Ruba'i

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Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Ruba'i of 12th century Persian poet and philosopher, Omar Khayyam.

Ruba'i is Persian word for quatrain and a collection of quatrains is called Ruba'iyat ^[1] or rubaiyat (Arabic: رباعیات) (a plural word derived from the root arba'a meaning 'four') means "quatrains" in the Persian language. Other spellings, rubai, ruba'ee, rubayi, rubayee ^[2].

The Rubaiyat is the only original contribution the Persians made to poetic form - there are a number of patterns to the Rubaiyat form ie AABA, AAAA. ("Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press, 1974, p.611") . The rhyme scheme AABA, is lines 1, 2 and 4 rhyme. In Persian verse, a rubai is visually only two lines long, its rhyme scheme at in the middle and ends of the lines.

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. Charles Algernon 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 rubaiyat 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.