Rubai - Rubaiyat

A single quatrain is a Rubai, several together become a Rubaiyat.

Rubāʿī" (رباعي) is a poetry style, the Arabic term for "quatrain". It is used to describe a Persian quatrain, or its derivative form in English and other languages. The plural form of the word, rubāʿiyāt (رباعیات ), often anglicised rubaiyat, is used to describe a collection of such quatrains.[1]

There are a number of possible rhyme schemes to the rubaiyat form, e.g. AABA, AAAA.[2] In Persian verse, a ruba'i visually contains only four lines, its rhyme falling at the middle and end of the lines.

The verse form AABA as used in English verse is known as the Rubaiyat Quatrain due to its use by Edward FitzGerald in his famous 1859 translation, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Algernon Charles Swinburne, one of the first admirers of FitzGerald's translation of Khayyam'smedieval Persian verses, was the first to imitate the stanza form, which subsequently became popular and was used widely, as in the case of Robert Frost's 1922 poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".

Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruba'i>

Pasted from <http://allpoetry.com/list/549121-Rubai_>

Example Poem

Free Agent  (Rubaiyat)

Testosterone Tom was a monstrous man

raised in the arctic where caribou ran.

When he ate there weren't left-overs;  Tom'd

never heard of baseball, bagels, or flan.

Like a fish to an aquarium  sent,

or a monkey to a zoo, our Tom spent

his first weeks in Maine looking for control.

Slowly festering smarts would now augment.

Tom learned of the NFL, why quibble.

For this quest he had no need to dribble.

For his size there was no counter-balance,

We'll not divulge teams taking a nibble.

     © Lawrencealot - December 29, 2012

I used the following words, one per line per contest requirements

TESTOSTERONE , ARCTIC,  LEFT-OVERS, BASEBALL,  AQUARIUM, MONKEY, CONTROL           

FESTERING,  QUIBBLE, QUEST,  COUNTER-BALANCE, DIVULGE

Visual Template