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,
*
written about A.D. 1328, is one notable example of this florid
style of composition; while the Rawḍatu'ṣ-Ṣafá, the Anwár-i-
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, * 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 * 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-