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Rubaiyat
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"Ruba?i" is Arabic for "quatrain", and is used to describe a Persian quatrain, or its derivative form in English and other languages. The plural form of the word, ruba?iyat (??????? - often anglicised rubaiyat), is used to describe a collection of such quatrains.
There are a number of possible rhyme schemes 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.
word "ruba?i" is derived from the same Arabic root as "arba?a", meaning "four".
verse form AABA as used in English verse is known as the Rubaiyat Quatrain due to its use by Edward FitzGerald in his famous 1859 translation, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

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Encyclopedia
"Ruba?i" is Arabic for "quatrain", and is used to describe a Persian quatrain, or its derivative form in English and other languages. The plural form of the word, ruba?iyat (??????? - often anglicised rubaiyat), is used to describe a collection of such quatrains.
There are a number of possible rhyme schemes 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 "ruba?i" is derived from the same Arabic root as "arba?a", 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 in his famous 1859 translation, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Algernon Charles Swinburne, one of the first admirers of FitzGerald's translation of Khayyam's 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 1922 poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".
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.
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