What Is a Rubai?
Quick answer: A rubai is a Persian quatrain rhyming AABA, made world-famous by Omar Khayyam. Learn how the form works, its history, and how to write your own rubaiyat.
A rubai is a Persian verse form: a self-contained quatrain, four lines usually rhyming AABA, that states a thought, complicates it and closes it with a snap. The plural is rubaiyat, the word most readers know from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald's celebrated English rendering first published in 1859.
The rubai is one of poetry's great small machines. In Persian it is governed by a strict family of metres as well as the rhyme; in English the metre requirement falls away and the form is defined by its quatrain shape, its AABA rhyme and, above all, its way of thinking: two lines of setup, a pivot, and a final line that lands like a verdict.
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, 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam' (1859)
The shape of a rubai
The classic scheme is AABA: the first, second and fourth lines rhyme, while the third stands free. Some rubaiyat rhyme all four lines, AAAA, but the AABA pattern is the signature, and the unrhymed third line is the form's secret weapon. It works like a held breath, a moment where the poem steps sideways, raises an objection or opens a window, before the fourth line returns to the rhyme and shuts the door.
Each rubai is complete in itself. Even when poets collect hundreds of them, as the Persian tradition did, every quatrain is a freestanding poem, closer to an epigram than to a stanza. In Persian the form also demands one of a small set of permitted metrical patterns, a constraint English adaptations quietly drop, usually substituting iambic pentameter or tetrameter.
Omar Khayyam and the FitzGerald phenomenon
Omar Khayyam, the eleventh and twelfth century Persian mathematician and astronomer, is the name the world attaches to the rubai, through the hundreds of sceptical, wine-praising, time-haunted quatrains attributed to him. Edward FitzGerald's English version appeared in 1859, sank without notice, was discovered in a bookseller's bargain box, and went on to become one of the most quoted books of poetry in the English language.
FitzGerald was frank that he had reshaped his material freely, merging quatrains, inventing connections, tuning Persian scepticism to a Victorian ear. Whatever it cost in fidelity, it fixed the AABA quatrain permanently in English verse, and gave the language lines that readers still carry.
How a rubai thinks
The form's logic is nearly legal in its structure. Lines one and two state a proposition and secure it with rhyme. Line three, released from rhyme, turns: it doubts, digresses, sharpens or swerves. Line four returns to the rhyme sound and delivers the judgement, and because the ear has been waiting two lines for that sound to come back, the close feels inevitable, like the resolving chord in music.
This is why the rubai has always attracted philosophical and satirical poets. It is an argument in miniature with a built-in verdict. If the sonnet is a courtroom, the rubai is a gavel.
The rubai beyond Khayyam
Khayyam neither invented the form nor exhausted it. Rubaiyat were a standard vessel across classical Persian literature: thousands are attributed to the mystic Rumi, and poets such as Attar used the quatrain for devotional and philosophical work centuries before FitzGerald. The form travelled with Persian literary culture into Urdu, where it became a favourite vehicle for moral and elegiac epigram; Mir Anis, the great nineteenth century Urdu poet, is especially admired for his rubaiyat.
In each language the constants hold: four lines, the AABA turn, the self-contained thought. The subjects range from wine to God to grief, often within a single poet's collection, which tells you the form itself has no favourite topic, only a favourite shape of argument.
Interlocking rubaiyat
English poets found a way to chain the quatrains. In an interlocking rubaiyat, the unrhymed third line of each stanza supplies the rhyme sound of the next: AABA, then BBCB, then CCDC, and so on, each stanza handing its loose thread to the one that follows. The chain traditionally closes with a stanza rhyming all four lines, tying off the final thread.
The most famous poem in this pattern is Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' (1923), which follows the interlocking scheme exactly and closes by repeating its final line, an elegant alternative way of sealing the chain. It is worth studying as proof of how naturally the Persian machinery runs in plain American English.
Writing your own
Start with the verdict. A rubai is built backwards from its fourth line, so decide what the poem finally knows, then construct the two-line setup and the third-line swerve that make the ending feel earned. Keep the language plain; the form supplies the elegance. Here is an original example in tetrameter: 'The last guest gone, the porch light on, / I sweep the crumbs of talk till dawn; / you ask me why I host at all: / to hear the quiet when they're gone.'
Notice the machinery working: two lines of scene, a third line that pivots into a question and declines the rhyme, and a fourth that answers both the question and the ear at once. Write ten of these on ten different subjects and you will learn more about endings than a month of free verse can teach.
What poets can take from this
- Build the rubai backwards: settle the fourth line's verdict first, then earn it.
- Guard the third line's freedom; if it rhymes by accident, the pivot loses its lift.
- Choose a rhyme sound with plenty of natural English words before you commit to it.
- Keep each quatrain complete; if it needs its neighbour to make sense, it is a stanza, not a rubai.
- Read FitzGerald aloud for the cadence, then Frost for proof the form works in plain speech.
- For a sequence, try the interlocking scheme and let each third line seed the next stanza.
Try it yourself
Write a rubai in which the first two lines describe an everyday ritual (making tea, locking up, feeding a cat), the third line asks why you keep doing it, and the fourth line answers with something the reader does not expect.
Questions
What is the difference between a rubai and a ghazal?
A rubai is a single four line poem rhyming AABA and complete in itself. A ghazal is a chain of couplets, usually five or more, sharing a refrain and rhyme, with each couplet standing alone in sense. Both come from Persian literature, but they are entirely different machines.
How many syllables does a rubai have?
In Persian, the rubai must follow one of a small set of traditional metrical patterns, each line commonly running around thirteen syllables. In English there is no fixed count; poets usually write in iambic pentameter or tetrameter and keep the AABA rhyme as the defining rule.
Is Frost's 'Stopping by Woods' a rubaiyat?
Formally, yes. The poem uses interlocking rubaiyat stanzas, with each third line supplying the next stanza's rhyme sound, and it seals the chain by repeating its final line. Frost turned a Persian pattern into one of the most famous poems in American English.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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