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. (And they are extremely popular — there’s one in pretty much every issue of all the poetry magazines I read in English.1) Despite their popularity, I couldn’t think of one I had found really convincing as a poem — they all seemed to me too self-conscious and “exercise-y”. I thought this was interesting since generally I enjoy formal dexterity, and this is one of relatively few standard forms you see regularly in contemporary poetry journals. Why have I found so few English examples truly satisfying and successful?
This links with one of my more general preoccupations — what makes the difference between the aesthetically successful importation of a poetic form from one language (and culture) to another, and an attempt that doesn’t come off? I’ve written before about how Ben Jonson tried (and failed) to get Pindaric odes off the ground in English fifty years before Cowley succeeded. And sometimes a short-lived vogue is so clearly delineated that you can date work by it. There’s a kind of Latin poem written in very short (5 syllable) lines which was fashionable in England for just a few decades in the second half of the sixteenth century: the vogue seems to have passed as abruptly as it arose and as a result a scholar can be fairly confident that a poem in this form dates originally from this period.2
In 400 years time, might the Anglophone ghazal be this sort of scholars’ friend — if you spot one, you’ll know that you’re almost certainly somewhere between 1995 and 2040?3 Or is it, by contrast, like the sonnet or the epigram or the verse letter, a form in the process of being ‘domesticated’, with a rich literary future before it? English epigrams from the 1570s, for example, are generally pretty clunky and long-winded attempts at what was at that point an almost purely Latin genre. None of the English ‘epigrams’ from this period have much if any of the nimble wit, word-play and concision we associate with the form — but by 1600 or so poets had really worked out how to do epigrams in English, by the late seventeenth century there were more in English than Latin, and it remains a productive literary form today.
Ghazals have an extremely long literary history in several languages, originating in Arabic verse of the seventh century, though most strongly associated with Persian poetry such as that of the mid-14th century Hafez and, more recently, with poets working also in Urdu such as Ghalib (1797-1869).4 Traditionally, they are love poems of an enigmatic and often mystical kind, in which the gender and identity of the beloved is unclear. I have enjoyed listening to several recordings of ghazals in performance, and I can read the Arabic script which means I can just about sound out lines and pick out the refrain and rhyme words in these three languages. Aside from a couple of terms of Persian nearly 20 years ago, though, I don’t speak or read any of them: so I write here, like most of my readers I imagine, as someone entirely outside this tradition.
First off, here are a few bits from John Hollander’s clever ghazal-as-mnemonic-for-the-ghazal:
For couplets the ghazal is prime: at the end
Of each one’s a refrain like a chime: “at the end.”But in subsequent couplets throughout the whole poem,
It’s this second line only will rhyme at the end.[. . .]
Dust and ashes? How dainty and dry! We decay
To our messy primordial slime at the end.[. . .]
You gathered all manner of flowers all day,
But your hands were most fragrant of thyme, at the end.
A ghazal consists of a series of five or more self-contained couplets, all in the same metre. Importantly they do not form a sequential narrative, and may be thematically and even tonally quite distinct. In the first couplet, both lines end with the same word or phrase (Hollander’s at the end). This phrase is then repeated at the end of the second line of each couplet. In addition, the word immediately before this refrain establishes a single rhyme which is sustained throughout the poem: in each case, the word immediately before the refrain rhymes with all the others. In Hollander’s poem, we can see prime and chime in the first couplet; then rhyme, slime and thyme in subsequent ones. Finally, the last couplet of the poem traditionally contains a kind of sphragis or signature, often partially concealed, which identifies the author. Here for instance is Marilyn Hacker alluding to her own name (hack) at the end of one of her many skilful ghazals:
Crave nothing, accept the morning’s washed and proffered air
brushing blued eyelids with an oblique desire.There was an other, an answer, there was a Thou
or there were mutilations suffered for your sake, desire.Without you, there is no poet, only some nameless hack
lacking a voice without your voice to speak desire.5
Very roughly speaking, imitation of this form in English seems to have come in two stages. In the 70s, 80s and 90s most English so-called ‘ghazals’ are just poems written in more-or-less stand-alone unrhyming couplets, generally with some attempt at an evocative atmosphere. You still see this sometimes, and one or two of the recommendations I received were for English poems of this kind. I actually quite liked some of the examples I was sent but they don’t really have anything much to do with the traditional form beyond the loosest sort of rhetorical similarity. This is not what most Anglophone poets mean by a ghazal today, and it’s not the kind of poem I was thinking of when I asked my question.
In 2000, Agha Shahid Ali, a champion of what he robustly called “real” ghazals, published an anthology of examples called Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. I don’t actually love most of these poems either, though it’s well worth reading for its range of styles and approaches. Ali modestly does not include any of his own poems in the anthology (though there are a couple in the introduction), but it was clearly his own ghazals which had the biggest impact upon Anglophone poets. Several people mentioned his collections Rooms Are Never Finished (2002) and Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2003). I also very much recommend his spirited introduction to the anthology.6 Ali was not at all afraid to explain where everyone had been going wrong, but also offers a very helpful glimpse of the performance context of a ghazal (he is writing about the Urdu tradition):
The audience (the ghazal is recited a lot) waits to see what the poet will do with the scheme established in the opening couplet [. . .] when the poet recites the first line of a couplet, the audience recites it back to him, and then the poet repeats it, and the audience again follows suit. This back and forth creates an immensely seductive tension because everyone is waiting to see how the suspense will be resolved in terms of the scheme established in the opening couplet [. . .] I should mention that a ghazal is often sung.
This really helped me make sense of what the form is aiming at. An actual musical setting, or if not at least a strongly musical, almost incantatory, style of recitation makes a refrain satisfying rather than merely repetitive. We are all familiar with this effect in songs, and it can be extremely evocative in poetry as well: think of the use of a refrain in Virgil’s eighth eclogue, or in many of Tennyson’s poems.7 Mimi Khalvati manages to write the erotic dynamic of the rhyme and refrain into one of her own ghazals:
If I am the grass and you the breeze, blow through me.
If I am the rose and you the bird, then woo me.If you are the rhyme and I the refrain, don’t hang
on my lips, come and I’ll come too when you cue me.8
In practice, contemporary ghazals take a range of approaches. Almost all now have a refrain; quite a large number adopt the rhyme word before the refrain and the reference to the author in the final verse, while often permitting half or partial rhymes; a smaller number are also composed in lines of equal syllabic length and/or the same number of stresses. Ali is quite clear in his introduction that the establishment of a strict metrical form is crucial to the effect of Urdu ghazals, as is Dick Davis in his very helpful preface on translating the Persian ghazals of Hafez, but this feature seems to be the one that is most often set aside by contemporary (especially American) poets in English. The most common contemporary form seems to be one in which all the lines are of similar but not identical syllabic lengths, usually without a fixed number of stresses. Like this one, by Zeina Hashem Beck (you can read the whole thing here):
The herons were no longer safe in the sky. They flew with prayer,
then fell to us. We hid them from the cats. What to do with prayer?Decades after the civil war, we enter the sniper’s hole, sew
the sandbags, read words for his boyfriend on the wall, true with prayer.Write my name & invite me to a wedding. I want a parade
of cars with flashers on, each blinking red, two times two with prayer.
Or this one (‘Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country’) by Angel Nafis:
Know what the almost-gone dandelion knows. Piece by piece
The body prayers home. Its whole head a veil, a wind-blown bride.When all the mothers gone, frame the portraits. Wood spoon over
Boiling pot, test the milk on your own wrist. You soil, sand, and mud grown bride.If you miss your stop. Or lose love. If even the medicine hurts too.
Even when your side-eye, your face stank, still, your heart moans bride.Fuck the fog back off the mirror. Trust the road in your name. Ride
Your moon hide through the pitch black. Gotsta be your own bride.Burn the honey. Write the letters. What address could hold you?
Nectar arms, nectar hands. Old tire sound against the gravel. Baritone bride.Goodest grief is an orchard you know. But you have not been killed
Once. Angel, put that on everything. Self. Country. Stone. Bride.
The looser the metrical structure of the rest of the poem, the greater the emphasis upon the repeated word or phrase. This is the nub of the technical problem I think: it is hard to find a way in English to prevent this word — especially when paired with often contrived rhymes — from dominating the poem in a way that swamps rather than reinforcing or opening up the meaning.
The ghazal doesn’t seem to have had the same intense vogue in contemporary French poetry. I looked through a couple of very recent anthologies and poetry journals from this year and last, and couldn’t find any examples. But they do crop up occasionally. I’m not an expert here and I’d love to receive other suggestions, but I was struck in particular by what the French poet Louis Aragon (1897-1982) does with the form.
Gazel au fond de la nuit9
Je suis rentré dans la maison comme un voleur
Déjà tu partageais le lourd repos des fleurs au fond de la nuit
J’ai retiré mes vêtements tombés à terre
J’ai dit pour un moment à mon coeur de se taire au fond de la nuit
Je ne me voyais plus j’avais perdu mon âge
Nu dans ce monde noir sans regard sans image au fond de la nuit
Dépouillé de moi-même allégé de mes jours
N’ayant plus souvenir que de toi mon amour au fond de la nuit
[. . .]
Va dire ô mon gazel à ceux du jour futur
Qu’ici le nom d’Elsa seul est ma signature au fond de la nuit !
Aragon’s version makes the refrain an addition to the couplet, rather than a part of the second line, and he does not maintain the same rhyme throughout; but he is faithful to the metrical integrity of the form in other ways. His lines are essentially classical alexandrines (the most common French kind of 12-syllable hexameter), with both lines in each couplet rhyming (futur / signature). In addition to these formal features, the subject of the poem, its tone and attitude, even elements of its vocabulary situate it within a recognisable Western tradition of love poetry stretching from Catullus and Propertius to Petrarch and Ronsard.
It’s noticeable also that his poem — like a lot of contemporary Anglophone ghazals — comes close to telling a lyric “story”: this is very far removed, as I understand it, from the traditions of the form, which avoids any kind of unity of this sort. Indeed, several poets — including Mimi Khalvati and Sarah Ghazal Ali — comment on the particular difficulty of reproducing in English the ‘disjunctive’ nature of a ghazal’s couplets. Although it may not be very authentic, the ‘unified’ ghazal can however be rather effective. Alexis Sears’s 2022 ‘Heartbreak Ghazal’ written in the aftermath of the school shooting at Uvalde has an obvious and indeed insistent “topic”, and leaves no room for ambiguity. In that sense, it’s not really a ghazal at all; but I do think it’s quite a successful poem, perhaps because it’s a rare instance in which what almost always feels in English like an overwhelming insistence on the repeat word or phrase is appropriate to the horror of the theme. We are indeed swamped by the ‘now’ of this poem, but that’s the point.
I enjoyed reading lots of ghazals this week, and thanks to all of my Twitter correspondents who wrote with suggestions. (For a collated list, follow this note.10) I admired ghazals by Mimi Khalvati and Marilyn Hacker in particular. But all the same, the best “real” ghazals struck me as generally impressive rather than truly beautiful and memorable, while the poems that most convinced me were mostly those — like Aragon's, and some of the many translations I read — that used different forms. For me, then, the jury is still out on the future of the ghazal in English. Perhaps the most likely outcome is neither total disappearance nor fully successful assimilation. There’s a third possibility, which is that like the villanelle the ghazal is destined to stay on the margins of the mainstream: a common “exercise” which is always a bit performative, often impressive and almost always (if we’re honest) unsuccessful, with just enough triumphant exceptions to keep poets trying. I don’t think I have yet read any single ghazal which seems to me to succeed as fully as the two or three best villanelles, but for this form in English it is still early days.
The most recent issue of Poetry London (108, summer 2024), for example, has ‘A Ghazal Born from Clay’ by Francis-Xavier Mukiibi.
The form is stichic adoneans. There is only a single late antique model for the use of this metre (Boeth. Cons. 1. met. 7), though it is also found occasionally in medieval Latin. I was able to identify the clarity and specificity of this trend as a result of my unfashionably spreadsheet-based approach to surveying early modern Latin verse in manuscript. I discuss the form in my book, A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry, pp. 84-85. Other noticeable though slightly less starkly delineated literary trends include the vogue for so called “epyllia” in the English verse of the 1590s; a fashion for asclepiad metres in Latin in the latter sixteenth century; and a fashion for iambic metres in Latin in the early and mid-seventeenth century.
Of course there’s always the occasional very elderly person still writing nostalgically in the forms of his or her youth, 50 years after they went out of fashion, just to trip up the unwary scholar.
Ghalib wrote in both Persian and Urdu, but it seems that it is his Urdu poetry which is better known today. Thanks to Twitter, I discovered a fantastic book on Ghalib: Aijaz Ahmad (ed.), Ghazals of Ghalib (Columbia UP, 1971), which for each poem prints the Urdu text, a literal translation, detailed notes, and then one or more contemporary English translations by poets including W. S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich.
From Marilyn Hacker, Desesperanto, W.W. Norton & Co, 2003, p. 98.
Two other pieces I found particularly helpful and illuminating where Dick Davis’ introduction to his translations of Hafiz and other Persian poets of the mid-fourteenth century (Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz, Penguin 2013), and this recent essay on ghazals by Sarah Ghazal Ali. For French speakers, Davis particularly recommends the French translation of Hafez with extensive commentary by Charles-Henri Fouchécour, Le Divan (Paris: Verdier, 2006).
'The Lady of Shallott’, ‘The Brook’, ‘Mariana’ and so on.
You can read the whole of this poem, which is one of my favourites, here. By rhyming twice on me in the final couplet, Khalvati indicates that the rhyme word me alludes to her own name Mimi. The penultimate stanza also rhymes me with Rumi, the Persian poet, and refers as well to Shamsuddin (that is, Hafez). Another of her ghazals, ‘Ghazal: In Silence’ is online here.
Louis Aragon, ‘Gazel du fond de la nuit’ from le Fou d'Elsa, 1963.
Here is a list of the suggestions of successful ghazals I received on Twitter, where they are available to read (or listen to) online: Marilyn Hacker, ‘The Dark Times’; Heather McHugh, ‘Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun’; Shadab Zeest Hasmi, ‘Broken Ghazal’; W. S. Merwin, ‘The Causeway’; Reginald Dwayne Betts, ‘Ghazal’; Zeina Hashem Beck, ‘Ghazal with Prayer’; Patricia Smith, ‘Hip-hop Ghazal’; Tarfia Faizullah, ‘Self-Portrait as Mango’; Alexis Sears, ‘Heartbreak Ghazal’; Angel Nafis, ‘Ghazal for becoming your own country’; Jamila Woods, ‘Ghazal for White Hen Pantry’; Munira Tabassum Ahmed, ‘Ghazal for Staying Sane’; Stuart Barnes, ‘Off-World Ghazal’.
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!
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.