I remember a very old and well-thumbed copy of Hafez an Iranian friend showed me, interleaved with countless post-it notes in varying shades of yellow. Than for their emblematic power, using a diction that is colloquial but also aphoristic or rhapsodic – how can I do this in English without being corny? More dubious still, how can I, a woman poet, address the Beloved from a submissive, even subservient, position, without irony, and call myself a feminist? Translating an aesthetic in which images are relished less for their quiddity Then there is the perilous question of cliché.
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But how to use the form without the stratagems of disguise we expect in contemporary formal poetry? Using strict and fully audible rhyme gratifying the reader’s expectation instead of subverting it employing a syntax that invites the audience to ‘join in’ the refrain, much like the ‘hook’ in song lyrics avoiding, in the absence of enjambment, metrical monotony – these are some of the technical challenges.īut thematically, there is the ‘disunity’ of the ghazal, in which couplets move around on a lateral plane – from the personal to the political, the meditative to the satiric – rather than in a linear, sequential line of logic, with only the rhyme and refrain to act as binding. The form itself is difficult enough: the monorhyme (qafiya), the refrain (radif) and, most alarmingly, the final ‘signature couplet’ which requires the author to mention him/herself by name or pseudonym. Faced with the same question, I am particularly challenged by the very aspects of the canonical ghazal which seem to contradict our aesthetic criteria for writing poetry. I want Rodolfo to sing, flooding the gods,Īh Mimi! as if I were her and he, here, to hold me.Īgha Shahid Ali, the late Kashmiri-American poet who did so much to familiarise American poets with the ghazal, asked himself, while translating Faiz, if he ‘could make English behave outside its aesthetic habits’. Like a curing-song in the creel of my ear to hold me. I want to catch the last echoes, reel them in Thrown, thrown like a rope from a very old pier to hold me. I want my ship to come in, hopes to run highīefore my back’s so bowed even children fear to hold me. I want hand and eye, sweet roving things, and landįor grazing, praising, and the last pioneer to hold me. Much more than God in some lonely stratosphere to hold me. My beloved to sleep, to cross sleep’s frontier to hold me. I want to strike out as a flock strikes for homeĪnd home is now this, now that, warm hemisphere to hold me. I want to be touched as the tree touches skyĪnd sky touches earth so horizons appear to hold me. In the wind and the rain when nobody’s near to hold me. The poetic device is a kind of epiphora.I want to be held. The poet repeated the same word ' at the end of some neighboring stanzas. The figure of speech is a kind of anaphora. The author used the same word my at the beginnings of some neighboring stanzas. The poet used anaphora at the beginnings of some neighboring lines. The author used lexical repetitions to emphasize a significant image and, armed are repeated. Average number of symbols per line: 30 (strings are less long than medium ones).Average number of symbols per stanza: 393.Rhyme scheme: abXccdXac aXeefgXXXXhcbiecXcdehiifXX ibXgXbeXcbXXeabcg.Use the criteria sheet to understand greatest poems or improve your poetry analysis essay. The information we provided is prepared by means of a special computer program.