Ghazal
Quick answer: The ghazal is a form of autonomous couplets bound by refrain and rhyme, from Hafiz to Agha Shahid Ali. Learn its rules and how to write one in English.
Few forms inspire the devotion the ghazal commands. For over a thousand years it has been the signature lyric of Arabic, Persian and Urdu poetry: a chain of self-contained couplets, each one a finished poem, bound together not by narrative but by a repeated refrain and the rhyme that precedes it. The subject is classically love, longing for the beloved, for the divine, for what cannot be had, but the form has carried politics, mysticism, exile and wit.
A ghazal does not develop an argument; it circles a wound. Each couplet strikes the same note from a new direction, and the recurring refrain lands each time with altered weight. Done well, the effect is closer to song than to essay, which is fitting, since ghazals are still sung nightly across South Asia and beyond.
From Arabia through Persia to the world
The ghazal grew out of seventh-century Arabic love poetry and reached one summit in Persia, where Rumi turned it toward mystical rapture in the thirteenth century and Hafiz of Shiraz perfected its worldly-divine double vision in the fourteenth. Urdu poets made it the centre of their literature: Mir Taqi Mir in the eighteenth century, Ghalib in the nineteenth, whose couplets remain proverbial across South Asia. In English, the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali campaigned for the true form, editing the anthology Ravishing DisUnities and writing the couplets collected in Call Me Ishmael Tonight, and it is largely thanks to him that English ghazals now keep the rules.
The rules, named and numbered
The ghazal's machinery has Persian names worth learning, because each part has a job.
Writing your first real ghazal
Choose the radif first, since everything hangs from it: a phrase that can bear repetition and reinterpretation, like 'in the rain' or 'even now'. Then list a dozen qafiya rhymes that can sit before it. Draft the matla to establish the music, then write each couplet as its own two-line poem: different scene, different register, same returning chime. Resist the urge to connect them; the disunity is the design. Finish with the maqta, addressing or naming yourself with tenderness or irony.
Order the couplets last, by musical instinct rather than logic, keeping the strongest for the end. A finished ghazal makes a fine test piece for a contest round, and Writory's judges see the form's structure and emotional range especially clearly when the radif genuinely shifts meaning across the poem.
What it holds best, and the usual failure
The ghazal suits longing in all its forms: erotic, spiritual, political, elegiac. Agha Shahid Ali used it for exile; Ghalib for grief and gallows wit. It cannot tell a story, and it resents being forced to. The common beginner failure is writing one poem chopped into couplets, with enjambed sense running across them. If any couplet cannot stand alone on a page and satisfy, the ghazal is not yet a ghazal.
What poets can take from this
- Choose a radif that can change meaning with each return.
- List your qafiya rhymes before drafting any couplets.
- Make every couplet a complete, freestanding poem.
- Keep line lengths consistent and never enjamb across couplets.
- Sign the final couplet with your name or an invented pen name.
- Read Ghalib and Agha Shahid Ali before writing your second ghazal.
Try it yourself
Write a ghazal of seven couplets with the radif 'at the border', letting the phrase mean something geographic, emotional or bodily in different couplets, and sign the maqta with a pen name you invent for yourself.
Questions
What are the radif and qafiya in a ghazal?
The radif is the repeated word or phrase ending both lines of the opening couplet and the second line of every later couplet. The qafiya is the rhyme that sounds immediately before the radif each time. Together they are the ghazal's binding music.
Do the couplets of a ghazal need to connect?
Not narratively. Each couplet must stand alone, complete in sense and feeling; the poem coheres through its refrain, rhyme, meter and mood. Agha Shahid Ali called this quality 'ravishing disunity', and it is the form's defining feature.
How many couplets should a ghazal have?
Tradition says at least five, and rarely more than fifteen. Seven to nine is a comfortable range for a first attempt: enough for the refrain to accumulate meaning without exhausting it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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