Kamil (metre)


Kāmil is the second commonest metre used in pre-Islamic and classical Arabic poetry. The usual form of the metre is as follows :
The mnemonic words used by Arab prosodists to describe this metre are: Mutafāʿilun Mutafāʿilun Mutafāʿilun.
The kāmil resembles the wāfir metre in that it makes use of biceps elements.

In Arabic poetry

The kāmil metre has been used for Arabic poetry since early times and accounts for about 18%-20% of the poems in early collections. Two of the famous seven pre-Islamic Mu‘allaqāt poems are written in the kāmil metre. One of these is the mu‘allaqa of Labid ibn Rabi‘a, which begins as follows:
Another, later, example of the metre is the qasida by the 10th-century poet al-Mutanabbi which opens as follows:
As can be seen, the most common form of the metron is | uu – u – | and the contracted form | – – u – | occurs in the above example in only one third of the cases.

In Persian poetry

Although relatively common in Arabic, this metre is scarcely ever used in Persian poetry. One post-classical exception, by the 18th-century poet Hatef Esfahani, is a short 6-couplet ghazal which begins as follows:
This Persian version is a tetrameter, divided into two dimeters, and every metron is of the form | uu – u – |. Hatef's poem is traditionally sung to a melody called Chahārbāgh, named after the well-known avenue Chaharbagh in Isfahan.

In Turkish and Urdu

The kāmil metre is also not found in Ottoman Turkish or in Urdu.