A literary history of Persia

DOWN TO A.D. 1000 473Persian poetical genius. Allusion has already been made toone of the stock anecdotes given by the biographers as to thefirst occasion on which Persian verse was composed inMuhammadan times ;the anecdote, namely, which ascribesa single misrd 1 to the chance utterance of a gleeful child. InDawlatshah's Memoirs (pp. 30-31 of my edition) this child issaid to have been the son of Amfr Ya'qubb.Layth theSaffaYid ;but latelyI have come across a much older versionof the storyinthe British Museum manuscript Or. 2814 of avery rare work on Persian Prosody and Rhetoric entitledal-Mifjam ft ma'dblri a^arfl-^Ajam^ composed about A.H.617 (=A.D. 12201221) by Shams-i-Qays.In this version(ff. 49 b ~5o b of the above-mentioned manuscript) the verse(" ghalatdn ghalatdn haml rawad td bun-i-kii"} and theanecdote are nearly the same, but the child is unnamed andnot represented as of royal patronage, while it is not the AmirYa'qub but the poet RudagI "or some other of the ancientpoets of Persia" who is the auditor and admirer. He,according to the author, after an examination of the hemistichin question, "evolved out of the akhrab and akhram varieties ofthe hazaj metre a measure which they call the * Quatrainmeasure,' 1 and which is indeed a graceful measure and apleasant and agreeable form of verse ;in consequence ofwhich most persons of taste and most cultivated natures havea strong inclination and leaning towards it." The quatrain,then, may safely be regarded as the most ancient essentiallyPersian verse-form, while next to this comes theTheMathnawf. '. ,. ,mathnawly or poem in "doublets, which isgenerallynarrative, and where the rhyme changes in each couplet.The portion of the Shdhndma composed by Daqfqf is probablythe oldest Persian mathnawi poem of which any considerableportion has been preserved to us, though fragments of Rudagf's1See Blochmann's Prosody of the Persians, p. 68, where the twentyfourrubd'i metres, of which half are derived from each of these twovarieties of the hazaj metre, are given in full.