Comments on "The Tear-filled Heart"

The Tear-filled Heart                                       Rhyme scheme: aaAbAbAbAbAbAbAbAbAbAb

What a travesty? (Set me free)                          aa

From brutality,   (set me free )    Refrain                          

Your ways are far too agrestic                          

The vulgarity; set me free                                 Aa

Your lies; no Qantas jets you own;

From depravity, set me free                              Aa

Even cats and dogs need respect

From bestiality, set me free                             Aa

In your mess you have lost your wits;

Have no chastity; set me free                          Aa

A rat will always be a rat;

From your vanity, set me free                         Aa    

Your Texas ranch is my prison

From calamity, set me free                             Aa

So many sad days I endure

From barbarity, set me free                            Aa

Trumpery is now my nightmare

From insanity, set me free                               Aa   

I see clearly you cannot love

You must Cassidy, set me free                       Aa

Your RiRi is on bended knees

From tragedy, please set me free.                   Aa


(July 17, 2015)


The Ghazal is a poem of five to fifteen couplets. It is made up of a short monorhyme. The first two verses rhyme with a repeated rhyme in the second of each succeeding couplet. The Ghazal usually deals with themes of love in a melancholy mood. The roots of the Ghazal blossomed in seventh-century Arabia and gained prominence in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century much credit to such poets as Rumi and Haftz. In the eighteenth-century, the Ghazal was used by poets writing in Urdu, a mix of the medieval languages of Northern India, including Persian. Among these poets, Ghalib is the recognized master.

Indian musicians such as Ravi Shankar and Begum Akhtar popularized the Ghazal in the English-speaking Diaspora during the 1960s. The poet Agha Shahid Ali introduced the Ghazal in its classical form to Americans.  Ali practiced his poetic craft in USA universities before cancer took his life in December of 2001. He left with English Poetry writers’ a legacy on how to write a Ghazal based on its traditional roots since it appeared from his many poetic statements he was not particularly a fan of Ghazal in free verse. His guidelines on how to write an English Ghazal suggested the following:

No enjambments between couplets

Couplets should be linked to a strict formal scheme

The rhyme scheme and refrain should remain the same throughout the Ghazal

Each line should have the same length inclusive of rhyme and refrain whether the verses 

are metrical or syllabic

The last couplet should be a signature couplet

The scheme of rhyme and refrain should emerge from the opening couplet of the Ghazal

These pointers have influenced how the poem, “The Tear-filled Heart” is written.  During the composition of this English Ghazal, every effort was made to ensure that the poem reflected this “constant longing”. The Ghazal is defined by this constant longing. This conforms to Ali's view. The poem, "The Tear-filled Heart" has eleven tetrameter couplets. A couplet has two successive verses of poetry, is usually of equal length and rhythmic correspondence with end-words that rhyme. The couplet is the shortest stanza form. It is joined frequently with other couplets, to form a poem with no stanzaic divisions.

A monorhyme is a poem in which all the verses have the same end rhyme. An end rhyme is a rhyme occurring in the terminating word or syllable of one verse of poetry with that of another verse, as oppose to internal rhyme.

The rhyme scheme used in this poem is -  aaAbAbAbAbAbAbAbAbAbAb representing as well the eleven stanzas in the poem. In a rhyme scheme, repeated rhymes are shown in capital letters. 

A refrain can sit on a stanza, verse, or phrase, generally pertinent to the central theme, which is repeated verbatim, usually at regular intervals throughout a poem, most often at the end of a stanza.