What Lays The Foundation Of Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry

Urdu has a quite a rich and diverse cultural and historical evolutional journey to backup one of its most sough after genres, i.e. poetry. Its each and every poem has a uniqueness and distinction of its own, bestowing great appeal and satisfaction to its readers, but still, there are certain rules, regulations, and foundation stones upon which the amazing structure of its poems (and all of the poetry) is laid.

Described below are the most fundamental ones with respect to “Ghazal”, the most popular form of Urdu poetry. Ghazal is composed of distinct couplets, called “ashaar” indigenously. Now, each “ghazal” takes into account either all, or some of the factors given below.

• Bahar: defines the meter or length of the couplet, with the restriction for each line of the couplet to have same “bahar”. There are 19 types of “bahar” categorized into short, medium or long ones.

• Radeef: represent a word or phrase that is repeated at the end of second line of each couplet. It should be same throughout the poem.

• Matla: the first couplet of each ghazal is refered as matla.

• Maqta: a usual practice for Urdu poets to use a pen name called as “Takhallus” in the last couplet of a poem, that couplet is termed as makta.

• Qafiya: It is a rhyming pattern used ahead of radeef in every couplet.

To be honest, modern Urdu poetry is not particularly strict about the implementation of each and every rule as described here, but still, observance of majority of them is well into practice and highly remomended.