Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
The basic organizing principle of Syriac poetry is syllable (hegyānā) count. Although it has sometimes been
claimed that stress patterns also played a role, this has never been
satisfactorily substantiated. Rhyme is occasionally found in early poetry,
but it is only used for special effect. The regular use of rhyme becomes a
common feature from about the 9th cent. onwards, due to the influence of
Arabic poetry. Acrostics, both alphabetic and spelling out the author’s
name, are already found in
There are two main forms of poetry: 1. The memrā, or
narrative poem, employing couplets all in the same syllabic meter; the most
common meters are those associated with
memrā has been conventionally
translated by Latin carmen ‘song’, memre were probably recited rather than sung; 2. The stanzaic
poem, or madrāšā (often translated ‘hymn’); here each
stanza (baytā) follows the same syllabic pattern (mšuḥtā). These patterns may either be simple, built
up of units of the same number of syllables (qāle, and many more
subsequently came into use; in this context the term qālā properly denotes the melody to which the madrāšā was to be sung, but the qālā title
also serves as an indicator of the meter and would usually be taken from the
opening words of a particular madrāšā; thus, for
example, the qālā title for Ephrem’s Nisibene madrāšā no. 50 is given as a(n)t
mār(y) aktebtāh, which are the opening words of no. 10 of his madrāše on Faith. According to some scholars the madrāšā was not originally sung, and it was
Later on, terms for certain sub-categories of the madrāšā were introduced, notably qālā and
soghithā. In the liturgical books qālā became a generic term for stanzaic verse. The
Chronicle of
soghyāthā (and
zmirāthā) as well as memre, and indeed a few of these survive, alongside his much more
familiar memre. In due course the term soghithā came to designate four-line poems with a
simple meter, usually 7+7 7+7 (or, in Maron. tradition, 8+8), with or
without an alphabetic acrostic. A sub-category of the soghithā was the dialogue, or dispute, poem (normally with an
alphabetic acrostic), where two protagonists speak in alternating verses.
This particular literary genre, taken up in many different languages of the
Middle East, can be traced back to the precedence disputes of Ancient
Mesopotamia, and it has remained popular right up to the present day (some
examples in Neo-Aramaic dialects are known).
Two Greek poetic repertoires were taken over (as prose translations) into the
Syr. Orth. tradition, the maʿnyotho of
qonune, or ‘canons’. It was under
the influence of Melkite translations of Greek ‘canons’ by
qonune yawnoye ‘Greek canons’, largely
translated from Greek, took as their starting point the Canticles (or Odes),
while the qonune suryoye, ‘Syriac canons’, were
Syriac compositions, based on Ps. 51 (and other psalms).
From about the 9th cent. Syriac began to adopt various features
characteristic of Arabic poetry; most notable among these were various forms
of rhyme (initial and internal, as well as end rhyme). The influence of
Arabic can also be seen in many of the poems that make up
Genuinae relationes
inter sedem apostolicam et Assyriorum orientalium seu Chaldaeorum
ecclesiam [1902], 159).
An early classification of the qāle used by Ephrem is
found in a 7th-cent. ms. on Sinai (ed. A. de Halleux, in
In the 17th cent. the great Maron.
Patr. and scholar,
Liber thesauri de arte poetica
syrorum (1875; an anthology of late poets, with Arabic
introduction).
Since verse has always frequently been a medium of instruction, it can be found used also for subjects that might surprise Western readers, such as exegesis, astronomy, chronology, and grammar.
A list of the main Syriac poets in the Syr. Orth. tradition is given by
Scattered pearls,
Scattered pearls,
See also
ʿOnitha
.