Such a numbing echo becomes repeated through the ballad in the deadness of a poem with
monorhyme and, frequently, an otto rhyme on "dead." Aside from the refrain, the ballad maintains a variation on iambic tetrameter, with an anapestic substitution in each line:
In fact, ordered copies of Esrefoglu's divan distinguish only between three types of poem:
monorhyme, mesnevi, and rubai; the first (and largest) group is undifferentiated as to subject matter.
A discussion of the ghazals cosmopolitanism must include a brief history of the ghazal and its transmutations from the original Arabic: the earliest ghazals were romantic odes included as one of the segments of the qasida--a long, multisegmented poem written in
monorhyme (with a set of predetermined themes) that sixth-century Arab Bedouins composed as their caravans traveled from oasis to oasis, reciting these poems at campsites.
Lovelock and Lowbury (53) suggest that Trench, a forgotten Victorian poet, inherits from his involvement in Oriental literature the
monorhyme of the ghazal.Few studies examine Arnold's Orientalism.
Ghazal is a short
monorhyme consisting of successive couplets whose lines all end with the same refrain phrase, thus they form a rhyme scheme of aa, ba, ca, etc.
In the bravura array of "new poems," we find
monorhyme, haiku, a fugue, paragraphs (a form invented by Hayden Carruth, to whom this poem is addressed), three sets of sapphics, two sets of renga composed with Deema Shahabi, four sestinas, alcaics for her daughter's wedding, a double sonnet, the crown of sonnets, four scrupulously perfect ghazals, and the stanza (pentameter aaba) used by Edward Fitzgerald when he translated "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." Look anywhere in this book and find treasure.
Second and just as important is Hamby's use of poetic form: extensive rhyme--mostly
monorhyme and couplets; sonnets; and varieties of abecedarian, including both a wickedly complex form she calls a "double-helix abecedarian" and a virtuosic 26 poem sequence of "abecedarian sonnets." These forms not only bring a rich musicality to the collection--Hamby is a gifted and clever rhymer--but they also put pressure on Hamby's American English, giving order to the "teeming" fluency of what she calls her "scattershot brain." Prosody turns the potentially prosaic into "bouquets, folios, flocks of black and flaming birds."
In place of the
monorhyme of the original, which is virtually impossible to reproduce in English, Halkin sensibly deploys, as he does often elsewhere, an irregular pattern of slant rhymes (stone-moon-gown) and almost-rhymes (sweets-feast).
The repetition of the same rhyme, a
monorhyme, is applied by Borodin with a satirical purpose.
There was a convention that poets payed homage to some great poet by writing a poem similar to one of his poems, in the same metre, using the same
monorhyme, and adopting some of its key expressions.
Borges manages this effect even when he uses
monorhyme, as for example in his poem "Arte poetica" in which he speaks of music.
And the preceding couplet seems consistent with this perspective: it again offers a vision of return, with Lorca's Spanish adaptation of another ancient Arabic poetic form--the sequence of
monorhyme couplets known as a qasida--somehow returning to the form's "native" language after the poet's death.