real effect is explained by an imaginary or fanciful reason.

We must now briefly consider some of the remaining and less important verse-forms, viz., the two kinds of strophe-poem The Tarjí'-band and Tarkíb-band. (the tarjí'-band and tarkíb-band), the various forms of multiple-poem (the murabba', mukhammas, &c.), the musammaṭ, and the mustazád.

The two kinds of strophe-poem both consist of a series of stanzas, each containing a variable, but equal, or nearly equal, number of couplets, all in one rhyme, these stanzas being separated from one another by a series of isolated verses which mark the end of each strophe. If the same verse (which in this case may be best described as a refrain) be repeated at the close of each band, or strophe, the poem is called a tarjí'-band , or “return-tie”; if, on the other hand, the verses which conclude each strophe be different, each rhyming internally in a rhyme differing from that of the preceding and succeeding strophes, the poem is called a tarkíb-band, or “composite tie.” In both cases the metre is the same throughout.

To translate in its entirety a poem of either of these two classes, having regard to the proper arrangement of the rhymes, is beyond my powers, but I here give a few lines from two successive strophes of a very celebrated and very beautiful tarjí'-band by Hátif of Iṣfahán, who flourished towards the end of the eighteenth century:—

“O heart and soul a sacrifice to Thee,
Before Thee all we have an off'ring free!
The heart, Sweetheart, we yield as service meet;
The soul, O Soul, we give right cheerfully.
Scarce from Thy hands may we preserve our hearts,
But at Thy feet surrender life with glee.
The way to Thee is fraught with perils dire,
And Thy love-sickness knows no remedy.
Eyes for Thy gestures, ears for Thy commands,
Servants with lives and hearts in hand are we.
Would'st Thou have peace? Behold, our hearts are here!
Would'st Thou have war? Our lives we offer Thee!

HE is alone, beside HIM there is none;
No God there is but HE, and HE is One!

From Thee, O Friend, I cannot break my chain,
Though limb from limb they hew my trunk amain.
In truth, from us a hundred lives were meet;
Half a sweet smile from Thee will ease our pain!
O father, cease to caution me of Love!
This headstrong son will never prudence gain.
Rather 'twere meet they should admonish those
Who 'gainst Thy love admonish me in vain.
Well do I know the way to Safety's street,
But what can I, who long in bonds have lain?

HE is alone, beside HIM there is none;
No God there is but HE, and HE is one!”

This poem comprises six strophes, separated by the above refrain, and contains in all (including the refrain-verse, five times repeated) about 148 verses, viz., 23 + 1 in the first strophe, 13 + 1 in the second, 17 + 1 in the third, 15 + 1 in the fourth, 18 + 1 in the fifth, and 57 in the sixth. If at the end of the second strophe, instead of having the same verse repeated we had a different verse in a different rhyme, the two half-verses of which rhymed together, the result would be a tarkíb-band. ^41a It will be observed that each strophe begins like a qaṣída or ghazal, with a maṭla', or initial verse, of which the two halves rhyme together.

The musammaṭ, according to Rückert (p. 85 of Pertsch's edition), is a general term including all the varieties of The Musammaṭ. multiple-poem, while the definition given by Rashídu'd-Dín Waṭwáṭ identifies it with what the Moorish poets called muwashshaḥ, where the miṣrá' has an internal rhyme, as in the following verses contained in my rendering of a poem ascribed to the Bábí heroine, Qurratu'l-'Ayn:—

“The musk of Cathay might perfume gain from the scent those fragrant tresses rain,

While those eyes demolish a faith in vain attacked by the pagans of Tartary.

With you who despise both Love and wine for the hermit's cell and the zealot's shrine,

What can I do? For our faith divine ye hold as a thing of infamy!”

Of all the early poets Minúchihrí appears to have been fondest of the musammaṭ, which has been revived in quite modern times by Mírzá Dáwarí of Shíráz. Two strophes from an unpublished musammaṭ of the latter will suffice to illustrate the usual form of this variety of poem:—

“O Arab boy, God give you happy morn!
The morning wine-cup give, for here's the dawn!
Give to the Pole one draught, and I'll be sworn
'Twill cast you down the crown of Capricorn:
You Ursa makes its ransom, tender fawn,
When sphere-like round the wine-jar you rotate.
Hast thou no wine? Clasp close the wine-skin old,
Then Arab-wise o'er head thy mantle hold,
And, like the Arabs, skirt in girdle fold;
Mantle and wine-skin clasp in hand-grip bold,
By wine-stained robe be wine-skin's bounty told;
And from thy lodging seek the Tavern's gate.”

The rhyme of this kind of musammaṭ, which is by far the commonest, may therefore be represented by the formula: a,a,a,a,a,x; b,b,b,b,b,x; c,c,c,c,c,x, &c. Another form used by Minúchihrí consists of a series of strophes each containing six rhyming miṣra's, according to the formula: a,a,a,a,a,a; b,b,b,b,b,b, &c. It will thus be seen that the musammaṭ of the former and most usual type is essentially a mukhammas, or “fivesome,” save that generally in the true mukhammas the five lines, or half-verses, composing the opening stanza all rhyme together, after which the rhyme changes, save in the tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth lines or half-verses, which maintain the rhyme of the first stanza. Very often the basis of a multiple-poem is a ghazal of some other poet, to each bayt of which two more half-verses or miṣrá's are added to make a murabba' (“foursome”), three to make a mukhammas (“fivesome”), and so on. We can most easily illustrate these forms by taking the opening lines of the translation given at p. 31 supra of Minúchihrí's qaṣída, as follows:—

The shades of evening mark the close of day;
The sunset fades, the world grows cold and grey;
“O tentsman, haste, and strike the tents, I pray!
The caravan's already under way.”

In haste the travellers together come;
Their voices rise like swarming bee-hive's hum;
“The drummer sounds already the first drum;
Their loads the drivers on the camels lay.”

The shades of evening mark the close of day;
The sunset fades, the world grows cold and grey;
Across the plain the length'ning shadows play;
“O tentsman, haste, and strike the tents, I pray!
The caravan's already under way.”

In haste the travellers together come;
Some all unready, long expectant some;
Their voices rise like swarming bee-hive's hum;
“The drummer sounds already the first drum;
Their loads the drivers on the camels lay.”

The structure of the musaddas (“sixsome”), musabba' (“sevensome”), and the remaining multiple-poems is precisely similar to these, and need not be further illustrated.

The mustazád, or “increment-poem,” is an ordinary quatrain, ode, or the like, whereof each half-verse is followed by a short The Mustazád. metrical line, not required to complete the sense or metre of the poem to which it is appended; these “increment-verses” rhyming and making sense together like a separate poem. We may illustrate this verse-form by means of the poem used to illustrate the murabba' and the mukhammas.

“O tentsman, haste, and strike the tents, I pray;”

“The caravan's already under way;”

“The drummer sounds already the first drum;”

“Their loads the drivers on the camels lay.”

“The evening-prayer is near, and lo! tonight ”

“The sun and moon opposed do stand at bay,”

The day grows late; They will not wait.

The mule-bells call;

Mate cries to mate.

The sky is clear;

Beyond the gate—

and so on. It will be observed that the sense and rhyme of the poem is complete without the increment, and vice versâ. It is not, however, necessary that the multiple-poem or the increment-poem should be based upon an earlier poem by some other author, for a poem may be composed originally in one of these forms.^44a

Besides the above classification by form, there is another classification (referring especially to the qaṣída, whereof the Classification by subject. scope is much wider and more varied than that of any other verse-form, except, perhaps, the qiṭ'a and the mathnawí) according to topic or subject. Thus a qaṣída may be a panegyric (madíḥa), or a satire (hajw), or a death-elegy (marthiya), or philosophical (ḥikamiyya), or it may contain a description of spring (rabí'iyya), or winter (shitá'iyya), or autumn (khizániyya), or it may consist of a discussion between two personified opposites (e.g., night and day, summer and winter, lance and bow, heaven and earth, Persian and Arab, Muslim and Zoroastrian, heat and cold, or the like), when it is called a munádhara, “joust,” or “strife-poem,” ^44b or it may be in the form of a dialogue (su'ál u jawáb, “question and answer”), and so on. The “dialogue” also occurs in ghazals, of which also sundry other forms exist, such as the mulamma', or “patch-work” poem, where alternate lines or verses are in two (occasionally three) different languages, e.g., Arabic and Persian, or both of these and one of the dialects of Persian; or we may have poems entirely in dialect, the so-called Fahlawiyyát, or “Pahlawí” ballads, which were common down to the thirteenth century of our era, and not rare in later times. In addition to these, there is the muwash- shaḥ or acrostic, ^45a the mu'ammá or riddle, the lughz or enigma, the nadhíra (which may be merely a “parallel,” or imitation, or an actual parody), and the taḍmín, or quotation (literally, “insertion”), where a poem by another author is taken as the basis, and added to, often in the spirit of parody. The only example of this last I can recollect in English is by Lewis Carroll, and occurs in his Phantasmagoria, afterwards republished under the title of Rhyme? and Reason? This is a genuine taḍmín of the well-known poem beginning, “I never loved ^45b a dear gazelle,” and the first verse runs, so far as I can recollect (for I have not the book at hand):—

“I never loved a dear gazelle,
Nor anything that cost me much:
High prices profit those who sell,
But why should I be fond of such?”

Mention should also be made of the genuine “macaronic”

Macaronic verse. poem, where Persian words are constructed and treated as Arabic, just as, in the absurd schoolboy doggerel beginning:—

“Patres conscripti took a boat and went to Philippi,”

English words are Latinized; as in the line:—

“Omnes drownderunt, quiâ swim-away non potuerunt.”

Such “macaronic” verses and prose occur in Sa'dí's facetiœ, but there is a better instance in Ibn Isfandiyár's History of Ṭabaristán (compiled about A.D. 1216) in a long qaṣída of seventy-four verses written by the Qáḍí Hishám to satirise one of his contemporaries. This poem is given in full, with the variants, at pp. 81-85 of my abridged translation of this History, published in 1905 as the second volume of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series. It begins:—

Ay bi-farhang u 'ilm daryá'u! Man-am ú tu ki lá ḥayá laná: Laysa márá bi-juz tu hamtá'u. Hazl-rá karda'ím iḥyâ'u.

Of European macaronic poems, the best known are, perhaps, the Macaronicorum poema of Merlinus Coccaius, published about A.D. 1529, and William Drummond of Hawthornden's Polemo-Middinia, printed at Oxford in 1691. The following specimen from the latter may suffice:—

“Hic aderant Geordy Akinhedius, et little Johnus,
Et Jamy Richœus, et stout Michel Hendersonus,
Qui gillatis pulchris ante alios dansare solebat,
Et bobbare bene, et lassas kissare bonœas;
Duncan Olyphantus valde stalvertus, et ejus
Filius eldestus jolyboyus, atque Oldmondus,” &c.

There are many other terms used in describing the subject-matter of verses, such as Kufriyyát (blasphemous or heretical poems), Khamriyyát (wine-poems), &c., which it is unnecessary to enumerate, since the number of these classes is not definite, and the terms employed commonly explain themselves.

In addition to the terms above explained, there are a large number of rhetorical devices and quaint conceits employed by writers of ornate prose and verse which demand some notice from any one desirous of understanding the nature, or appreciating the ingenuity, of Persian (and Arabic or Turkish) literary compositions. Many of these figures, though no longer cultivated in this country, were highly esteemed by the Euphuists and other English writers of the sixteenth century, and a rich store of examples may be gleaned from George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, and quoted hereinafter from Mr. Arber's reprint of 1869; while most varieties of the tajnís, or word-play, may be illustrated from the Ingoldsby Legends, the works of Tom Hood, and similar books. The more important of these artifices of the Persian rhetoricians and poets are illustrated in a qaṣída-i-muṣanna', or “artifice-qaṣída,” composed by the poet Qiwámí of Ganja, the brother of the celebrated Nidhámí of Ganja, who flourished in the twelfth century of our era. This qaṣída comprises 101 bayts, or verses, and is given on pp. 198-201 of vol. i of Ẓiyá Pasha's Kharábát. I reproduce it here, line by line, with prose translation, and running commentary as to the nature of the rhetorical figures which it is intended to illustrate.

1. Ay falak-rá hawá-yi qadr-i-tu bár, W'ay malak-rá thaná-yi-ṣadr-i-tu kár!

“O thou the love of whose worth is the burden of heaven,
And O thou the praise of whose high place [affords] occupa-
tion to the angels!”

This verse exemplifies two figures, ḥusn-i-maṭla', (“beauty of exordium”), which is, as Gladwin says, “when the poet exerts Ḥusn-i-matla' and Tarṣí'. himself in the maṭla'” (or opening verse of a qaṣída or ghazal) “to fix the hearer's attention, and excite his curiosity for the catastrophe”; and tarṣí', which literally means “setting with jewels,” but in poetical composition is when the words in two successive miṣrá's, or half-verses, correspond, each to each, in measure and rhyme. An English example (but imperfect at two points) would be:—

“O love who liest on my breast so light,
O dove who fliest to thy nest at night!”

An excellent Latin example is given in Morgan's Macaronic Poetry (New York, 1872, p. 101):—

“Quos anguis tristi diro cum vulnere stravit,
Hos sanguis Christi miro tum munere lavit.”

2. Tír-i-charkhat zi mihr dída sipar, Tír-i-charkhat zi mihr dída-sipár !

“The quarrel of thy cross-bow sees in the sun a shield;
The [planet] Mercury in heaven lovingly follows thee with
its eyes!”

Here we have two figures, the tarṣí' explained above, but combined with an elaborate series of “homonymies,” or word- Tarsí'and Tajnísi-támm. plays. Such word-plays (called tajnís or jinás) are of seven kinds (or, if we include the kindred ishtiqáq, eight), all of which seven kinds are exemplified in this and the six following verses. In this verse the words on which the poet plays are identical alike in spelling, pointing, and pronunciation, and illustrate the first kind of tajnís, called támm (“complete”). Thus tír is the name of the planet “Mercury,” and also denotes “an arrow” or “quarrel”; charkh means “heaven,” and also “a cross-bow”; mihr, “the sun,” and “love”; dída, “having seen” or “saw,” and “the eye”; sipar is a shield, while sipár is the root of the verb sipurdan, “to entrust,” dída-sipár being, at the end of the verse, a compound adjective meaning “entrusting,” i.e., “fixing the eye.”

3. Júd-rá burda az miyána miyán, Bukhl-rá dáda az kinára kinár!

“Out of a company [of rivals] thou hast caught Generosity in
thine embrace:
Thou hast banished Avarice from thy side!”

The tajnís here illustrated is really the third variety, called zá'id (“redundant”), though described in the margin of my Tajnís-i-zá'id. text as of the last or “complete” kind, and another instance of it occurs in the fifth verse. It is so called because one of each pair of words has a “redundant” letter, which differentiates it from its fellow (mayán mayána; kinár, kinára), and prevents the word-play from being “complete.” An English exemplification from Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie is the following:—

“The maid that soon married is, soon marred is.”

4. Sá'id-i-mulk, u Rakhsh-i-Dawlat-rá, Tu siwárí, wa himmat-i-tu sawár.

Tajnís-i-náqiṣ.

“On the arm of Empire, and the steed of State,
Thou art the bracelet, and thy courage the rider.”

Rakhsh (here rendered by “steed”) was the name of the legendary hero Rustam's horse. The verse exemplifies the second kind of tajnís, called náqiṣ, or “defective,” when the words on which the writer plays are spelt alike, but pointed differently, i.e., differ in one or more of the short vowels. The following English example is from Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie:—

“To pray for you ever I cannot refuse;
To prey upon you I should you much abuse.’

5. Past bá rif'at-i-tu khána-i-khán: Tang bá fusḥat-i-tu shári'-i-Shár .

Tajnís-i-zá'id. “Low compared with thine exaltation is the khán's
mansion;
Narrow compared with thy spaciousness is the street of the Shár.”^49a

Here again we have the “redundant” (zá'id) variety of tajnís explained above in the third verse.

6. Bí wafá-yi tu mihr-i-ján ná-chíz: Bá wafá-yi tu Mihriján chu bahár.

“The love of the soul is naught without thy faithful troth:
With thy faithful troth Mihriján ^50a is like Spring.”

Tajnís-i-murakkab.

Here we have the kind of tajnís called “compound” (murakkab), of which the late Mr. E. J. W. Gibb gives the following ingenious exemplification in English in the first volume (p. 118) of his History of Ottoman Poetry:—

“Wandering far, they went astray,
When fell on the hills the sun's last ray.”

7. Ṣubḥ-i-bad-khwáh z'iḥtishám-i-tu shám; Gul-i-bad-gúy z'iftikhár-i-tu khár.

“The morning of him who wishes thee ill [becomes as] evening
through thy pomp;
The rose of him who speaks evil of thee [becomes as] a thorn
through thy pride.”

Tajnís-i-mukarrar.

Here the tajnís is what is called mukarrar, or “repeated,” shám being a repetition of part of iḥtishám, and khár of iftikhár. Here is an example in English:—

“Alas! you did relate to us too late,
The perils compassing that agate gate.”

8. 'Adlat áfáq shusta az áfát; Ṭab'at ázád búda az ázár.

“Thy justice hath cleansed the horizons from calamities;
Thy nature hath been exempted from hurtfulness.”

Here the tajnís is of the kind called muṭarraf (“partial” or Tajnís-i-muṭarraf. “lateral”), the words áfaq and áfát, and ázád and ázár agreeing save for a “partial” or “lateral” (i.e., terminal) difference. Example in English:—

“Like Esau lose thy birthright: I instead
Shall eat the pottage and shall break the bread.”

9. Az tú bímár-i-dhulm-rá dárú, Wa'z tu a'dá-yi mulk-rá tímár.

“By thee [is effected] the cure of him who is sick with injustice.
By thee [is undertaken] the care of the enemies of the state.”

Here the tajnís is what is called khaṭṭí (“linear” or Tajnís-i-khaṭṭí. “scriptory”), i.e., the words bímár and tímár are the same in outline, and differ only in their diacritical points.

10. Juz ghubár-i-nabard-i-tu nabarad Dída-i-'aql surma-i-dídár.

“Save the dust of thy battle, the eye of understanding
Will take naught as collyrium for its eyesight.”

This verse illustrates the isti'ára (“trope” or “simile”), the Isti'ára. expression “the eye of understanding” meaning “the understanding eye,” or simply “the understanding.”

11. Dar gul-i-sharm yáft bí gul-i-tu Shána-i-charkh máh áyina-dár .

This verse (which is to me unintelligible, and probably corrupt) illustrates the figure called murá'át-i-nadhír (“the Murá'át-i-nadhír. observance of the similar”), or tanásub (“congruity”), and consists in introducing into a verse things which are naturally associated together, such as bow and arrow, night and day, sun and moon. The following English example is from Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (p. 251), from a “Partheniade” composed by him on Queen Elizabeth:—

“Two lips wrought out of rubie rocke,
Like leaves to shut and to unlock.
As portall dore in Prince's chamber:
A golden tongue in mouth of amber.”

12. Án kunad kúshish-i-tu bá a'dá Ki kunad bakhshish-i-tu bá dínár.

Madḥ-i-muwajjah. “Thy striving does to [thy] foes what thy giving
does to [thy] money.”

This figure is called madḥ-i-muwajjah, or simply muwajjah, i.e., “implied praise”; for in the above verse the poet intends primarily to praise his patron's prowess on the field of battle; but by the simile which he employs—“thou scatterest thy foes by thy valour as thou scatterest thy money by thy generosity”— he also hints at another virtue.

13. Bá hawá-yi tu kufr báshad dín: Bí-riḍá-yi tu fakhr báshad 'ár.

This verse illustrates the figure called “ambiguity,” or Muḥtamalu'lwajhayn. muḥtamalu'l-wajhayn (“that which will bear two [opposite] interpretations”), for, the positions of subject and predicate being interchangeable in Persian, we may translate it either:—

“With thy love, infidelity becomes faith: Without thine approval,
pride becomes shame,”

or:—

“With thy love, religion becomes infidelity: Without thine
approval, shame becomes pride.”

Ambiguity or “amphibology” is treated by Puttenham (Arte of English Poesie, pp. 266-267) as a vice of style, which it is, unless it be deliberate, as it usually is with the Orientals, who thus outwardly praise one whom they really intend to censure. So in Morier's Hajji Baba the poet Asker ('Askar) is made to speak as follows:—

“I wrote a poem, which answered the double purpose of gratifying my revenge for the ill-treatment I had received from the Lord High Treasurer, and of conciliating his good graces; for it had a double meaning all through: what he in his ignorance mistook for praise, was, in fact, satire; and as he thought that the high-sounding words in which it abounded (which, being mostly Arabic, he did not understand) must contain an eulogium, he did not in the least suspect that they were, in fact, expressions containing the grossest disrespect. In truth, I had so cloaked my meaning that, without my explanation, it would have been difficult for any one to have discovered it.”

Rashídu'd-Dín Waṭwáṭ relates, in his Gardens of Magic, that a certain wit among the Arabs said to a one-eyed tailor named 'Amr, “If you will make me a garment such that man shall be unable to say whether it is a qabá or a jubba, I will make for you a verse such that none shall be sure whether it is intended for praise or blame.” The tailor fulfilled his part of the bargain, and received from the poet the following verse:—

Kháṭ^a lí 'Amr^un qabá: Layt^a 'aynayhⁱ siwá!

“'Amr made for me a coat: Would that his two eyes were alike!”

This may be taken as meaning: “Would that both his eyes were sound!” or “Would that both his eyes were blind!”

An English example would be:—

“All can appraise your service's extent:
May you receive its full equivalent!”^53a

14. Hast ráy-at zamána-rá 'ádil, Lík dast-at khizána-rá ghaddár!

Ta'kídu'l-madḥi bi-má yushbihu'dh-dhamm. “Thy judgement deals justly with the Age,
But thy hand plays the traitor with the Treasury!”

The figure exemplified in this verse is called “emphasis of praise by apparent censure” (ta'kídu'l-madḥi bi-má yushbihu'dh-dhamm ), or “pseudo-criticism,” because the second clause, while appearing at first sight to be a qualification of the praise expressed in the first, in reality implies further praise, namely, in the instance given above, for generosity as well as justice.

Iltifát. 15. Falak afzún zi tu na-dárad kas: Ay Falak, ník gír u ník-ash dár!

“Heaven hath none above thee: O Heaven! hold him well
and keep him well!”

This simple figure, called iltifát, or “turning from one person to another,” needs no explanation. It may be from any person (first, second, or third) to any other, and examples of each kind will be found in Gladwin's Rhetoric … of the Persians, pp. 56-58.

Íhám. 16. Bakht sú-yi dar-at khazán áyad; Rást chún but-parast sú-yi Bahár.”

“Fortune comes creeping to thy door, just as does the idolater
to Bahár.”

This verse contains the ingenious figure called by Mr. Gibb (History of Ottoman Poetry, vol. i, pp. 113-114) “amphibological congruity,” and depends on the employment in a verse of two or more ambiguous terms, which, from their juxtaposition, appear to be used in one sense, while they are really intended in the other. Thus, in the above verse, khazán means “autumn” and also “creeping” (from the verb khazídan, “to creep” or “crawl”); while Bahár means “spring,” but is also the name of a place in Central Asia (whence the celebrated family of Barmak, or Barmecides, came) where there existed a famous idol-temple. The reader, misled by the juxtaposition of these words, imagines at first sight that the former meaning of each is intended, while in reality it is the latter. In English, a good instance occurs in the following verse of “Look at the Clock,” in the Ingoldsby Legends:—

“Mr. David has since had a ‘serious call,’
And never drinks ale, wine, or spirits at all,
And they say he is going to Exeter Hall
To make a grand speech, And to preach and to teach
People that ‘they can't brew their malt liquor too small’;
That an ancient Welsh poet, one PYNDAR AP TUDOR,
Was right in proclaiming ‘ARISTON MEN UDOR’!
Which means ‘The pure Element Is for Man's belly meant!’
And that Gin's but a Snare of Old Nick the deluder!”

The following verse, which I have constructed to illustrate this figure, is defective as regards spelling, but correct as to sound:—

“O mother, halt! No farther let us roam;
The sun has set, and we are far from home.”

The next eight couplets, which I take together, illustrate eight different kinds of tashbíh, or simile, termed respectively Tashbíh (eight varieties). muṭlaq (“absolute”), tafḍíl (“comparative,” or “preferential”), ta'kíd (“emphatic”), mashrúṭ (“conditional”), iḍmár (“implicit”), taswiya (“equivalent”), kináya (“metaphorical”), and 'aks (“antithetical”), most of which are sufficiently explained by their names, taken in conjunction with the following exemplifications:—

1.—muṭlaq. 2.—tafḍíl. 3.—ta'kíd. 4.—mashrúṭ. 5.—iḍmár. 6.—taswiya. 7.—kináya. 17. Tígh-i-tu hamchu áftáb bi-núr Sír dárad zamánará zi nigár.

18. Charkh u máhí; na, nístí tu, az ánk Níst ín har du-rá qiwám u qarár!

19. Balki az tust charkh-rá tamkín, Balki az tust máhrá idhhár!

20. Máhí, ar máh náwarad káhish; Charkhí, ar charkh na-shkanad zinhár!

21. Gar tu charkhí, 'adú chirást nigún? Wa'r tu máhí, 'adú chirást nizár?

22. Jáy-i khaṣm-at chu jáy-i-tust rafí'; Án-i-tú takht, wa án-i-khaṣmat dár.

23. Chún tu dar rúz shab kuní paydá, Chún tu az khár gul kuní dídár,

8.—'aks. 24. Shám gardad chu ṣubḥ surkh-libás, Ṣubḥ gardad chu shám tíra-shi'ár.

“Thy sword, like the sun with its light, keep the world replete with pictures.

Thou art heaven and moon; nay, thou art not, for these two have not [thy] subsistence and endurance!

Nay, rather from thee heaven derives its dignity; Nay, rather from thee the moon derives its manifestation!

Thou art the moon, were it not that the moon wanes; thou art heaven, did not heaven break its troth!

If thou art heaven, why is thine enemy inverted? ^56a And if thou art the moon, why is thine enemy on the wane?

Thine enemy's position is high, like thine; for thine is the throne, while his is the gibbet!

When thou displayest the night in the day, ^56b [And] when thou revealest the rose from the thorn, ^56c Evening becomes clad in scarlet like morning, [And] morning becomes apparelled in black like evening.”

The next figure illustrated is that called siyáqatu'l-a'dád

Siyáqatu'la'dád. (“the proposition of multiples”), where a common quality or action is ascribed to a number of otherwise dissimilar things:—

25. Dast burda'st, gáh-i-'arḍ-i-hunar, Bi-sakhá, ú wafá wa 'adl u yasár,

“What time talents are displayed, In generosity, constancy,
justice, and opulence,”

Tansíqu'ṣ.-ṣifát. 26. Núr-at az mihr, luṭf-at az náhíd; Birr-at az abr, júd-at az kuhsár.

“Thy light excels the Sun, thy grace Venus; Thy benevolence
the cloud, thy generosity the highlands.”^57a

This figure is named tansíqu'ṣ-ṣifát, or “the arrangement of attributes,” and is when, to quote Gladwin (pp. 46-47), the poet “uses contrary properties, as they occur, without order or regularity.”

The next three verses illustrate the figure known as “pleonasm,” or ḥashw (lit. “stuffing”), i.e., the introduction Ḥashw. of a word or words superfluous to the sense, which may be either a downright blemish (when it is called ḥashw-i-qabíḥ, or “cacopleonasm”), or an improvement (ḥashw-i-malíḥ, or “eupleonasm”), or neither hurtful nor beneficial (ḥashw-i-mutawassiṭ, “mediocre” or “indifferent pleonasm”). I find the following example of “cacopleonasm” at p. 264 of Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie:—

“For ever may my true love live and never die,
And that mine eyes may see her crownde a Queene,”

where the words in italics are quite superfluous to the meaning, and do not in any way beautify the form. The pleonasm is italicised in the translation of each of the following verses:—

—qabíḥ. —mutawassiṭ. —malíḥ.

27. Qahr-at, ar mujtahid shawad, bi-barad Ásmán-rá bi-sukhra u bígár;

28. Lík luṭf-i-tu, ay humáyún ráy, Bi-luṭaf dur bar áwarad zi biḥár.

29. Bágh-i-'umr-at (ki táza bád mudám Chashm-i-bad dúr!) rawḍa'íst bi-bár.

“Thy power, should it be exerted, would compel Heaven to
forced toil and labour for thee;
But thy grace, O thou of royal mind! Would by its favours
bring forth pearls from the seas.

The garden of thy life (may it be ever fresh! May the evil eye
be remote from it!) is a garden in fruit.”

The next verse illustrates the figure which is generally called ishtiqáq (“etymology”), but more correctly, shibhu'l-

Ishtiqáq. ishtiqáq (“pseudo-etymology”). It is in reality a variety of tajnís, or word-play, where the words upon which the poet plays appear to come from one root, but have really no common derivation. Of this figure of Prosonomasia, George Puttenham says, in his Arte of English Poesie (p. 212):—

“Ye have a figure by which ye play with a couple of words or names much resembling, and because the one seemes to answere the other by manner of illusion, and doth, as it were, nick him, I call him the Nicknamer… Now when such resemblance happens betweene words of another nature, and not upon men's names, yet doeth the Poet or maker finde prety sport to play with them in his verse, specially the Comicall Poet and the Epigrammatist. Sir Philip Sidney in a dittie plaide very pretily with these two words, love and live, thus:—

‘And all my life I will confesse,
The lesse I love, I live the lesse.’”

Two other examples from the same passage are as follows:—

“They be lubbers not lovers that so use to say,”

and—

“Prove me, madame, ere ye fall to reprove,
Meeke mindes should rather excuse than accuse.” ^58a 30. Rúz-i-kúshish, chu zír-i-rán árí Án qadar-paykar-i-qaḍá-
paygár,—

“In the day of battle, when thou bestridest that [war-horse] like
Fate in form, and like Destiny in determination,”—

Here paykar, “form,” and paygár, “determination,” or “strife,” appear to be, but are not, derived from the same root.

The next three verses illustrate three varieties of saj', “response,” or “harmonious cadence” (literally, “the cooing Saj'. of doves”), called respectively mutawází, muṭarraf, and mutawázin. In the first, the words involved in the figure agree in measure and rhyme; in the second, in rhyme only; and in the third, in measure only, as follows:—

—mutawází. 31. Dar sujúd-at nawán shawand zi písh, Bar wujúd-
at rawán kunand nithár, —mutawázin. 32. Sar-kashán-i-jahán-i-ḥáditha-war, Akhtarán-i-
sipihr-i-áyina-dár. —muṭarraf. 33. Árad-at fatḥ dar makán imkán: Dihad-at kúh bar
firár qarár.

“Trembling there advance to do the homage, Before thee cast
their souls as an offering,
The proud ones of this fateful world, The stars of the mirror-
holding sphere.
Victory brings thee power in space; The mountain [i.e., thy
steadfastness] gives thee endurance against flight.”

The next four verses exemplify four varieties of anagram (maqlúb), viz., the “complete” (—i-kull), where one word in Maqlúb. the verse is a complete anagram of another (e.g., karam and marg in the Arabic character); the “partial” (—i-ba'ḍ), where the second word consists of the same letters as the first, but reversed otherwise than consecutively (e.g., rashk and shukr); the “winged” (mujannaḥ), where, in the same verse or half verse, words occur at the beginning and end which are “complete” anagrams of one another; and the “even” (mustawí), where the sentence or verse may be read backwards or forwards in the same way. This, properly called the Palindrome, is the most difficult and the most perfect form.^59a

—ba'ḍ. 34. RASHK-i-qadr-at barad sipihr u nujúm; SHUKR-i-
fatḥ-at kunad bilád u diyár. —kull. 35. GARM dárad zi táb-i-dil paygán; MARG bárad bi-
khaṣm bar súfár. —mujannaḥ. 36. GANJ-i-nuṣrat dihad guzárish-i-JANG; RAY-i-dawlat
zanad ḥimáyat-i-YÁR. —mustawí. 37. RÁMISH-I-MARD GANJ-BÁRÍ U QÚT; TU QAWÍ-RÁ
BI-JANG DAR MA-SHUMÁR.

“The sky and the stars envy thy worth; the countries and lands
render thanks for thy victory.
He warms the spear-head with the glow of hearts; the nock
[of his arrow] rains death on his foe.
[His] exploits of war yield a treasure of victory; [his] pro-
tection of friends devises empire.
The pleasure and substance of a man [is] to lavish treasure;
do thou reck nothing of the strong in war.”

The next eight verses illustrate eight different varieties of what is called raddu'l-'ajuz ‘ala’ṣ-ṣadr (literally “the throwing Raddu'l-'ajuz ‘ala’ṣ-ṣadr. back of the last word in the verse to the first place in the verse”), a figure less limited than its name would imply, since it consists, as Gladwin (p. 11) says, in using the same word in any two parts of the verse. This figure resembles those called by Puttenham (Arte of English Poesie, p. 210) Epanalepsis (“Echo sound,” or “slow return”), Epizeuxis (“Underlay,” or “Cuckoo-spell”), and Ploche (“the doubler.”)^60a

38. KÁR-i-'adl-i-tu mulk dáshtan-ast: 'Adl-rá khud juz ín na-
báshad KÁR.
39. Bi-YASÁR-i-tu júd khurd YAMÍN: Shud YAMÍN-i-zamána bar tu
YASÁR.
40. Khaṣm TÍMÁR-i-dawlat-i-tu kashad: Khaṣm níkú-tar-ast dar
TÍMÁR.
41. Dar maqámí ki BÁR-i-zar bakhshí, Rízish-i-abr-rá nabáshad BÁR,
42. Mí-guzárí bi-RUMḤ WÁM-i-'adú: Kas na-dídast RUMḤ WÁM
guzár.
43. Charkh az ÁZÁR-i-tu NAYÁZÁRAD: Bandagán-rá kujá kuní
ÁZÁR?
44. N'ÁRAD az khidmat-i-tu birún sar, War chi bishgáfiyash bi-
níza chú MÁR.
45. Dushmanán-rá bi-DÁWARÍ wa khiláf, Bá taqáẓá-yi gunbud-i-
DAWWÁR.
46. Qahr u kín-at bi-bád dáda chu khak, Luṭf u qahr-at bi-áb
kushta chu nár.

“The task of thy justice is to hold the kingdom: Justice, indeed,
has no task but this.
Bounty swears by thy wealth; the right hand of Fate became
to thee a left hand. ^61a
The foeman is filled with anxiety by reason of thy prosperity;
it is best that the foeman should be under care. ^61b
On the occasion of thy distributing stores of gold, the pouring
of the cloud hath no place. ^61c
Thou payest with thy spear the foeman's debt: no one has
[hitherto] regarded the spear as a payer of debts.
Fortune is not hurt by thy hurting: How should'st thou hurt
thy servants?
It will not withdraw its head from thy service, though thou
should'st break it like a snake with thy lance.
Thine enemies by antagonism and opposition, at the instiga-
tion of the circling vault [of Heaven],
Thy wrath and ire cast to the winds like dust, Thy clemency
and wrath extinguish like water extinguishes fire.”^61d

The last couplet, as well as the next, illustrates the figure called mutaḍádd, or “antithesis,” and generally consists in Mutaḍádd. bringing together in one verse things antithetical or opposite, such as the four elements (as in the last of the verses cited above, and in another on p. 37 supra), or light and darkness, or day and night, and the like.

The next two couplets exemplify what is called i'nát, which means that the poet “takes unnecessary trouble” either by I'nát. extending beyond what is required the rhyme of the rhyming words, or by undertaking to use a given word or words in each verse. The following English examples from the Ingoldsby Legends will serve as illustrations of the former variety:—

“A slight deviation's forgiven! but then this is
Too long, I fear, for a decent parenthesis…”

Another example:—

“And a tenderer leveret Robin had never ate;
So, in after times, oft he was wont to asseverate.”

Another:—

“And the boldest of mortals a danger like that must fear,
Rashly protruding beyond our own atmosphere.”

47. Ay nikú-khwáh-i-dawlat-i-tu 'azíz, Wa'y bad-andísh-i-ruzgár-
i-tu khwár!
48. Har-ki zinhár-khwár-i-'ahd-i-tu shud, Bi-sipár-ash bi-'álam-i-
khún-khwár.

“O thou the well-wisher of whose empire is ennobled, and O
thou whose fortune's envier is abased,
Whosoever is false to thy covenant, do thou consign him to the
blood-drinking world!”^62a

This figure is also called Luzúmu má la yalzam, or “the making obligatory on one's self that which is not obligatory.” In the second of its two senses (that illustrated in the Persian verses given above) it only becomes difficult when continued throughout a long qaṣída.

The next verse illustrates the figure called muzdawaj, or Muzdawaj. “the paired,” which consists in the introduction into the verse of rhyming words other than the necessary rhyme:—

49. Káh-i-RÍZA bi-NÍZA bi-r'bá'í: Chún kuní 'AZM-i-RAZM, ín't
sawár!

“Thou snatchest fine chaff with thy spear; when thou seekest
battle, see what a horseman!”

The next figure, mutalawwin (“variegated,” or “chameleon”) consists in so constructing a verse that it may be read Mutalawwin. in either of two metres. Thus the following verse may be scanned, like the rest of the poem, in the metre called Khafíf-i-makhbún-i-maqṣúr, or in that named sarí'-i-maṭwí.

50. Ay buda qidwa-i-waḍí' u sharíf: W'ay shuda qibla-i-sighár u
kibár!

“O thou who art the model of low and high: and O thou who
art the shrine of small and great!”

The next figure is what is called irsálu'l-mathal, a term rendered by the late Mr. E. J. W. Gibb “proverbial com- Irsálu'l-mathal. mission”; of which there is a subordinate variety, irsálu'l-mathalayn, which consists in the introduction into the verse of two proverbial sayings, or of two similitudes. This is similar to the “Gnome, or director” of Puttenham (p. 243), and the “Parimia, or Proverb” (p. 199), concerning the latter of which he says:—

“We dissemble after a sort, when we speake by common proverbs, or, as we use to call them, old said sawes, as thus:—

‘As the olde cocke crowes so doeth the chick:
A bad cooke that cannot his own fingers lick.’

Meaning by the first, that the young learne by the olde to be good or evill in their behaviours: by the second, that he is not to be counted a wise man, who, being in authority, and having the administration of many good and great things, will not serve his owne turne and his friends whilest he may, and many such pro-verbiall speeches: as totnesse is turned French, for a strange alteration: Skarborow warning, for a sudaine commandement, allowing no respect or delay to bethinke a man of his busines. Note never-thelesse a diversitie, for the two last examples be proverbs, the two first proverbiall speeches.”

This love of introducing proverbs into their verses is very characteristic of several Persian poets, notably Ṣá'ib of Iṣfahán (d. A.D. 1677-78), who served as a model to a host of Turkish verse-writers; and, in much earlier times, Abu'l-Faḍl as-Sukkarí, of Merv, who, as ath-Tha'álibi informs us in his Yatímatu'd-Dahr (Damascus edition, vol. iv, pp. 23 and 25), written in A.D. 994, “was very fond of translating Persian proverbs into Arabic.”

51. Na-kushad áb-i-khasm átash-i-tu; Nashkinad táb-i-núr muhra-
i-már!

“The water of the enemy extinguishes not thy fire; the snake-
stone ^64a cannot outshine the light!”

52. Gar mahí, fárigh az hawá-yi khusúf: Gar mayí, íman az balá-
yi-khumár!

“If thou art a moon, [then it is one] free from anxiety of eclipse:
If thou art wine [it is wine] exempt from the plague of
wine-headache!”

Lughaz.

The next ten verses form a lughaz, or riddle:—

53. Chíst án dúr, wa aṣl-i-ú nazdík? Chíst an fard, wa fi'l-i-ú
bisyár?
54. Khám-i-ú har-chi 'ilm-rá pukhta: Mast-i-ú har-chi 'aql-rá
hushyár.
55. Dil-shikan, lík dard-i-dil-paywand: Khush-guzar, lík rúzgár-
guzár.

56. Ranj-i-ú nazd-i-bí-dilán ráḥat: Khwár-i-ú nazd-i-zírakan
dushwár.
57. Chún du'á khush-'inán u bí-markab: Chún qaḍá rah-naward u
bí-hanjár.
58. Anduh-ash hamchu lahw u ráḥat-bakhsh: Átash-ash hamchu
áb núsh-guwár.
59. Na'ra dar way shikanj-i-músíqí: Nála dar way nawá-yi
músíqár.
60. 'Ishq aṣlíst kaz munáza'at-ash 'Aql ghamgín buwad, rawán
ghamkhwár.
61. Kháṣṣa 'ishq-i-butí ki dar ghazal-ash Midḥat-i-Sháh mí-kunam
takrár.
62. Sháyad ar-zán ghazála bi-n'yúshad Zín nawá ín ghazal bi-
naghma-i-zár.

“What is that distant one, whose origin is withal near? What is
that unique one, whose deeds are withal many?
Whose rawest [recruit] ripens whatever is knowledge: whose
most drunken [dependent] gives sense to whatever is
understanding.
A breaker of hearts, but a healer of hearts' ills: living pleasantly,
but compelling fortune:
Whose pain is peace to those who have lost their hearts; whose
easiest is hard to the intelligent.
Like prayer, light-reined and horseless: like Fate, a swift and
unaccountable traveller.
Care for him is like play and a giver of ease; whose fire is like
water, sweet to drink.
A cry in whom is a movement of music; a wail in whom is the
melody of the shepherd's pipe.
Love is that element by whose struggles reason is rendered
sorrowful and the spirit sad;
In particular the love of that idol in my love-songs to whom I
repeat the praises of the king.
Therefore it were meet if the sun should listen graciously to the
ode in this song set in plaintive strain.”

These riddles are generally very obscure, and I regret to say that of the one here given I do not know the answer. Other specimens, with the solutions, will be found on pp. 336-338 of Rückert's work on Persian Poetry and Rhetoric.

Next comes what is called a “double-rhymed maṭla',” i.e., a Maṭla'-i-Dhú qáfiyatayn. fresh opening-verse with an internal double rhyme, or rhyme between the two half-verses:—

63. Az dil-am súsan-ash bi-burd qarár: bi-saram nargis-ash supurd
khumár.

“Her lily [breast] hath snatched repose from my heart: her
narcissus [eye] hath imposed intoxication on my head.”

Then follows the favourite figure, called “the feigned Tajáhulu'l'Árif. ignorance of one who knows,” which is akin to what Puttenham (p. 234) calls Aporia, or “the Doubtful”:—

64. Wayḥak! Án nargis-ast, yá jádú? Yá Rabb, án súsan-ast, yá
gulnár?

“Alas! is that [eye] a narcissus, or a witch? O Lord! Is that
[breast] a lily or a pomegranate?”

Su'ál u jawáb.

The next figure is the simple one called “Question and Answer” (su'ál u jawáb):—

65. Guftam: ‘Az ján bi-'ishq bí-záram!’ Guft: ‘'Áshiq zi ján
buwad bízár!’

“I said: ‘Through love I am sick of life!’ She said: ‘Sick of
life must the lover needs be!’”

The next verse is a muwashshaḥ, or acrostic, of which also,

Muwashshaḥ. I regret to say, I have not been able to discover the solution.

66. Dúst mí-dáram-ash ki yár-i-man-ast: Dushman án bih ki khud
na-báshad yár!

“I love her, for she is my friend: it is, indeed, well that a friend
should not be a foe!”

The mulamma', or “pied verse,” illustrated in the next Mulamma'. line, has been already mentioned on p. 23 supra. Examples in English and Latin are frequent in the Ingoldsby Legends, e.g.:—

“… I've always considered Sir Christopher Wren,
As an architect, one of the greatest of men;
And, talking of Epitaphs,—much I admire his,
‘Circumspice, si monumentum requiris.’”

And again (though this, perhaps, rather comes under the figure tarjuma, or “translation”):—

“‘Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores’:
I wrote the lines— ^{* *} owned them—he told stories!”

67. Súkht dar átash-am: chi mí-gúyam? Aḥraqat-ní 'l-hawá bi-
ghayri'n-nár!

“She hath burned me in fire: What do I say? Sine igne amor me
comburit!”

The next five verses illustrate figures which depend upon the peculiarities of the Arabic letters, in respect to their being joined or unjoined, dotted or undotted respectively; and which cannot, therefore, be represented in English characters. In the first, termed “disjointed” (muqaṭṭa'), all the letters are unjoined; in the second (muwaṣṣal, all are joined; the third (mujarrad) is not mentioned in the books at my disposal, and I do not see wherein its peculiarity consists; in the fourth (raqṭá) the letters are alternately dotted and undotted; while in the fifth (khayfá) the words consist alternately of dotted and undotted letters.

Muqaṭṭa'. 68. Zár u zard-am zi dard-i-dúriy-i-ú: Dard-i-dil-dár
zard dárad u zár. Muwaṣṣal. 69. Tan-i-'aysh-am naḥíf gasht bi-gham: gul-i-bakht-am
nihufta gasht bi-khár. Mujarrad. 70. Chihra-i-rawshan-ash, ki rúz-i-man-ast, Zír-i-zulf-ash
mahíst dar shab-i-tár. Raqṭa. 71. Ghamza-i-shúkh-i-án ṣanam bu-k'shád ashk-i-khún-
am zi chashm-i-khún-áthár. Khayfá. 72. Dil shud, u ham na-bínad az way mihr: sar shud,
u ham na-píchad az tan kár.

“I am weak and pale through grieving at her farness [from me]:
grief for one's sweetheart keeps [one] pale and weak.

The frame of my life grew weak in sorrow: the flower of my
fortune became hidden by thorns.
Her bright face, which is my day, beneath her locks is a moon in
a dark night.
The wanton glances of that idol have loosed blood-stained tears
from my blood-shot eyes.
My heart is gone, and it does not even see kindness from her:
my head is gone, and it does not even turn aside the
trouble from the body.”

The next line contains an enigma (mu'ammá), which again Mu'ammá. I have not been able to solve:—

73. Mawj u dúd-i-dil u du dída-i-man burd daryá wa abr-rá
miqdár.

“The waves (of tears) and heart-smoke (i.e., sighs) of my two eyes
have lowered the esteem of the sea and the cloud.”

The next figure illustrated is the taḍmín, or “insertion” (i.e., of the verse of another poet in one's own), already men- Taḍmín. tioned at p. 45 supra. It is necessary, however, either that the “inserted” verse should be very well known, or that it should definitely be introduced as a quotation, lest the poet employing it expose himself to a charge of plagiarism. A good instance in English is the following from the Ingoldsby Legends:—

“‘One touch to his hand, and one word to his ear,’—
(That's a line which I've stolen from Sir Walter, I fear).”

The following taḍmín is one of the few Persian verses which the author of this work has ventured to compose, and was written at the request of a friend who was enamoured of a young lady named May, which word (pronounced in exactly the same way) means “wine” in Persian. Shaykh Sa'dí, of Shíráz, says in one of his verses in the Gulistán:—

Mast-i-may bídár gardad ním-i-shab:
Mast-i-sáqí rúz-i-maḥshar bámdád,

which means—

“He who is intoxicated with the Wine (May) will come to his
senses at midnight:
He who is intoxicated with the cup-bearer [only] on the Resur-
rection morning!”

From these verses I made the following taḍmín, which also contains a tajnís-i-támm, or “perfect word-play,” on the word “may,” and an ighráq, or “exaggeration” of the most approved type:—

‘Mast-i-may bídár gardad ním-i-shab,’ farmúd Shaykh:
Ín, agarchi qawl-i-Shaykh-ast, níst já-yi i'timád:
Man mayí dánam, ki hargah mast-i-án gardad kasí,
Sar zi mastí bar na-dárad ‘rúz-i-maḥshar bámdád.’

“‘He who is intoxicated with the Wine will come to his senses
at midnight,’ says the Shaykh: ^69a
This, though it is the Shaykh's saying, is not a statement on
which one can rely.
I know a certain Wine (or a certain May) wherewith should one
become intoxicated
He will not raise up his head from his intoxication even ‘on the
Resurrection-morning.’”

74. Waṣl khwáham: na-dánam ánki bi-kas ráyagán rukh namí-
numáyad yár?

“I desire union: [but] do I not know this, that the Beloved will
not show her face to any one for nothing?”

The deplorable fact that I do not know which part of the verse is the quotation, nor whence it is borrowed, rather lays me open to the charge of ignorance than the poet to that of plagiarism.

The figure termed ighráq (“straining”) is next illustrated.

Ighráq. This is one of the three recognised forms of hyperbole (mubálagha), viz., tablígh, when the assertion made “is possible both to reason and experience”; Ghuluww. ighráq, “when it is possible, but not probable”; and ghuluww, “when the assertion is absolutely impossible.” A good instance of this last is given by Dawlat-sháh (p. 33 of my edition) in the two following verses in praise of Sulṭán Maḥmúd of Ghazna by the poet Ghaḍá'irí (or 'Aḍá'irí), of Ray:—^70a

Ṣawáb kard ki paydá na-kard har du jahán
Yagána Ízad-i-dádar-i-bí-nadhír u hamál:
Wa gar-na har du bi-bakhshídí ú bi-rúz-i-sakhá;
Umíd-i-banda na-mándí bi-Ízad-i-muta'ál!

“Well it was that God, the One, the Judge, Exempt from peer
or mate,
Made apparent one alone of those two worlds He did create;
Else the King's unstinted bounty would have given both away;
Nothing then would have been left for which a man to God
should pray!”

Another still more extravagant instance of ghuluww (in the theological as well as in the rhetorical sense) is the following verse addressed to Bahá'u'lláh, the late Pontiff of the Bábís, by Nabíl of Zarand:—

Khalq gúyand Khudá'í, wa man andar ghaḍab áyam;
Parda bar dáshta ma-p'sand bi-khud nang-i-Khudá'í!

“Men call Thee God, and I am filled with wrath thereat:
Withdraw the veil, and suffer no longer the shame of Godhead
[to rest upon Thee]!”^70b

The instance of ighráq given in our qaṣída is the following:—

75. W'ar numáyad zi bas ṣafá ki darúst, Ráz-i-man dar rukhash
buwad dídár.

“Or if she shows it [i.e., her cheek], such is its translucency that
my secret will be apparent in her face.”

The next seven verses illustrate different combinations of Jam' u tafríq u taqsím. the figures called jam' (combination), tafríq (separation), and taqsím (discrimination), of which the nature will be sufficiently clear from the following lines:—

Jam'. 76. Bar lab-ash zulf 'áshiq-ast chu man: lá jaram
hamchu man 'sh níst qarár. Tafríq. 77. Bád-i-ṣubḥ-ast bú-yi zulf-ash: nay, na-buwad bád-i-
ṣubḥ 'anbar-bár! Jam' u taqsím. 78. Man u zulfín-i-ú nigúnsár-ím, lík ú bar gul-ast u
man bar khár. Jam' u tafríq. 79. Hast khaṭṭ-ash firáz-i-'álam-i-rú: án yakí abr, u ín
yakí gulzár. Taqsím u tafríq. 80. Ghamm-i-du chíz mará du chíz supurd: dída-rá áb,
u sína-rá zangár. Jam' u tafríq u taqsím. 81. Hamchu chashm-am tawángar-ast lab-ash: án
bi-ashk, ín bi-lu'lu'i-shahwár.
82. Áb-i-án tíra, áb-i-ín rawshan; án-i-ín girya, w'án-i-u
guftár.

“Her tresses, like me, are in love with her lips, consequently,
like me, they know no rest.
The fragrance of her tresses is [like] the morning breeze; nay,
for the morning breeze is not laden with ambergris!
I and her tresses are cast down headlong, but they on the roses ^71a
and I on the thorns. ^71b
The down overshadows the world of her face: that is the cloud,
and this the rose-garden.
Sorrow for two things conferred on me two things: tears on my
eyes and verjuice on my bosom.
Her lip is as rich as my eye, the latter in tears, the former in
royal pearls. ^71c
The water of those [tears] is dark, while the water of these
[pearls] is bright; the property of those [my eyes] is weep-
ing, and of these [her lips] speech.”

The next four verses illustrate the figure called tafsír

Tafsír-i-khafí and Tafsír-i-jalí. (“explanation”), of which there are two kinds, called respectively jalí (“patent”) and khafí (“latent”), which last is complicated by a kind of chiasmus. The following exemplifies the latter:—

83. ¹Jigar, ú ²ján, u ³chashm, u ⁴chihr-i-man-ast, dar gham-i-'ishq-
i-án but-i-Farkhár,
84. Ham bi-gham⁴ khasta, ham zi-tan² mahjúr, ham bi-khún³ gharqa,
ham zi zakhm¹ afgár.

“My ¹heart, and ²soul, and ³eye, and ⁴face are, in love-longing for
that fair one of Farkhár,
Sick⁴ with grief, parted² from the body, submerged³ in blood,
weakened¹ by wounds.

The other kind o?? tafsír is exemplified in the next two verses:—

85. Khurd,¹ u khurdam² bi-'ishq-i-án ná-kám; hast,³ u hastam⁴ zi
hajr-i-ú ná-chár;
86. Ú mará khún,¹ u man wará andúh²; ú zi man shád,³ u man zi
ú gham-khwár.⁴

“She consumes,¹ and I consume² in her love in spite of myself;
she is,³ and I am,⁴ willing or no, through her separation;
She my blood,¹ and I her grief²; she glad³ through me, and
I sorrowful⁴ through her.”

The next two verses give an instance of what is called Kalám-i-jámi'. kalám-i-jámi', which “is when the poet treats on morality, philosophy, or worldly delights”:—

87. Mú-yam az gham sapíd gasht chu shír: dil zi miḥnat siyáh
gasht chú qár,
88. Ín zi 'aks-i-balá kashíd khiḍáb, W'án zi ráh-i-jafá girift ghubár.

“Through grief, my hair hath turned white as milk; through
sorrow my heart hath become black as pitch;
This derived its tint from the reflection of [dark] affliction,
while that was powdered with the dust of sorrow's path.”

Ḥusn-i-makhlaṣ, or “apt transition,” the figure next illustrated, means that in the guríz-gáh, or “transition-verse” (see Ḥusn-i-makhlaṣ. pp. 30 and 32, n. 1), the poet passes gracefully and skilfully from the exordium of his qaṣída to the qaṣd or purpose (panegyric or otherwise) which he has in view:—

89. Gham-i-dil gar bi-bast bázár-am, madḥ-i-shah mí-kusháyad-am
bázár.

“If the heart's sorrow hath closed my market, the praise of the
King re-opens it.”

The next figure illustrated is tazalzul or mutazalzil, which means “shaking” or “shaken” to the foundations, as by an Tazalzul. earthquake (zalzala), and is, as Gladwin says (p. 32), “when there is a word of which, upon changing the vowel-point of one letter only, the sense is altered entirely”:—

90. Shah Qizil Arslán, ki dast u dil-ash hast khaṣm-shumár u
khaṣm-i-shumár.

“King Qizil Arslán, ^73a whose hand and heart are [respectively] an
accounter for enemies and an enemy to accounts.”^73b

Ibdá', the figure next displayed, means in Rhetoric “re-originating,” “reconstructing,” or “re-creating,” that is,

Ibdá'. expressing in similar but different form the thought of some previous poet or writer, while giving it a new meaning or application; which procedure, though bordering on sirqat, or “plagiarism,” is not (like other plagiarisms of form or meaning, viz., intikhál, maskh, and salkh: see Rückert, pp. 188-191) reckoned a fault, but a merit. To judge of the comparative value of a verse inspired by another as regards either form or meaning, it is necessary to be acquainted with the original, which, unfortunately, I am not in the following instance:—

91. Ḥazm-ash áwurda bád-rá bi-sukún: 'azm-ash afganda khák-rá
bi-madár.

“His resolve brings the wind to a standstill: his determination
casts the dust into a whirl.”

The next verse illustrates the simple figure called ta'ajjub,

Ta'ajjub. “astonishment”:—

92. Já-yi dur gar mayána-i-daryást, az chi ma'níst dast-i-ú dur-
bár?

“If the place for pearls is in the midst of the sea, for what reason
does his hand rain pearls?”

The answer to this question contained in the next verse Ḥusn-i-ta'líl. affords an instance of ḥusn-i-ta'líl, or “poetical ætiology,” which consists in explaining a real fact by a fanciful or poetical cause:—

93. Raghm-i-daryá, ki bukhl mí-warzad, Ú kunad mál bar jahán
íthár.

“To spite the sea, which practises avarice, he scatters wealth on
the world.”

Here the king's liberality is ascribed to disgust at the stinginess of the ocean, though this typifies liberality, so that daryá-dast (“ocean-handed”) is used as a synonym for bountiful.

The following verse, however, strikes me as a much prettier instance of the figure in question:—

Ḥusn-i-mah-rá bá tu sanjídam bi-mízán-i-qiyás:
Palla-i-mah bar falak shud, u tu mándí bar zamín.

“I weighed the beauty of the moon with thine in the balance of
judgment:
The pan containing the moon flew up to heaven, whilst thou
wert left on the earth.”

George Puttenham's definition and examples of ætiology (“reason-rend” or “tell-cause,” as he names it in English, pp. 236-237 of Arber's reprint) hardly agree with the Persian figure, since he has in mind real, not imaginary, causes.

The next figure, ṭard u 'aks, or “thrust and inversion,”

Ṭard u 'aks. simply consists in the transposition in the second miṣrá' of the two halves of the first, thus:—

94. Chi shikár-ast nazd-i-ú, chi maṣáf: chi maṣaf-ast písh-i-ú, chi
shikár.

“Alike to him are chase and battle: battle and chase are alike to
him.”

The two next couplets illustrate the mukarrar or “repeated” figure, which resembles those called Anadiplosis (“the Mukarrar. redouble”), Epanalepsis (“echo-sound,” or “slow return”), and Epizeuxis (“underlay” or “cuckoo-spell”) by Puttenham (pp. 210-212), especially the latter, exemplified in the three following verses:—

“It was Maryne, Maryne that wrought mine woe.”

Again:

“The chiefest staff of mine assured stay,
With no small grief is gone, is gone away.”

And again, in a verse of Sir Walter Raleigh's:—

“With wisdom's eyes had but blind fortune seene,
Then had my love, my love for ever beene.”

95. Badra badra dihad bi-sá'il zar: Dijla Dijla kashad bi-bazm
'uqár.
96. Gashta z'an badra badra badra khajil: burda z'án Dijla Dijla
Dijla yasár.

“He gives gold to the beggar, purse-on-purse: he brings wine to
the feast, Tigris-on-Tigris.
From that purse-on-purse the purse is ashamed: from that
Tigris-on-Tigris the Tigris derives wealth.”

The four concluding verses of the poem illustrate the two Ḥusn-i-ṭalab. Ḥusn-i-maqṭa'. figures ḥusn-i-ṭalab, or “apposite request,” and ḥusn-i-maqṭa', or “apposite conclusion”:—

97. Khusrawá! bá zamána dar jang-am: ki bi-gham mí-gudázad-
am hamwár:
98. Chi buwad gar kaf-i-tu bar gírad az mayán-i-man u zamána
ghubár?
99. Tá 'ayán-ast mihr-rá tábish, tá nihán-ast charkh-rá asrár,
100. Rúz u shab juz sakhá ma-bádat shughl; sál u mah juz ṭarab
ma-bádat kár!

“O Prince! I am at war with Fortune: for ever she consumes
me with vexation:
How would it be if thy hand should remove the dust (i.e., dis-
agreement) between me and Fortune?
So long as the shining of the sun is apparent, so long as the
secrets of the sphere are hidden,
Day and night may thine occupation be naught but generosity:
year and month may thy business be naught but enjoy-
ment!”

Nearly all the more important rhetorical figures are contained and illustrated in the above qaṣída, or have been mentioned incidentally in connection with it, though many minor embellishments will be found by those desirous of going further into the matter in the works of Gladwin and Rückert. Of those omitted mention need only be made of the following:—

(1) The ta'ríkh, or chronogram, where the sum of the letters, according to the abjad reckoning, in a verse, sentence,

Ta'ríkh. or group of words, gives the date of the event commemorated. The most ingenious paraphrase in English of a Persian chronogram with which I am acquainted is one by Hermann Bicknell (“Ḥájjí 'Abdu'l-Waḥíd”), the admirer and translator of Ḥáfidh, on the well-known chronogram:—

Chu dar khák-i-Muṣallá sákht manzil,
Bi-jú ta'ríkh-ash az KHÁK-I-MUṢALLA.

“Since he made his home in the earth of Muṣallá, ^77a
Seek for his date from THE EARTH OF MUṢALLÁ.”

The letters composing the words Khák-i-Muṣallá are:— Kh=600; á=1; k=20; m=40; ṣ=90; l=30; y=10: Total=791 (A.H.=1389). The difficulty in producing a chronogram in English is that only seven letters (C, D, I, L, M, V, and X) have numerical values, nevertheless Bicknell overcame this difficulty and thus paraphrased the above chronogram:—

“Thrice take thou from MUṢALLÁ'S EARTH” (M+L+L=1100) “ITS RICHEST GRAIN” (I+I+C+I=103X3=309: 1100-309=791).^77b

(2) The talmíḥ, or allusion (to a proverb, story, or well- Talmíḥ. known verse of poetry) is another pretty figure. Here is an English instance from the Ingoldsby Legends:—

“Such a tower as a poet of no mean calibre
I once knew and loved, poor, dear Reginald Heber,
Assigns to oblivion—a den for a she-bear.”

The allusion is to the following verse in Heber's Palestine:—

“And cold Oblivion midst the ruin laid,
Folds her dank wing beneath the ivy shade.”

A good instance from the Bústán of Sa'dí is (ed. Graf, p. 28, l. 2):—

Chi ḥájat ki nuh kursiy-i-ásmán
Nihí zír-i-pá-yi Qizil Arslán?

“What need that thou should'st place the nine thrones (i.e., spheres) of heaven beneath the feet of Qizil Arslán?”

The allusion is to the following verse by Dhahír of Fáryáb:—

Nuh kursi-i-falak nihad andísha zír-i-páy
Tá búsa bar rikáb-i-Qizil Arslán nihad.

“Imagination puts the nine thrones (spheres) of heaven beneath
its feet
That it may imprint a kiss on the stirrup of Qizil Arslán.”

'Ubayd-i-Zákání, a very bitter satirist who died some twenty years before Ḥáfidh, wrote amongst other poems a little mathnawí (still a popular children's book in Persia) named “The Cat and the Mouse” (Músh u Gurba), in which an old cat plays the devotee in order to entice the mice within its clutches. The mice report its “conversion” to their king in the following verse:—

“Muzhdagáná! ki gurba záhid shud,
'Ábid, u mu'min, u musulmáná!”

“Good tidings! for the cat has become an ascetic,
A worshipper, a believer, a devout Muslim!”

From this story the phrase “gurba záhid shud” (“the cat has become an ascetic”) became very common in speaking of an old sinner who shams piety for purely mundane (generally evil) objects; and Ḥáfidh alludes to this in the following verse:—

Ay kabk-i-khush kharám! Kujá mí-rawí? Bi-íst!
Ghirra ma-shaw ki “gurba-i-'ábid” namáz kard!

“O gracefully-walking partridge! Whither goest thou? Stop!
Be not deceived because the ‘devout cat’ has said its prayers!”

These allusions often constitute one of the most serious difficulties which the European student of Persian, Arabic,

Difficulty of allusions in poetry of the Muslims. Turkish, and other Muslim languages has to encounter, since the common ground of historical and literary knowledge shared by all persons of education in the lands of Islám is quite different from that in which the European and other Christian nations participate. Any allusion to the Qur'án, for instance, is supposed to be intelligible to a well-educated Muslim; yet it may cost the Christian reader an infinity of trouble to identify it and trace it to its source. To take one instance only, which, se non è vero è ben trovato. The poet Firdawsí, when suffering from the sore disappointment occasioned by Sulṭán Maḥmúd's niggardly recognition of his great work, the Sháhnáma, or Book of Kings, wrote a most bitter satire (now prefixed to most editions of that work), left it in the hands of a friend of his, with instructions to deliver it after the lapse of a certain period, and then made the best of his way to Ṭabaristán, where he sought refuge with the Ispahbad Shírzád (or, according to others, Shahriyár, the son of Sharzín). Sulṭán Maḥmúd, on reading the satire, was filled with fury, and wrote to this Prince demanding the surrender of the poet, and threatening, should his demand not be complied with, to come with his elephants of war (which appear to have been a great feature of his army) and trample him and his army, villages and people under their feet. It is said that the Ispahbad merely wrote on the back of the Sulṭán's missive the three letters “A. L. M.” Though Sulṭán Maḥmúd, it is said, did not at once see the allusion, all his courtiers immediately recognised it, and knew that the Ispahbad's intention was to remind them of the fate which overtook Abraha the Abyssinian, who, trusting in his elephants, would have profaned the Holy City of Mecca in the very year of the Prophet Muḥammad's birth, known ever afterwards as “the Year of the Elephant.” For concerning these impious “People of the Elephant” a short chapter (No. CV) of the Qur'án was revealed, known as the Súratu'l-Fíl, which begins with the letters “A. L. M.,” i.e., Alam tara kayfa fa'ala Rabbuka bi-Aṣḥábi'l-Fíl?—“Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with the People of the Elephant? Did HE not cause their device to miscarry? And send against them birds in flocks, which pelted them with stones of baked clay? And make them like leaves of corn eaten [by cattle]?” The allusion was extraordinarily appropriate, and is said to have effectually turned the Sulṭán from his purpose. Nothing, indeed, is so effective or so much admired amongst Muslims as the skilful and apposite application of a passage from their Sacred Book, and to this topic I shall have occasion to revert again at the end of this chapter.

Taṣḥíf is another ingenious figure depending on the diacritical points which serve to distinguish so many letters of Taṣḥíf. the Arabic alphabet. By changing these points, without interfering with the bodies of the letters, the sense of a sentence may be completely changed, and the sentence or sense so changed is said to be muṣaḥḥaf. The expression occurs in the Bústán of Sa'dí (ed. Graf, p. 166, l. 4):—

‘Mará búsa,’ guftá, ‘bi-taṣḥíf dih, Ki darwísh-rá túsha az búsa bih.’

“‘Give me,’ said he, ‘kisses with taṣḥíf, For to the poor man
túsha (provisions) are better than búsa’ (kisses).”

This figure cannot be illustrated or properly explained without the use of Arabic letters, else I should be tempted to cite an ingenious poem, quoted by Rashíd-i-Waṭwáṭ in his Ḥadá'iqu's-Siḥr, wherein the sense of each verse is changed from praise to blame by a slight alteration of the diacritical points, so that, for example, Hast dar aṣl-at bulandí bí-khiláf (“The nobility in thy stock is indisputable”) becomes Hast dar aṣl-at palídí bí-khiláf (“The uncleanness in thy stock is indisputable”).

Some few words should, perhaps, be said at this point concerning the satire (hajw) and the parody (jawáb). Satire was Satire and Parody. amongst the Arabs, even in pre-Muhammadan days, a powerful weapon, and commonly took the form of what were known as mathálib, i.e., poems on the disgraces and scandals attaching to some rival or hostile tribe. In Persian, one of the earliest satires preserved to us is that of Firdawsí on Sulṭán Maḥmúd, to which allusion has already been made. This, though very bitter, is utterly devoid of the coarse invective and innuendo which mar (according to Western ideas) most satirical poems of the Arabs and Persians. The five following verses may serve to give some idea of its style:—

“Long years this Sháhnáma I toiled to complete,
That the King might award me some recompense meet,
But naught save a heart wrung with grief and despair
Did I get from those promises empty as air!
Had the sire of the King been some Prince of renown,
My forehead had surely been graced by a crown!
Were his mother a lady of high pedigree,
In silver and gold had I stood to the knee!
But, being by birth not a prince but a boor,
The praise of the noble he could not endure!”

Any one who wishes to form an idea of the grossness which mars so much of the satirical verse of the Persians should peruse the crescendo series of abusive poems which marked the progress of the quarrel between the poet Kháqání (d. A.D. 1199) and his master and teacher, Abu'l-'Ulá, which will be found in full, with translations, in Khanikof's admirable Mémoire sur Khâcâni (Paris, 1865, pp. 14-23). The quatrain with which Abu'l-'Ulá opened the duel is delicacy itself compared to what follows, and will alone bear translation. He says:—

Kháqániyá! Agarchi sukhan ník dániyá,
Yak nukta gúyam-at: bi-shinaw ráyagániyá!
Hajw-i-kasí ma-kun ki zi tu mih buwad bi-sinn:
Báshad ki ú pidar buwad-at, tu na-dániyá!

which may be paraphrased in English:—

“Thy verse, Kháqání, deeply I admire,
Yet one small hint to offer I desire:
Mock not the man whose years outnumber thine:
He may, perchance (thou know'st not), be thy sire!”

The following, however, ascribed to Kamál Isma'íl of Iṣfahán (killed by the Mongols when they sacked that city in A.D. 1237-38), is the most irreproachable specimen of Persian satire with which I have met:—

Gar kwája zi bahr-i-má badí guft
Má chihra zi gham na-mí kharáshím:
Má ghayr-i-nikú'iyash na-gú'ím,
Tá har du durúgh gufta báshím!

which may be paraphrased:—

“My face shall show no traces of despite,
Although my Patron speaketh ill of me:
His praise I'll still continue to recite,
That both of us alike may liars be!”

As for the jawáb (literally “answer”), it may be either a parody or merely an imitation, this latter being also called a Parodies and Parallels. nadhíra, or “parallel.” The great parodists of Persia were 'Ubayd-i-Zákání, a ribald wit who died about A.D. 1370, and of whose satires in verse and prose a selection was published in Constantinople in A.H. 1303 (A.D. 1885-86); and Abú Isḥáq (Busḥaq) of Shíráz, the Poet of Foods; and Nidháma'd-Dín Maḥmúd Qárí of Yazd, the Poet of Clothes, from the works of both of whom selections were published in the same year and place. Each of these was a parodist, but the first-named was by far the greatest as a master of satire, and excelled in prose as well as in verse, as we shall have occasion to remark when we come to speak of his period.

Much more might be said on the Rhetoric of the Muslims, but considerations of space forbid me for the present to enlarge Conventionality in metaphor and simile. further on this subject, and I must refer such of my readers as desire fuller information to the works of Gladwin, Rückert, Gibb, Blochmann, and the native writers on these topics. A few words, however, must be added on a work of great utility to students of the erotic poetry of the Persians, I mean the “Lover's Companion” (Anísu'l-'Ushsháq) of Sharafu'd-Dín Rámí, who flourished in the latter part of the fourteenth century of our era. This book treats of the similes which may be employed in describing the various features of the beloved, and has been translated and annotated in French by M. Clément Huart, Professor of Persian at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes (Paris, 1875). It contains nineteen chapters, treating respectively of the hair, the forehead, the eyebrows, the eyes, the eyelashes, the face, the down on the lips and cheeks, the mole or beauty-spot, the lips, the teeth, the mouth, the chin, the neck, the bosom, the arm, the fingers, the figure, the waist, and the legs. In each chapter the author first gives the various terms applied by the Arabs and Persians to the part which he is discussing, differentiating them when any difference in meaning exists; then the metaphors used by writers in speaking of them, and the epithets applied to them, the whole copiously illustrated by examples from the poets. Thus the eyebrows (in Persian abrú, in Arabic ḥájib) may be either joined together above the nose (muttaṣil), which is esteemed a great beauty, or separated (munfaṣil), and they are spoken of by the Persian poets by thirteen metaphors or metaphorical adjectives. Thus they may be compared to crescent moons; bows; rainbows; arches; miḥrábs; ^83a the letter nún, ; the letter káf, ; the curved head of the mall-bat or polo-stick; the dágh, or mark of ownership branded on a horse or other domestic animal; and the ṭughrá, or royal seal on the letters-patent of beauty. In the case of the hair the number of metaphors and metaphorical adjectives of which the use is sanctioned is much greater: in Persian, according to our author, “these are, properly speaking, sixty; but, since one can make use of a much larger number of terms, the hair is spoken of metaphorically as ‘that which possesses a hundred attributes’”; of which attributes a copious list is appended.

From what has been said, it will now be fully apparent how intensely conventional and artificial much Persian poetry is.

Essentially conventional character of Muslim Poetry. Not only the metres and ordering of the rhymes, but the sequence of subjects, the permissible comparisons, similes, and metaphors, the varieties of rhetorical embellishment, and the like, are all fixed by a convention dating from the eleventh or twelfth century of our era; and this applies most strongly to the qaṣída. Hence it is that the European estimate of the greatness of a Persian poet is often very different from that of his own countrymen, since only beauties of thought can be preserved in translation, while beauties of form almost necessarily disappear, however skilful the translator may be. Thus it happens that 'Umar Khayyám, who is not ranked by the Persians as a poet of even the third class, is now, probably, better known in Europe than any of his fellow-countrymen as a writer of verse; while of the qaṣída-writers so highly esteemed by the Persians, such as Anwarí, Kháqání, or Dhahír of Fáryáb, the very names are unfamiliar in the West.

The early Arab poets of the classical (i.e., the pre-Muhammadan, early Muhammadan, and Umayyad) periods are natural,

Substance and style as canons of criticism. unaffected, and perfectly true to their environment, and the difficulty which we often experience in understanding their meaning depends on the unfamiliarity of that environment rather than upon anything far-fetched or fanciful in their comparisons; but, apart from this, they are splendidly direct and spontaneous. Even in Umayyad times, criticism turned rather on the ideas expressed than on the form into which they were cast, as we plainly see from an anecdote related in the charming history of al-Fakhrí (ed. Ahlwardt, pp. 149-150), according to which 'Abdu'l-Malik (reigned A.D. 685-705) one day asked his courtiers what they had to say about the following verse:—

Ahímu bi-Da'dⁱⁿ má ḥayaytu, fa-in amut,
Fa-wá-ḥarabá mim-man yahímu bihá ba'dí!

“I shall continue madly in love with Da'd so long as I live;
and, if I die,
Alack and alas for him who shall be in love with her after
me!”

They replied, “A fine sentiment.” “Nay,” said 'Abdu'l-Malik, “this is a fellow over-meddlesome after he is dead. This is not a good sentiment.” The courtiers agreed. “How then,” continued the Caliph, “should he have expressed himself?” Thereupon one of those present suggested for the second line:—

… Uwakkil bi-Da'dⁱⁿ man yahímu bihá ba'di!

… “I will assign to Da'd one who shall love her after me!”

“Nay,” said 'Abdu'l-Malik, “this is [the saying of] a dead man who is a procurer and a go-between.” “Then how,” the courtiers demanded, “should he have expressed himself?” “Why,” said the Caliph, “he should have said:—

… Fa-lá ṣaluḥat Da'd^un li-dhí khullatⁱⁿ ba'dí!
…; ‘and if I die,
Da'd shall be no good to any lover after me!’”

Here, then, it is wholly a question of the idea expressed, not of the form in which it is cast.

Now see what that greatest philosophical historian of the Arabs, the celebrated Ibn Khaldún (born in Tunis, A.D. 1332;

Ibn Khaldún on “Moulds” or Models of Style. died in Cairo, A.D. 1406) says in chap. xlvii of the sixth section of his masterly Prolegomena, ^86a which is headed: “That the Art of composing in verse or prose is concerned only with words, not with ideas”:—

“Know,” he begins, “that the Art of Discourse, whether in verse or prose, lies only in words, not in ideas; for the latter are merely accessories, while the former are the principal concern [of the writer]. So the artist who would practise the faculty of Discourse in verse and prose, exercises it in words only, by storing his memory with models from the speech of the Arabs, so that the use and fluency thereof may increase on his tongue until the faculty [of expressing himself] in the language of Muḍar becomes confirmed in him, and he becomes freed from the foreign idiom wherein he was educated amongst his people. So he should imagine himself as one born and brought up amongst the Arabs, learning their language by oral prompting as the child learns it, until he becomes, as it were, one of them in their language. This is because, as we have already said, language is a faculty [manifested] in speech and acquired by repetition with the tongue until it be fully acquired. Now the tongue and speech deal only with words, while ideas belong to the mind. And, again, ideas are common to all, and are at the disposal of every understanding, to employ as it will, needing [for such employment] no art; it is the construction of speech to express them which needs art, as we have said; this consisting, as it were, of moulds to contain the ideas. So, just as the vessels wherein water is drawn from the sea may be of gold, or silver, or pottery, or glass, or earthenware, whilst the water is in its essence one, in such wise that the respective excellence [of each] varies according to the vessels filled with water, according to the diversity of their species, not according to any difference in the water; just so the excellence and eloquence of language in its use differs according to the different grades of speech in which it is expressed, in respect of its conformity with the objects [in view], while the ideas are [in each case] invariable in themselves. He, then, who is incapable of framing a discourse and [shaping] its moulds [i.e., its style] according to the requirements of the faculty of speech, and who endeavours to express his thought, but fails to express it well, is like the paralytic who, desiring to rise up, cannot do so, for loss of the power thereunto.”

With these “moulds” (asálíb, plural of uslúb), wherein, as it were, we cast our ideas, and so give them style and distinction, Ibn Khaldún deals at some length, recommending as models of expression the pre-Islámic pagan poets of the Arabs; Abú Tammám, the compiler of the Ḥamása, who died about the middle of the ninth century; Kulthúm b. 'Umar al-'Attábí, who flourished in the reign of Hárúnu'r-Rashíd; Ibnu'l-Mu'tazz, whose one day's Caliphate was extinguished in his blood in A.D. 908; Abú Nuwás, the witty and disreputable Court-poet of ar-Rashíd; the Sharíf ar-Raḍí (died A.D. 1015); 'Abdu'lláh b. al-Muqaffa', the apostate Magian, put to death in A.D. 760; Sahl b. Hárún (died A.D. 860), the wazír Ibnu'z-Zayyát (put to death in A.D. 847); Badí'u'z-Zamán al-Hamadhání, the author of the first Maqámát (died A.D. 1008), and the historian of the House of Buwayh, aṣ-Ṣábí (died A.D. 1056). He who takes these as models, and commits their compositions to memory, will, says Ibn Khaldún, attain a better style than such as imitate later writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era, like Ibn Sahl, Ibnu'n-Nabíh, al-Baysání, and 'Imádu'd-Dín al-Kátib of Iṣfahán. And so Ibn Khaldún, logically enough from his point of view, defines poetry (Beyrout ed. of A.D. 1900, p. 573) as follows:—

“Poetry is an effective discourse, based on metaphor and descriptions, divided into parts [i.e., verses] agreeing with one another in metre and rhyme, each one of such parts being independent in scope and aim of what precedes and follows it, and conforming to the moulds [or styles] of the Arabs appropriated to it.”

And about a page further back he compares the writer, whether in prose or verse, to the architect or the weaver, in that he, like them, must work by pattern; for which reason he seems inclined to agree with those who would exclude al-Mutanabbí and Abu'l-'Alá al-Ma'arrí from the Arabian Parnassus because they were original, and “did not observe the moulds [or models sanctioned by long usage] of the Arabs.”

Turning now to the Persians, we find, as we should naturally expect in these apt pupils of the Arabs, that precisely similar Conservatism of Persian poetry and prose styles. ideas maintain in this field also. “The words of the secretary (or clerk in a Government office) will not,” says the author of the Chahár Maqála, “attain to this elevation until he becomes familiar with every science, obtains some hint from every master, hears some aphorism from every philosopher, and borrows some elegance from every man of letters.” To this end the aspirant to literary skill is advised in particular to study, with a view to forming and improving his style, in Arabic the Qur'án, the Traditions, the proverbial sayings of the Arabs, and the writings of the Ṣáḥib Isma'íl b. 'Abbád, aṣ-Ṣábí, Ibn Qudáma, Badí'u'z-Zamán al-Hamadhání, al-Ḥarírí, and other less well-known writers, with the poems of al-Mutanabbí, al-Abíwardí, and al-Ghazzí; and, in Persian, the ??ábús-náma (composed by Kay-Ká'ús, the Ziyárid ruler of Ṭabaristán, in A.D. 1082-83), the Sháhnáma of Firdawsí, and the poems of Rúdagí and 'Unṣurí. This intense conventionality and conservatism in literary matters, broken down in Turkey by the New School led to victory by Ẓiyá Pasha, Kemál Bey, and Shinásí Efendi, maintains an undiminished sway in Persia; and if, on the one hand, it has checked originality and tended to produce a certain monotony of topic, style, and treatment, it has, on the other, guarded the Persian language from that vulgarisation which the triumph of an untrained, untrammelled, and unconventional genius of the barbaric-degenerate type tends to produce in our own and other European tongues.

The models or “moulds” in Persian, as in Arabic, have, it is true, varied from time to time and, to a certain extent, from Bombast and inflation an accidental, not an essential, quality of Persian literary style. place to place; for, as we have seen, the canons of criticism adopted by Dawlatsháh at the end of the fifteenth century differ widely from those laid down by the author of the Chahár Maqála in the middle of the twelfth; while Ibn Khaldún's severe and classical taste prevented him from approving the rhetorical extravagances which had prevailed amongst his Eastern co-religionists and kinsfolk for nearly three centuries. Yet simplicity and directness is to be found in modern as well as in ancient writers of Persian verse and prose; the Íqán (“Assurance”) of the Bábís, written by Bahá'u'lláh about A.D. 1859, is as concise and strong in style as the Chahár Maqála, composed some seven centuries earlier, and the verse of the contemporary Passion-Play (ta'ziya) or of the popular ballad (taṣníf) is as simple and natural as one of Rúdagí's songs; while the flabby, inflated, bombastic style familiar to all students of the Anwár-i-Suhaylí has always tended to prevail where the patrons of Persian literature have been of Turkish or Mongolian race, and reaches its highest development in the hands of Ottoman writers like Veysí and Nergisí.