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,
Metre (poetry) metrical patterns are made of long and short syllables, much as in Classical Greek, Latin and Arabic. "Anceps" positions in the line, however, that is places where either a long or short syllable can be used (marked "x" in the schemes below), are not found in Persian verse except in some metres at the beginning of a line. Persian poetry is written in couplets, with each half-line (hemistich) being 10-14 syllables long. Except in the ruba'i (quatrain), where either of two very similar metres may be used, the same metre is used for every line in the poem. Rhyme is