Earlier this week I remarked on Twitter (X, whatever) that I don’t really get ghazals, in the standard English form in which they have become very popular in the last twenty years or so.
I'm so happy to have learned the word "sphragis" here; it has a very organic sound, like some kind of North American pond weed. (I suppose I'm thinking of sphagnum moss.)
Right now for American poets, at least, the ghazal seems to be one of those forms that imposes a bit of constraint without being too demanding or finicky. There's the pleasure of surprise when the poet really finds an unexpected solution for the repetition. (But it might be that this is a form it's more fun to write --or recite aloud--than to read at length on the page.)
Musically, I wonder if the effect of a hearing good ghazal might be akin to the suspense of a blues stanza--there you get the rhythm and rhyme embedded in your ear in the two repeated lines, and then anticipation of hearing how the rhyme will build on that.
I hate to see the evening' sun go down
I hate to see the evening' sun go down
It makes me think I'm on my last go 'round
Maybe?--this is a hasty thought but your observations on the effect of musical refrain brought this connection to mind.
You know funnily enough Michael Silk used exactly the same example -- the same blues lyric -- in a talk comparing jazz and Pindaric metre in London a few weeks ago. Anyway, I think you're right about the effect of (traditional) ghazals in performance. I suspect you're also right that ghazals are probably fun to write (though I haven't tried)and genuinely good exercises. With some of the ones with quite varied line lengths I also wondered to what difference the pacing of a good performance would have.
Yes, I wonder if the artificiality of this kind of patterning works better in a song than in a poem, where it often just seems a little too clever and can suffer from the technical problem you identify.
For example, Bob Dylan wrote a number of songs where each longish stanza ends with the same line, typically the title (“Tangled Up in Blue,” “With God on Our Side,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Desolation Row,” “Shelter from the Storm”). If you’re familiar with these songs, or at least by the second verse when the pattern is obvious, one of their pleasures is discovering anew with each stanza how it reaches that last line, usually with a rhyme, in what are often story songs.
The Urdu performance tradition reminds me a little of that. And the audience often sings along with the refrain (repeated) line.
Thanks for this — all very interesting, and a new discussion for me. I think that there are scenes of ghazals being composed and performed in Ismail Merchant's film “In Custody,” based on Anita Desai's novel? Haven't seen it since it came out in the early 90s, and don't remember it well, but the poetry scenes left an impression.
Ha, maybe one day I'll do a bonus post with loads of GRAPHS. There's a particularly good one for formal Latin epithalamia -- becomes briefly but completely unwritable for about 15 years at the end of Elizabeth's reign, then comes back again as soon as she's dead. But all the metrical ones are really fascinating.
I loved this post, thank you! I also adored the beautifully understated, almost visible little edge to “generally with some attempt at an evocative atmosphere” :-)
I’m the very reverse of a poetry expert but having recently slogged through Binyon’s terra rima version of Divine Comedy, I’d definitely agree that some forms are more “impressive” than lovable when rendered into English. Is it just the lack of rhymes in general?
So thoughtful and thought-provoking— many thanks, Victoria! For another perspective on the Hafez legacy, there’s Edwin Morgan’s 100-poem sequence, ‘The New Divan’. It’s his war poem, written out of his military service in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon, in the RAMC. Carol Rumens in her Guardian poem of the week article for 27 March 2020 selects three of the poem and makes some Sufi connections. In a sense, though, each poem/ stanza in the sequence (usually about 12 lines or so in length) works like a ghazal couplet, seemingly only glancingly connected with its neighbours, yet with the poet’s gay identity being obliquely and then clearly presented. Both Hafiz and himself are visible in the ending. Morgan knew and wanted to reflect the string of jewels analogy. Published in 1977, it was written earlier, when television images of the Arab-Israeli Seven Days War brought flashbacks and nightmares. I was his part-time doctoral student at the time, and he showed me some stanzas in draft. Since Basil Bunting was my topic, I have wondered whether reading his Persian and North African war poem The Spoils also helped make the connection to Hafiz.
By the way, Pravin Loloi and Glen Pursglove write on ‘Basil Bunting’s translations of Hafiz’ in The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism (2000), which I co-edited with Richard Price. They note that a ghazal of Hafiz was written in 1690 by Thomas Hyde, Bodley’s Librarian in Oxford, though not published until 1767.
What a great link to Morgan, thank you James. I consciously decided to steer clear of Bunting's Hafiz for this piece, because I know myself -- if I start thinking about Bunting, nothing much else will seem worth writing about. And it seems to me that his work -- both the translations and the more general influence of Persian poetry -- deserves to be discussed in relation to other projects of sustained translation and imitation, which is not really what is going on in most cases with contemporary ghazals. Thanks for the ref too -- I have the book but it's trapped in storage along with most of my library. Great Thomas Hyde info too -- you do see bits of Arabic and Persian verse fairly often in the fancier type of 17th century manuscript (e.g. university verse miscellanies).
You did such a great job looking at this form and the nuances of bringing it into English! Having studied Classics, I tried at some point to use Greek meters in English, but it was quite a chore 😂 Thank you for this very enlightening post!
Many thanks for commenting Ramya and apologies for the slow reply -- substack doesn't seem to be completely reliable on comment notifications! The history of quantitative metres in English is very interesting though it's probably fair to say that the various experiments have been more significant as staging posts to other successful poems than as poems in their own right.
Thanks for these insights on the ghazal in English. You have returned to me a bit of self-confidence in my own judgement: after a spate a ghazals in a recent manuscript, I removed all but two, finding them contrived as a result of rhyming that called too much attention to itself, though this is something I seek to avoid. When they work, though, a ghazal in English works very well, and has, I think, a future in the language. (As an aside, and as a 75 year-old, I do not take too kindly to your cliche of the elderly poet writing nostalgically in old forms.) I love the interview you've done with Alice from the podcast Poetry Speaks and with Matthew Buckley Smith, host of Sleerickets. They are partly why I'm here now. Zara Raab
Thanks so much for commenting and subscribing Zara! And for following the link from the podcast. I should add a link to that somewhere on here. I've never done a podcast before but I really enjoyed it and Alice and Matthew made it very straightforward. I just saw a review by you of Matthew's book, which I enjoyed very much. I will certainly order it.
My observation about older writers sometimes confusing the dating process was very much based on my historical work -- I mean it was meant as a genuine observation not as a sarcastic aside. I'm not sure enough people write poetry, at least in English, today to make the same thing hold true, because you find this effect historically most often with people who are not primarily poets. But in the 16th and 17th century you do quite often see a poem in a manuscript for instance, which feels very strongly like a poem from, say, the 1560s and is actually written by an elderly person in the 1610s (or whatever). One quite famous (at the time) example is a long controversial Latin poem in sapphic stanzas the "Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoriae" written by Andrew Melville in 1604 (it was to this poem that George Herbert's first published collection, the "Musae Responsoriae", was responding, so it has a place in literary history). Melville was a first generation Protestant who was about 60 in 1604. Any literary historian dating his poem on form alone would probably put it in the 1570s or 1580s at the latest -- no-one was still using very long sapphics for polemical or invective verse in the early 17th century. Indeed, contemporary response made fun of his choice of form. Melville's poem was printed, caused a big stir and refers directly to contemporary events so we know for sure when it was written, but when you find things like that in an anonymous manuscript without any other info about the author or context, it can confuse the dating process so it's something you have to keep in mind, especially if you are trying to get a sense of when a form came in or went out of fashion. There's a similar, more obvious, problem dating handwriting which changes significantly between the mid-16th and the mid-17th century, so is usually quite a reliable guide to date but can be thrown off by a very elderly person.
Terrific survey and (as always) heroically restrained commentary on a contemporary poetic trend I’ve found pretty tedious. For what it’s worth, the aspect of contemporary ghazals I find most irritating is the insistence of nearly all American practitioners to include the word “ghazal” in the title, no matter how many other formal constraints they abandon in the body of the poem itself. It is as if one must be sure to announce one’s project lest one fail to get credit for taking on so fashionable a form, however lackadaisically.
Great write-up! I'm not a literature academic so apologies in advance if what I'm saying doesn't make much sense. I'm a big fan of Urdu ghazals (it's easy to be a fan if you know the language lol, they're a very pleasing form), but I also have trouble with their English counterparts. What I always wonder about English ghazals is why they end at a "solid" noun and not a prepositional phrase. A lot of Urdu ghazals have a phrase-ish refrain that simply translates to "to you/by me/for God/because of them/etc" as opposed to the concrete nouns in English (hips, bride, etc). In fact, I think Aragon's "au fond de la nuit" is more faithful to the Urdu form than most of what I've read in English. I also think more contemporary Urdu ghazals have also followed in the Anglophone fashion of making the couplets somewhat connected, but I'm sure that has also been influenced by the uptick of use of ghazals in Bollywood soundtracks.
Thanks so much for commenting Veeda. I actually cut a whole paragraph about exactly this point, so I'm really glad you brought it up. I noticed in the "Ghazals of Ghalib" book, which always explains what the refrain is, that many of the refrains are as you say either phrasal or also sometimes very short grammatical markers (e.g. sometimes just 'accusative marker'), and I was interested in just the point you make -- that these allow for much less "heavier" refrains than having to get often rather awkwardly to a particular noun each time. In the end I cut the paragraph because it seemed a bit technical and as I don't know any Urdu I was relying purely on my understanding of this (excellent!) book, so it's great to have the point raised independently by a native speaker. Good point too that Urdu ghazals have themselves drifted towards greater thematic/narrative connection more recently -- I watched a few videos of Bollywood ghazals so I see just what you mean.
I think you're right that they are a genuinely good exercise, which surely goes a long way to explaining their popularity. @zararaab in a comment upthread remarked that, revising the manuscript of her latest collection, she had decided to leave out all but two of the ghazals as she found them too contrived. I thought that was a fascinating glimpse into how they might be a productive part of a poet's "practice" as it were, even if they tend not to be entirely successful as poems in their own right. More generally, I have the impression that a lot of contemporary poets find it interesting to experiment with some formal constraints but perhaps lack confidence in inventing their own forms.
I feel like this may be a case of contemporary English poetics being at odds with the source material. Classical Persian poetry really is chock-full of singsong verse about wine and women (or boys) with a patina of sometimes nominal Islam. Lots of ruby lips, moon faces, musk-scented tresses, and bodies lithe like cyprus trees. Probably not a coincidence that Edward FitzGerald was born in the same year as Tennyson and the fad for The Rubaiyat peaked during the fin-de-siècle and early 20th century. People these days might be using the pretext of “world literature” to scratch the itch for something a bit more mannered and classical.
Thanks for commenting. I think you're right that the form is particularly well-suited to a very deep-rooted and widely understood sort of poetic economy, in which you can assume that all readers are familiar with a whole concatenation of nuances and associations attached to a series of "stock" words, images and scenarios. There is something similar in Sanskrit court poetry. And you're right that contemporary English poetry is very far removed from this sort of literary context, either among poets or readers.
I'm so happy to have learned the word "sphragis" here; it has a very organic sound, like some kind of North American pond weed. (I suppose I'm thinking of sphagnum moss.)
Right now for American poets, at least, the ghazal seems to be one of those forms that imposes a bit of constraint without being too demanding or finicky. There's the pleasure of surprise when the poet really finds an unexpected solution for the repetition. (But it might be that this is a form it's more fun to write --or recite aloud--than to read at length on the page.)
Musically, I wonder if the effect of a hearing good ghazal might be akin to the suspense of a blues stanza--there you get the rhythm and rhyme embedded in your ear in the two repeated lines, and then anticipation of hearing how the rhyme will build on that.
I hate to see the evening' sun go down
I hate to see the evening' sun go down
It makes me think I'm on my last go 'round
Maybe?--this is a hasty thought but your observations on the effect of musical refrain brought this connection to mind.
Thanks for the list of poems and links!
You know funnily enough Michael Silk used exactly the same example -- the same blues lyric -- in a talk comparing jazz and Pindaric metre in London a few weeks ago. Anyway, I think you're right about the effect of (traditional) ghazals in performance. I suspect you're also right that ghazals are probably fun to write (though I haven't tried)and genuinely good exercises. With some of the ones with quite varied line lengths I also wondered to what difference the pacing of a good performance would have.
Yes, I wonder if the artificiality of this kind of patterning works better in a song than in a poem, where it often just seems a little too clever and can suffer from the technical problem you identify.
For example, Bob Dylan wrote a number of songs where each longish stanza ends with the same line, typically the title (“Tangled Up in Blue,” “With God on Our Side,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Desolation Row,” “Shelter from the Storm”). If you’re familiar with these songs, or at least by the second verse when the pattern is obvious, one of their pleasures is discovering anew with each stanza how it reaches that last line, usually with a rhyme, in what are often story songs.
The Urdu performance tradition reminds me a little of that. And the audience often sings along with the refrain (repeated) line.
Example, in this Joan Osborne cover:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sZh21HxcTo
Thanks for this — all very interesting, and a new discussion for me. I think that there are scenes of ghazals being composed and performed in Ismail Merchant's film “In Custody,” based on Anita Desai's novel? Haven't seen it since it came out in the early 90s, and don't remember it well, but the poetry scenes left an impression.
I for one would love to see those spreadsheets.
Ha, maybe one day I'll do a bonus post with loads of GRAPHS. There's a particularly good one for formal Latin epithalamia -- becomes briefly but completely unwritable for about 15 years at the end of Elizabeth's reign, then comes back again as soon as she's dead. But all the metrical ones are really fascinating.
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.
I loved this post, thank you! I also adored the beautifully understated, almost visible little edge to “generally with some attempt at an evocative atmosphere” :-)
I’m the very reverse of a poetry expert but having recently slogged through Binyon’s terra rima version of Divine Comedy, I’d definitely agree that some forms are more “impressive” than lovable when rendered into English. Is it just the lack of rhymes in general?
So thoughtful and thought-provoking— many thanks, Victoria! For another perspective on the Hafez legacy, there’s Edwin Morgan’s 100-poem sequence, ‘The New Divan’. It’s his war poem, written out of his military service in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon, in the RAMC. Carol Rumens in her Guardian poem of the week article for 27 March 2020 selects three of the poem and makes some Sufi connections. In a sense, though, each poem/ stanza in the sequence (usually about 12 lines or so in length) works like a ghazal couplet, seemingly only glancingly connected with its neighbours, yet with the poet’s gay identity being obliquely and then clearly presented. Both Hafiz and himself are visible in the ending. Morgan knew and wanted to reflect the string of jewels analogy. Published in 1977, it was written earlier, when television images of the Arab-Israeli Seven Days War brought flashbacks and nightmares. I was his part-time doctoral student at the time, and he showed me some stanzas in draft. Since Basil Bunting was my topic, I have wondered whether reading his Persian and North African war poem The Spoils also helped make the connection to Hafiz.
By the way, Pravin Loloi and Glen Pursglove write on ‘Basil Bunting’s translations of Hafiz’ in The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism (2000), which I co-edited with Richard Price. They note that a ghazal of Hafiz was written in 1690 by Thomas Hyde, Bodley’s Librarian in Oxford, though not published until 1767.
What a great link to Morgan, thank you James. I consciously decided to steer clear of Bunting's Hafiz for this piece, because I know myself -- if I start thinking about Bunting, nothing much else will seem worth writing about. And it seems to me that his work -- both the translations and the more general influence of Persian poetry -- deserves to be discussed in relation to other projects of sustained translation and imitation, which is not really what is going on in most cases with contemporary ghazals. Thanks for the ref too -- I have the book but it's trapped in storage along with most of my library. Great Thomas Hyde info too -- you do see bits of Arabic and Persian verse fairly often in the fancier type of 17th century manuscript (e.g. university verse miscellanies).
You did such a great job looking at this form and the nuances of bringing it into English! Having studied Classics, I tried at some point to use Greek meters in English, but it was quite a chore 😂 Thank you for this very enlightening post!
Many thanks for commenting Ramya and apologies for the slow reply -- substack doesn't seem to be completely reliable on comment notifications! The history of quantitative metres in English is very interesting though it's probably fair to say that the various experiments have been more significant as staging posts to other successful poems than as poems in their own right.
For some extraordinary reason no-one recommended mine:
LAC 1831755
By day in workshop or hangar, but down to the river at night.
Clean starter pumps, change a carb. Fish the river at night.
Put a Gypsy Six in the Dragon. Got two Cheetahs away.
Wasp to refurbish. Red spinner on the river at night.
Night flying, slept in Control Tower, a fire to dry us out.
Home at 8.10, somewhat peckish. Made the river at night.
A leak from a rocker box, No 5 low in cruising.
Children with colds, peevish. Trout in the river at night.
Duty Fitter, 4 a.m. in bitter cold. No 2 forced landed.
NAAFI almost empty. Nightmarish by the river at night.
Salvage on 6 by Bull Hangar. Pay day: 4/- short.
Coal scarce. Dinner one dish. Nothing doing in the river at night.
Bought saddle and chain, sold pedals and seat (Harry).
Gave wheels a polish. Hooked pike on the river at night.
A spoonful of brandy, a gasp from the baby, but he breathed,
and the ambulance came. Feverish, dreamt of the river at night.
Rehashed the kingpins on Squadron Leader’s car,
A Ford, once quite swish. Small perch in the river at night.
Took D to the pictures, Gentleman Jim. Walked back:
the right place for a wish, by the river at night.
Chippy, on-leave, called mid-morning with eggs.
Cylinder in Wasp: last to finish. A full river at night.
Victory Day (rain): took boy to town, streets criss-crossed with colour.
Even found liquorice. Mayfly on the river at night.
Cycled home with Eddie, in heavy rain and wind.
Muddy water, swirling rubbish. Gudgeon in the river at night.
Caught small bream and roach, in sunlight at 6am.
Japan surrendered. Hellish. Too tired for the river at night.
Almost five of us, on family walk by the Trent.
Two days packing. Goodbyes. A last fish of the river at night.
Martin Hayden
Thanks for these insights on the ghazal in English. You have returned to me a bit of self-confidence in my own judgement: after a spate a ghazals in a recent manuscript, I removed all but two, finding them contrived as a result of rhyming that called too much attention to itself, though this is something I seek to avoid. When they work, though, a ghazal in English works very well, and has, I think, a future in the language. (As an aside, and as a 75 year-old, I do not take too kindly to your cliche of the elderly poet writing nostalgically in old forms.) I love the interview you've done with Alice from the podcast Poetry Speaks and with Matthew Buckley Smith, host of Sleerickets. They are partly why I'm here now. Zara Raab
Thanks so much for commenting and subscribing Zara! And for following the link from the podcast. I should add a link to that somewhere on here. I've never done a podcast before but I really enjoyed it and Alice and Matthew made it very straightforward. I just saw a review by you of Matthew's book, which I enjoyed very much. I will certainly order it.
My observation about older writers sometimes confusing the dating process was very much based on my historical work -- I mean it was meant as a genuine observation not as a sarcastic aside. I'm not sure enough people write poetry, at least in English, today to make the same thing hold true, because you find this effect historically most often with people who are not primarily poets. But in the 16th and 17th century you do quite often see a poem in a manuscript for instance, which feels very strongly like a poem from, say, the 1560s and is actually written by an elderly person in the 1610s (or whatever). One quite famous (at the time) example is a long controversial Latin poem in sapphic stanzas the "Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoriae" written by Andrew Melville in 1604 (it was to this poem that George Herbert's first published collection, the "Musae Responsoriae", was responding, so it has a place in literary history). Melville was a first generation Protestant who was about 60 in 1604. Any literary historian dating his poem on form alone would probably put it in the 1570s or 1580s at the latest -- no-one was still using very long sapphics for polemical or invective verse in the early 17th century. Indeed, contemporary response made fun of his choice of form. Melville's poem was printed, caused a big stir and refers directly to contemporary events so we know for sure when it was written, but when you find things like that in an anonymous manuscript without any other info about the author or context, it can confuse the dating process so it's something you have to keep in mind, especially if you are trying to get a sense of when a form came in or went out of fashion. There's a similar, more obvious, problem dating handwriting which changes significantly between the mid-16th and the mid-17th century, so is usually quite a reliable guide to date but can be thrown off by a very elderly person.
Terrific survey and (as always) heroically restrained commentary on a contemporary poetic trend I’ve found pretty tedious. For what it’s worth, the aspect of contemporary ghazals I find most irritating is the insistence of nearly all American practitioners to include the word “ghazal” in the title, no matter how many other formal constraints they abandon in the body of the poem itself. It is as if one must be sure to announce one’s project lest one fail to get credit for taking on so fashionable a form, however lackadaisically.
Great write-up! I'm not a literature academic so apologies in advance if what I'm saying doesn't make much sense. I'm a big fan of Urdu ghazals (it's easy to be a fan if you know the language lol, they're a very pleasing form), but I also have trouble with their English counterparts. What I always wonder about English ghazals is why they end at a "solid" noun and not a prepositional phrase. A lot of Urdu ghazals have a phrase-ish refrain that simply translates to "to you/by me/for God/because of them/etc" as opposed to the concrete nouns in English (hips, bride, etc). In fact, I think Aragon's "au fond de la nuit" is more faithful to the Urdu form than most of what I've read in English. I also think more contemporary Urdu ghazals have also followed in the Anglophone fashion of making the couplets somewhat connected, but I'm sure that has also been influenced by the uptick of use of ghazals in Bollywood soundtracks.
Thanks so much for commenting Veeda. I actually cut a whole paragraph about exactly this point, so I'm really glad you brought it up. I noticed in the "Ghazals of Ghalib" book, which always explains what the refrain is, that many of the refrains are as you say either phrasal or also sometimes very short grammatical markers (e.g. sometimes just 'accusative marker'), and I was interested in just the point you make -- that these allow for much less "heavier" refrains than having to get often rather awkwardly to a particular noun each time. In the end I cut the paragraph because it seemed a bit technical and as I don't know any Urdu I was relying purely on my understanding of this (excellent!) book, so it's great to have the point raised independently by a native speaker. Good point too that Urdu ghazals have themselves drifted towards greater thematic/narrative connection more recently -- I watched a few videos of Bollywood ghazals so I see just what you mean.
I've enjoyed writing ghazals, they certainly provide a good exercise. Whether any of mine actually work I can't say.
I enjoy reading those relatively rare ghazals which really evoke atmosphere
I think you're right that they are a genuinely good exercise, which surely goes a long way to explaining their popularity. @zararaab in a comment upthread remarked that, revising the manuscript of her latest collection, she had decided to leave out all but two of the ghazals as she found them too contrived. I thought that was a fascinating glimpse into how they might be a productive part of a poet's "practice" as it were, even if they tend not to be entirely successful as poems in their own right. More generally, I have the impression that a lot of contemporary poets find it interesting to experiment with some formal constraints but perhaps lack confidence in inventing their own forms.
I feel like this may be a case of contemporary English poetics being at odds with the source material. Classical Persian poetry really is chock-full of singsong verse about wine and women (or boys) with a patina of sometimes nominal Islam. Lots of ruby lips, moon faces, musk-scented tresses, and bodies lithe like cyprus trees. Probably not a coincidence that Edward FitzGerald was born in the same year as Tennyson and the fad for The Rubaiyat peaked during the fin-de-siècle and early 20th century. People these days might be using the pretext of “world literature” to scratch the itch for something a bit more mannered and classical.
Thanks for commenting. I think you're right that the form is particularly well-suited to a very deep-rooted and widely understood sort of poetic economy, in which you can assume that all readers are familiar with a whole concatenation of nuances and associations attached to a series of "stock" words, images and scenarios. There is something similar in Sanskrit court poetry. And you're right that contemporary English poetry is very far removed from this sort of literary context, either among poets or readers.