Kamil (metre)

Kāmil (Arabic الكامل "the perfect") is the second commonest metre (after the ṭawīl) used in pre-Islamic and classical Arabic poetry.[1] The form of the metre is as follows (where "–" represents a long syllable, "u" a short syllable, and "o" one long or two shorts):[2][3]

| o – u – | o – u – | o – u – |

The mnemonic words (tafāʿīl) used by Arab prosodists to describe this metre are: Mutafāʿilun Mutafāʿilun Mutafāʿilun (مُتَفَاعِلُنْ مُتَفاعِلُنْ مُتَفَاعِلُنْ).

An example of the metre is the qasida by the 10th-century poet al-Mutanabbi which opens as follows:

بأبي الشُّموسُ الجانِحاتُ غَوارِبَ * أللاّبِساتُ مِنَ الحَريرِ جَلابِبَا
ألمُنْهِباتُ عُقُولَنَا وقُلُوبَنَا * وجَناتِهِنّ النّاهِباتِ النّاهِبَا
bi-’abi š-šumūsu l-jāniḥātu ḡawāribā
al-lābisātu mina l-ḥarīri jalābibā
al-munhibātu ‘uqūlanā wa-qulūbanā
wa-janātihinna n-nāhibāti n-nāhibā
| uu – u – | – – u – | uu – u – |
| – – u – | uu – u – | uu – u – |
| – – u – | uu – u – | uu – u – |
| uu – u – | uu – u – | – – u – |
"By my father, those suns (i.e. women) inclining to the west
who dress in garments of silk
and cause us to lose our minds and hearts
and whose paradises steal even the thief!"

Although relatively common in Arabic, this metre is not used in Persian poetry,[4] or in Turkish[5] or (with rare exceptions) in Urdu.[6] It resembles the wāfir metre in that it makes use of biceps elements (that is, places in the verse where two short syllables can be replaced by one long one).

Two of the famous seven pre-Islamic Muʿallaqāt poems (the 4th and 6th) are written in the kāmil metre.[6]

References

  1. ↑ Golston, Chris & Riad, Tomas (1997). "The Phonology of classical Arabic meter". Linguistics 35 (1997), 111-132; p. 120.
  2. ↑ McCarus, Ernest N. (1983). "Identifying the Meters of Arabic Poetry", Al-'Arabiyya vol 16. no. 1/2, pp. 57-83. (Georgetown University Press).
  3. ↑ Wright, W. (1951). A Grammar of the Arabic Language, vol. II, Cambridge University Press; pp. 350-390.
  4. ↑ L. P. Elwell-Sutton (1986), Article: Aruz (Encyclopaedia Iranica)
  5. ↑ Deo, A; Kiparsky, P. (2011) "Poetries in Contact: Arabic, Persian, and Urdu". In M. Lotman (ed.) Frontiers of Comparative Metrics. Bern, New York: Peter Lang.
  6. 1 2 R.P. Dewhurst (1917) "The Metres of Hafiz and Atish". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland pp. 383-385

See also

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