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Rubaiyat

Rubaiyat

Overview
"Rubāʿī" (رباعی) is Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. In terms of speakers, the Arabic macrolanguage is the largest member of the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million people as...

 for "quatrain
Quatrain
A Quatrain is a stanza of poetry consisting of four lines. Existing in various forms, the quatrain appears in poems from ancient civilizations including Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome continues into the 21st century where it is seen in works published in several languages.-Forms:*The heroic stanza...

", and is used to describe a Persian quatrain, or its derivative form in English and other languages. The plural form of the word, rubāʿiyāt (رباعیات - often anglicised rubaiyat), is used to describe a collection of such quatrains.

There are a number of possible rhyme scheme
Rhyme scheme
quote this will not help you at all with home work language practice week 7 msl students in 6th gradedo not use wiki for msl language practice week seven it will not help with unless we are doing stanza's and things...

s to the rubaiyat form, e.g. AABA, AAAA. . In Persian verse, a ruba'i is visually only two lines long, its rhyme falling at the middle and end of the lines.

The word "rubāʿī" is derived from the same Arabic root as "arbaʿa" (أربعة), meaning "four".

The verse form AABA as used in English verse is known as the Rubaiyat Quatrain due to its use by Edward FitzGerald
Edward FitzGerald (poet)
Edward FitzGerald was an English writer, best known as the poet of the first and most famous English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The spelling of his name as both FitzGerald and Fitzgerald is seen...

  in his famous 1859 translation, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in the Persian language and of which there are about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám , a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer...

.
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Encyclopedia
"Rubāʿī" (رباعی) is Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. In terms of speakers, the Arabic macrolanguage is the largest member of the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million people as...

 for "quatrain
Quatrain
A Quatrain is a stanza of poetry consisting of four lines. Existing in various forms, the quatrain appears in poems from ancient civilizations including Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome continues into the 21st century where it is seen in works published in several languages.-Forms:*The heroic stanza...

", and is used to describe a Persian quatrain, or its derivative form in English and other languages. The plural form of the word, rubāʿiyāt (رباعیات - often anglicised rubaiyat), is used to describe a collection of such quatrains.

There are a number of possible rhyme scheme
Rhyme scheme
quote this will not help you at all with home work language practice week 7 msl students in 6th gradedo not use wiki for msl language practice week seven it will not help with unless we are doing stanza's and things...

s to the rubaiyat form, e.g. AABA, AAAA. . In Persian verse, a ruba'i is visually only two lines long, its rhyme falling at the middle and end of the lines.

Etymology


The word "rubāʿī" is derived from the same Arabic root as "arbaʿa" (أربعة), meaning "four".

Ruba'i in English


The verse form AABA as used in English verse is known as the Rubaiyat Quatrain due to its use by Edward FitzGerald
Edward FitzGerald (poet)
Edward FitzGerald was an English writer, best known as the poet of the first and most famous English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The spelling of his name as both FitzGerald and Fitzgerald is seen...

  in his famous 1859 translation, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in the Persian language and of which there are about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám , a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer...

. Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, controversial in his own day. He invented the roundel form, wrote some novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.- Biography :...

, one of the first admirers of FitzGerald's translation of Khayyam's
Omar Khayyám
Omar Khayyám , , was a Persian polymath, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics, geography, music and was a physicist....

 medieval Persian verses, was the first to imitate the stanza form, which subsequently became popular and was used widely, as in the case of Robert Frost's
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...

 1922 poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a poem written in 1922 by Robert Frost, and published in 1923 in his New Hampshire volume. Imagery and personification are prominent in the work...

".

Fitzgerald’s translation became so popular by the turn of the century that hundreds of American humorists wrote parodies using the form and, to varying degrees, the content of his stanzas, including The Rubaiyat of Ohow Dryyam, The Rubaiyat of A Persian Kitten, The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Jr.

In extended sequences of ruba'i stanzas, the convention is sometimes extended so that the unrhymed line of the current stanza becomes the rhyme for the following stanza. The structure can be made cyclical by linking the unrhymed line of the final stanza back to the first stanza: ZZAZ. These more stringent systems were not, however, used by FitzGerald in his Rubaiyat.

Coinage



In the Islamic world the "ruba'i" designated a quarter-dinar
Dinar
The Dinar is the name of the official currency in several countries. The Gold Dinar was a coin dating back to the early days of Islam, issued by many rulers, and the Islamic gold dinar is a modern revival of it as a coin or unit of account, separate from the currencies listed below...

, weighing 1.05g of gold. The ruba'i had been minted by the Muslims in Sicily
Sicily
Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. It is an autonomous region of Italy. Several much smaller islands surrounding it are considered to be part of Sicily....

, unlike the Muslim rulers of North Africa, who preferred the larger dinar. It became highly popular as it was smaller and therefore more convenient than the large-sized 4.25g dinar. This type of coin was named tarì
Tarì
A tarì was the Christian designation of a type of gold coin of Islamic origin minted in Sicily, Malta and South Italy from about 913 to 1859.-History:...

by Christians and was largely adopted in Sicily and mainland Italy.