Rubaʿi Rubaʿi Rubāʿī (from "rubāʿiyy", plural "rubāʿiyāt") is the term for a quatrain, a poem or a verse of a poem consisting of four lines. It refers specifically to a form of Persian poetry, or its derivative form in English and other languages In classical Persian poetry, the "ruba'i" is written as a four-line (or two-couplet) poem, with a rhyme-scheme AABA or AAAA. This is an example of a "ruba'i" from Rūmī's Dīwān-i Shams": The usual metre of a Persian "ruba'i", which is used for all four lines of the above quatrain by Rumi, is as follows: In the above scheme,
Decasyllabic quatrain decasyllabic quatrain contains a stiffness that can not be overcome: You can not vary your stops, as in blank verse or the Spenserian, there is not room enough: and the recurrent divisions necessatated by the stanza lack at once the conciseness and the continuity of the couplet, the variety and amplitude of the rhyme-royal, octave, or Spenserian itself. In his essay on "Annus Mirabilis", A. W. Ward suggests that the decasyllabic quatrain used by Davenant and Dryden, with its insistence on providing each quatrain with the "completeness" given by the final period, causes the verse to strike the reader as