A Persian and Arabic verse form of rhyming couplets, each couplet free to establish its own new rhyme rather than carrying one rhyme through the whole poem, which frees the form for great length and made it the standard vehicle for extended narrative, romantic, mystical and didactic poetry across the Persianate world.
Facts
Place of OriginPersia, flourishing from the 11th century onward across the Persianate literary world. 1 StructureRhyming couplets (each line-pair AA, BB, CC...), with no rhyme carried between couplets, permitting indefinite length. 1 Notable ExampleRumi's Masnavi-ye Ma'navi and Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, both major masnavi-form works. 1 Connections
Associated With
Form Of Genre
Epic, Genres Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Sources
1. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Princeton University Press
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