Hazaj meter

Resemblance to wāfir

The hazaj meter may be compared to the wāfir meter, which has the following rhythm, in which u u may be replaced in any foot by a single long syllable:

u – uu – | u – uu – | u – –

One difference between them is that the wāfir is quite commonly used in Arabic poetry but never used at all in Persian, Turkish or Urdu. However, in its contracted form, where both pairs of short syllables in a hemistich (half-line) are replaced by a long one, it closely resembles the Persian 11-syllable hazaj:

u – – – | u – – – | u – –

Hazaj in Hebrew poetry

The first poet to imitate Arabic meters in Hebrew is said to have been Dunash ben Labrat (915-70), who was possibly born in Fez, Morocco but lived in Spain. His most famous poem, the D'ror Yikra, is written in the hazaj meter. It begins as follows:

דְּרוֹר יִקְרָא לְבֵן עִם בַּת * וְיִנְצָרְכֶם כְּמוֹ בָבַת

נְעִים שִׁמְכֶם וְלא יֻשְׁבַּת * שְׁבוּ נוּחוּ בְּיוֹם שַׁבָּת

D'ror yikra l'ven im bat * V'yintsorchem k'mo vavat.

Na'im shimchem velo yushbat * Sh'vu nuchu b'yom Shabbat.

"Freedom shall He proclaim for His sons and daughters * and will keep you as the apple of His eye .

Pleasant is Your name and will not cease to be. * Repose (and) rest on the Sabbath day."

The first letters of each half line in this stanza make up the name "DUNASH".

To make the short syllables of the meter, Dunash generally uses the sheva half vowel. Occasionally, however, he uses one of the other "short" vowels of Hebrew, as in the word na'im in the second line, which was presumably pronounced n'im.

Since the 4th syllable of each foot is always long, Dunash's meter rhythmically has much more in common with the 16-syllable Persian hazaj than with Abu Firas's Arabic version quoted above, which frequently uses a short syllable in the 4th position.

Other traditional Jewish hymns, such as Adon Olam, are written in the same meter. However, since the pronunciation of Hebrew no longer distinguishes long and short vowels, the various melodies used for such hymns these days are often in different rhythms that ignore the characteristic u – – – foot of the hazaj.

In Hebrew, the hazaj meter is known as הַמִּשְׁקָל הַמַּרְנִין, ha-mishqal ha-marnin.

Persian hazaj

The hazaj meter is also represented in Ottoman Turkish, Persian and other Iranian, Urdu and other North Indian Islamic traditions.

In Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu, the antispast variant given above is not used, and the meter is found mainly in two forms, one of 11 syllables and the other of 16:

u – – – | u – – – | u – – (x2)

u – – – | u – – – || u – – – | u – – – (x2)

11-syllable version

By the 11th century, the 11-syllable version of the hazaj meter had become "the most popular meter for romantic epics" in Iranian language compositions. Particularly notable Persian poems in the hazaj meter include Fakhruddin As'ad Gurgani's Wis u Ramin, and – extending to 6,150 verses – Nizami's Khusraw u Shirin. "The preference for Hazaj-type meters may be explained in terms of their relationship to folk verses and songs. The meter of hazaj and its variations are among the ones most frequently found in folk poetry such as du-baytī and lullabies (lālā'ī). The [11-syllable] meter of hazaj-i musaddas-e maḥdūf-i maqṣūr, which is the meter of du-baytī (or čār-baytī in regional dialects), is particularly often sung in the āwāz-i daštī, which is closely associated with Iranian folk tunes."

An example of the 11-syllable hazaj in Persian is Nizami's epic poem Khusraw u Shirin mentioned above, completed in 1180, of which the first verse is as follows:

خداوندا در توفیق بگشای * نظامی را ره تحقیق بنمای

xudāwandā dar-i tawfīq bugšāy * Niẓāmī-rā rah-i tahqīq binmāy

"O God, open the door of success; show Nezami the way of investigation"

The underlined syllables are "overlong"; that is, they count as equivalent to a long syllable plus a short one, a typical feature of Persian verse, imitated in Turkish and Urdu poetry, but not found in Arabic.

The meter of the du-baytī is similar to this, except that – u or – – may sometimes be substituted for the initial u –.

16-syllable version

The 16-syllable version of the hazaj meter was used for lyric poetry such as some of the ghazals of Hafez and their imitations in Urdu and Ottoman Turkish. About 6% of Persian lyric poems are in this metre, and 16% of Ottoman Turkish ones. This form of the metre usually has a break in the middle of each half-line, dividing the couplet into four equal parts, giving a very similar rhythmic effect to the poem of Dunash quoted above. The following example comes from one of the spiritual ghazals of the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi:

چه تدبیر ای مسلمانان که من خود را نمی‌دانم

نه ترسا و یهودیم نه گبرم نه مسلمانم

či tadbīr ay musalmānān? ki man xwad-rā namē-dānam

na tarsā wa yahūdīy-am, na gabr-am na: musalmān-am

"What am I to do, o Muslims? Since I do not know myself;

I am not a Christian or a Jew, nor a Zoroastrian, nor a Muslim."

In this particular poem, Rumi not only makes a break in the middle of the line, but also in every verse makes a word break after every foot. However, other writers make a word break in the middle of the line only.

Turkish hazaj

A Turkish poem in this meter is the following from the 16th-century poet Bâkî, which begins as follows:

Ezelden şâh-ı aşkın bende-i fermânıyüz cânâ

Mahabbet mülkünün sultân-ı âli-şânıyüz cânâ

"Oh beloved, since the origin we have been the slaves of the shah of love"

"Oh beloved, we are the famed sultan of the heart's domain"

Unlike in the Rumi poem quoted above, there is no break in the middle of the half-line.

Urdu hazaj

The 16-syllable hazaj meter is also among the three most commonly used meters in Urdu verse, It is one of the typical meters of the ghazal genre. The following example comes from a ghazal written by Ghalib in 1816. Like the Turkish version of the metre, it has no break in the middle of the half-line. (Asad is the earlier pen-name of Ghalib himself.)

جراحت تحفہ الماس ارمغاں داغِ جگر ہدیہ

مبارک باد اسد غم خوارِ جان درد مند آیا

jarāḥat tuḥfah almās armuġā̃ dāġh-i jigar hadiya

mubārak bād Asad ġam-xwār-i jān-i dard-mand āyā

"Wounds, a present; diamond, a gift; liver-wound, an offering –

congratulations, Asad, the comforter of an afflicted soul came by"

The underlined syllable is "overlong", taking the place of a long plus a short one, in imitation of Persian prosody.

Ruba'i

The 13-syllable meter of the Persian ruba'i (quatrain) is also traditionally analysed as if it were a variety of the hazaj meter,, but in reality it is quite different, and evidently has no connection with the meter described above. The meter, which has two versions, differing in the reversal of the 6th and 7th syllables, is as follows:

– – u u – u – u – – u u –

or:

– – u u – – u u – – u u –

The analysis of this meter in terms of hazaj is made even more complicated by the fact that a long syllable can optionally be substituted for two short ones, which does not occur in the hazaj meter in Arabic poetry. It also lacks the characteristic u – – – rhythm of the hajaz.