About the meters used
in the Divan-e Ghalib
Ghalib was not very interested in metrical innovation or
experimentation. In the whole of his published Urdu divan
he has used only 19 meters, and all of them are
well-established within the traditional Perso-Arabic
metrical system.
For the purposes of this project, I didn’t want to have
to explain the whole metrical system, but I did want to
give the scansion of each ghazal in some quick and
convenient form. So I decided simply to number the meters
Ghalib used in his divan, in the order he used them. For
each ghazal, I provide a number from ‘G1’ onwards
that identifies its meter as one of those given in the
chart below. Long syllables ( = ) and short syllables ( -
) are marked, along with slashes for foot boundaries and
double slashes for quasi-caesura breaks (where an extra,
short ‘cheat syllable’ is allowed, like the one allowed at
the end of the line in all meters).
If you’d like to know more, check out *Urdu
Meter: A Practical Handbook*. It contains a thorough
and pragmatic account of how the Urdu metrical system
works (including a list of meters), with practice exercises for learning scansion, and
a bibliography of further readings. It was written for
non-native-speakers of Urdu, especially English-speakers,
and should be of help if you want to read classical or
modern ghazal with full understanding.
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