Manuchehri


Abu Najm Ahmad ibn Qaus ibn Ahmad Manuchehri, a.k.a. Manuchehri Damghani, was an 11th-century court poet in Persia and Afghanistan.
He was from Damghan in Iran and he is said to have invented the form of musammat in Persian poetry and to have written the best examples of this form. He traveled to Tabarestan and was admitted to the court of King Manuchihr of the Ziyarid dynasty. It is from here that he acquired his pen-name. He later was a royal poet in the court of Sultan Shihab ud-Dawlah Mas'ud I of Ghazni, son of Mahmud of Ghazna.
He left behind a divan, a collection of his shorter poems. His works were extensively studied and translated into French by Albert Kazimirski de Biberstein in 1886.
Manuchehri died in 1040 CE.

Sample Poetry

The following are the opening lines of one of his most famous musammāt:
Metre:
There are 35 stanzas, each of three couplets, with the rhyme scheme aaaaax, bbbbbx, cccccx, etc. The poet plays on the similar sounding words xīz "rise", xaz "marten", xazān "autumn", and on razān "vines" and razān "dyeing".
The metre is 3.3.14 in Elwell-Sutton's system, one of the various metres traditionally known as hazaj.