Rubai
Quick answer: A rubai is a Persian quatrain rhyming AABA, the four-line form made world famous by Omar Khayyam. Learn how the rubai works and how to write your own.
A rubai is a four-line Persian poem, a quatrain, that usually rhymes AABA: the first, second and fourth lines share a rhyme while the third stands free. The plural is rubaiyat, a word most readers know from Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation of Omar Khayyam. The form is compact and complete, four lines that must open a thought, complicate it and close it with a click.
Persian poets used the rubai for philosophy in miniature: fate, wine, mortality, the rudeness of time. Because the third line escapes the rhyme, it acts as a held breath, and the fourth line lands with the force of an answer. The shape rewards a poet who can think in arcs rather than lists, which is why judges reading short-form entries at Writory's monthly contest so often see the quatrain used for a poem's final punch.
The poem
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Edward FitzGerald, 'The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam' (1859)
How the AABA Turn Works
The unrhymed third line is the hinge of the whole machine. Lines one and two establish a rhyme and a claim; line three swerves; line four returns to the rhyme carrying whatever the swerve discovered. An invented example:
The clock forgives no one, and least of all the proud; / it files the mountain down, it thins the crowd. / I asked it for a single extra summer. / It answered by continuing, out loud.
Feel how the third line's request makes the fourth line's return to the rhyme sound like fate closing a door.
Khayyam and the Famous Rubaiyat
Omar Khayyam, the eleventh-century Persian mathematician and astronomer, left quatrains that FitzGerald gathered and freely translated in 1859. The book became one of the most quoted poems in English. This stanza shows the form's fatalism at full power:
Writing Your Own
Keep each rubai to a single thought with a twist; the form has no room for scenery. Draft the fourth line early, since the whole quatrain exists to arrive there, then build the first two lines toward it and spend your revision time on the third line's swerve. A chain of rubaiyat can carry a long meditation, but each stanza should still close like a well-made box.
What poets can take from this
- Write the last line first; a rubai is an arrow and the fourth line is the target.
- Use the unrhymed third line to change direction, not to rest.
- Keep one image per quatrain; four lines cannot host a crowd.
- Read Khayyam in two translations to hear how much the form itself carries.
- If you chain rubaiyat into a sequence, let each stanza still stand alone.
Try it yourself
Write three rubaiyat on the same object, an ordinary one such as a spoon or a doorknob, letting each quatrain's third line take the object somewhere stranger.
Questions
What rhyme scheme does a rubai use?
Most commonly AABA, with lines one, two and four rhyming. Some classical rubaiyat rhyme all four lines AAAA, which is equally accepted in the Persian tradition.
Is the rubai the same as any quatrain?
No. A quatrain is any four-line stanza, while the rubai is a specific Persian form with its own rhyme pattern and, classically, its own restricted set of metres. Every rubai is a quatrain, but not the reverse.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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