A Study of External music and its characteristics in the Poetry of Zhāleh Isfahāni

One of the fundamental elements of poetry is musicality, which has always maintained a strong and inseparable connection with poetic expression. The most immediate and prominent manifestation of this musicality is external rhythm, or prosodic metre, traditionally referred to as arūz. Zhāleh Isfahāni, a relatively lesser-known contemporary Iranian poet, demonstrates a remarkable and nuanced use of external rhythm in both her classical and Nimā’ī (modern) poems. A comprehensive study of her collected works reveals that, in her classical poetry, she employs 23 metrical patterns derived from nine classical Persian metres: ramal, hazaj, rajaz, mutaqārib, muzāre, mujtath, munsareḥ, khafīf, and sarī’. In her Nimā’ī poems, she adds the metre mutadārik to the previous ones, resulting in the use of ten distinct metrical bases. Among her classical poems, muzāre and mujtath are the most frequently used, while mujtath and hazaj dominate in her Nimā’ī verse. Isfahāni carefully harmonizes rhythm with content, often opting for smooth and flowing metres, commonly referred to as joybāri (stream-like). Many of her Nimā’ī poems exhibit uniform line lengths and equal numbers of metrical feet (arkān), usually not exceeding four per line, and with only a small number of single-foot lines. In metrically consistent Nimā’ī poems, she avoids monotony or transformation into baḥr-e ṭawīl (long classical poetry sans equal lines and stanzas) by skillfully using tercets for line endings. However, in some cases, improper line division and misplacement of hemistichs lead to occasional rhythmic irregularities, which could have been due to typesetting and layout. Her oeuvre also includes two examples of dual-metre poems, where verses shift between different metrical patterns.