Musaddas Poems | Examples

Death of Plotinus

Friendly sage from the starless height 
Now dying without fright 
In his human and earthly sight 
The cosmos dimmed its light 
Dying from old diphtheria 
Still his will looked higher 

He lost his voice to teach and greet 
That poured wisdom so sweet 
All he could do was meekly bleat 
Uclers formed on his feet 
Uclers broke through his gentle hands 
And sweat poured from his glands 

“I’ve been waiting to see 
You at last before I am free 
The Divine within me 
I will give back with childlike glee 
To the Good and Divine 
To the highest, beautiful Vine” 

“I have hope for you too 
I will fly the path of the few 
The path that Plato knew 
I am glad you will see me through” 
He said as he leaked puss 
To his dear friend Eustochius  

His friend was by his side 
Glad in the fertile countryside   
A snake slithered to hide 
With logos as his inner guide 
He took his final breath 
Greeting his diligent friend, death 

He left at sixty-six 
No longer bound to fleshly tricks 
Flew above stars and Styx 
Flew high above the craftsman’s bricks 
He ascended to the One 
Thus, his own friendly will was done

The Wayfarer and the Thirteen Kingdoms Part 3

The thirteenth kingdom says that he is the word so great    
Born from the king of kings, who gave his dear son a mandate 
To enter the world the word formed as it is his fate 
The word received glory before he left through heaven’s gate 
And entered the flowing waters to quench the powers 
Especially their flaming and chaotic desires 

But the kingless generation, those children above the stars of night 
Whispers that the invisible light chose him to enter the chaos and plight 
Chose him from all the eternal realms, to carry five seals of insight 
In him was the seed of gnosis, to grow and know the truth and light 
“Out of a foreign air and realm, the sun of life appeared in our midst 
Christ, the son, chose us to shine in the Pleroma, out of the mist”

sematary

A cemetery 

So, quiet here, yellowing grass
fallen leaf turning dark 
like the hands of a day laborer
Dignified rusty teared crosses
Names on headstones, a whisper 
of one who died in 1852
Did he die from a war wound?
A cat keeps an eye out for mice
like its ancestors did before 
the oak trees grew tall.
There is talk of removing
headstones and crosses, making
a garden with benched and
bright flowers, and no one will
know what is down in the soil
A French architect thinks it is
a precise place for posh villas 
As it is, no one asks the cats

Love Illusion

Love’s Illusion 

I will give you all my thoughts and my displeasure
and love of flowers, you will know everything 
about me and play like a string on your harp.
You will find my dog-like eyes of adoration
unnerving, dismiss me and only call me when   
needing comfort from a lost love affair.
And then, yes, he died, you escaped the scene of
ending in a panic of the secrets untold.
From the depth of your mind, it turned out to be
so utterly self-absorbed your life had been flirty  
the Wiener Waltz only played on a festive occasion.
I loathe myself for loving you.

Forgive To Live

Refusing to forgive someone’s fault no matter the pouring rain 
Is holding a fiery coal in one hand no matter the pain 
So put your hand in the flowing Jordan river 
Let your memories flow away without a remaining sliver 
In the river of your mother’s tears shed ages ago 
From the transgression we have done but only a few know 

We are all guilty of wrongdoing and our mother’s mourn 
We are all that fallen angel of light last to be born 
Who abandoned her house and fell into this life of disruption 
Who lost her bright innocence and gave birth to corruption 
God does not reach out with a burned hand to inflict shame 
But with a hand clean and untouched by any flame 

Every human lives in an intense fog in which they cannot see 
With only burning coals in their hands lighting some way to be free 
Though these do not break through the grey swarm that we tread 
Only fortifies the fog with grey smoke and ash, hence why it was said 
“Father, forgive them, no matter what I go through 
For they do not know what they do”

Arum Palaestinum

Edible plants were hungry, most eaten raw.
My Mom's recipe abandoned, rockets salvoed.
Maiden roots are cut, water is decanted.
As many religious beliefs, in situ and ex situ versus.
So Earth's half million plants surrendered.
Forgive us, unhug you.

Growing Tomatoes and Flowers

Elephant ears with a green glow.
Gives nature a magnificent show.
Please visit and stay down below.
One of my plants looks like a sweet bow.
Zinnias, marigolds, roses too.
Sharing their pretty. Each one brand new.


Daisies planted softly in the ground.
More beautiful garden rarely found.
Sunflower’s face so prettily round.
Tiny grasshopper providing sound.
My work is happy. Dirt therapy.
Flowers my main productivity.


Angels, faeries, dragonflies too.
Sit next to pasture where cows go moo.
I have no qualms about what to do.
I’ll also grow tomatoes for you.
Soil so dear; flowers and veggies love it here.

Baby Your My Sweetest Thing

baby your my pride
your my guild
love you by my side
my love for you is wide
your everything
all the love brings
BABY YOUR MY
SWEETEST THING

Introduction

The pleasure of reading a musaddas often gathers at the hinge between accumulation and release. A poet can spend four lines enlarging an image, argument, scene, or lament, then use the closing pair to seal that movement, redirect it, or expose what the preceding lines withheld. As you read the community poems, notice not only whether this transition occurs, but what emotional work it performs. The close may sound like a verdict in one poem, an echo in another, and an unanswered appeal in a third.

Examples become especially rewarding side by side because the form can accommodate intimate grief, public reflection, moral address, narrative development, devotional intensity, or even irony. One writer may make each unit feel self-contained; another may let a sentence or image press forward into the next. Some poets emphasize musical recurrence, while others use syntax, imagery, and tonal contrast to prevent the pattern from becoming too settled. These choices reveal how a shared architecture can support markedly different voices.

Browsing the poems in this collection-and returning as further work appears-also shows what an isolated example cannot: the difference between convention and personal interpretation. Compare how poets manage the pressure of rhyme, how much explanation they place in the final pair, and whether successive units deepen the subject or merely repeat it. Reading beyond a first encounter turns the form from an abstract pattern into a field of artistic decisions, where sound, argument, memory, and closure continually reshape one another.

Reading Guide

Read a musaddas by listening for relationships rather than merely checking its visible arrangement. Each six-line unit creates a small drama of expectation: the opening movement establishes a sonic and rhetorical field, while the final pair can confirm, complicate, or resist what has gathered. In a longer poem, those local dramas must also contribute to a larger progression. As you compare community poems, attend to how sound influences meaning, how each unit changes the pressure of the subject, and whether closure feels earned or merely scheduled.

• Follow the internal movement. Notice what the opening four lines actually do: narrate, describe, accuse, remember, praise, or reason. Their shared sound can intensify accumulation, but only if the thought also develops. Ask: does each line add a new layer, or does it restate the same idea?
• Examine the closing pair. The last two lines may deliver a consequence, emotional reversal, summary, image, appeal, or transition. Because their sound distinguishes them from what precedes, they receive unusual emphasis. Ask: would the unit lose tension if these lines were removed, or do they merely explain what is already clear?
• Listen for the cost of rhyme. Repeated rhyme can create ceremony, insistence, grief, momentum, or wit, but it can also tempt a poet toward strained grammar and predictable vocabulary. Ask: does the sound seem to generate meaning, or does meaning appear to have been bent to satisfy sound?
• Compare unit with sequence. In an extended musaddas, every unit needs some integrity while still advancing the whole. Watch for changes in scene, speaker, scale, time, or argument. Ask: how does this section alter what the previous section allowed you to believe?
• Notice the scale of the voice. A speaker may address one person, a community, the self, the divine, or an imagined future audience. The form's recurring closures can give that address ceremonial authority. Ask: is the voice intimate, public, prophetic, reflective, or deliberately unstable?
• Read metaphors contextually. Images associated with faith, mourning, honor, decline, memory, or collective identity may carry implications beyond their literal surface. Ask: what knowledge does the poem expect from its audience, and what clues allow an unfamiliar reader to enter without flattening the image?
• Test the poem aloud. Vocal reading reveals whether repeated sounds create propulsion or monotony and whether pauses strengthen the final pair. In translated or cross-language work, listen for what has been prioritized-semantic precision, cadence, rhyme, or rhetorical force. Ask: what becomes clearer when the poem is heard?

After reading, compare your answers rather than reducing each poem to formal compliance. The most revealing differences often lie in how poets distribute emphasis, enlarge a subject across units, and make an expected closure feel newly necessary.

Writing Tips

Begin a musaddas draft with material that can sustain both local concentration and continued development. A passing observation may fill one unit, but a sequence needs a subject capable of changing under pressure. In workshop terms, imagine each unit as a chamber with its own acoustic shape and purpose, connected to a corridor of argument, story, meditation, or lament. The goal is not to fill compartments; it is to make each return to the structure alter the reader's understanding.

• Choose a subject with stages. Public questions, layered memories, spiritual conflicts, historical reflections, and evolving grief can unfold through shifts of perspective. Before drafting, list several distinct movements the subject might undergo. If every item is merely another example of the same feeling, the poem may become repetitive rather than cumulative.
• Give each unit a dramatic task. One might establish a scene, another challenge its interpretation, and another widen private experience into communal consequence. Write a brief purpose beside each planned unit. This keeps the recurring architecture from producing a sequence of interchangeable mini-poems.
• Build rhyme from meaning. Create rhyme banks containing words connected to the poem's emotional and intellectual world, not just any available matches. Include different parts of speech and syntactic possibilities. A narrower, meaningful sound field is usually more persuasive than an impressive rhyme purchased with irrelevant diction.
• Vary the route to recurrence. Repeated sound need not require repeated sentence shapes. Mix statements with questions, long clauses with brief assertions, and end-stopped lines with carefully controlled enjambment. Such variation preserves forward motion while allowing the rhyme to remain audible.
• Do not overburden the closing pair. Beginners often treat it as a place to summarize the preceding lines or announce a moral. Try several alternatives: an image that embodies the argument, a consequence that opens the next unit, a change of addressee, or a question that makes closure emotionally incomplete.
• Develop an image system. Select images capable of transformation across the poem-a ruined house, a river, a lamp, a road, a wound, or another motif suited to your subject. Let its meaning change as the sequence proceeds. When drawing on culturally inherited metaphors, supply enough dramatic context for their force to be felt without pausing to lecture the reader.
• Decide who has the right to speak. A public or ceremonial tone can sound powerful, but authority must be earned through precision and self-awareness. Consider whether the speaker witnesses, mourns, advises, confesses, or judges. Shifts from I to we deserve particular scrutiny because they change the poem's ethical scale.
• Plan the final ending separately from local endings. Repeated closing pairs create many moments of apparent arrival, so the poem's ultimate close needs more than additional emphasis. It may return to an altered opening image, narrow a broad argument to one human detail, or leave a resonant tension unresolved.

During revision, read the draft aloud once for sound and again without emphasizing rhyme. Mark forced inversions, filler words, repeated conclusions, and places where the voice becomes grander than the evidence supports. Then examine each unit's images and verbs: are they advancing the poem, or merely occupying lines? Finally, let a reader hear the poem without being told where the major turns occur. If the shifts can be felt through cadence, thought, and image, the structure is serving the poem rather than displaying itself.

Interesting Facts

• The closing pair need not behave like a conclusion. It can serve as a verdict, counterargument, lament, transition, or deliberate fracture. This flexibility lets poets preserve the form's audible hinge while avoiding the predictable effect of repeated summaries.
• Recurrence can imitate states of mind. A sustained sound may suggest ritual, insistence, obsession, praise, or grief. The same acoustic pressure can feel consoling in one poem and claustrophobic in another, depending on syntax, imagery, and pace.
• Local completeness can create a larger difficulty. Because each unit can sound satisfyingly finished, a longer poem risks repeatedly stopping. Experienced poets counter this by carrying an image, question, narrative consequence, or grammatical expectation across the boundary.
• Translation requires artistic triage. When work moves between Urdu and another language, preserving sound, literal meaning, idiom, cultural implication, and natural syntax at once may be impossible. A thoughtful version makes its priorities perceptible rather than disguising awkward language as fidelity.
• Metaphor may function as shared memory. An image can invoke religious, communal, or literary associations that are not explained on the surface. Readers should look for contextual signals and remain alert to meanings that a purely literal reading might miss.
• Silence is part of the architecture. The pause after a closing pair can let an accusation settle, permit grief to resonate, or prepare a change in scale. In performance, the length and quality of that pause can shape the sequence almost as strongly as rhyme.
• Comparison reveals identity through variation. As you browse community interpretations, notice which qualities remain recognizable even when poets alter pacing, tone, or degree of closure. Such comparison offers a more flexible understanding than treating one example as the only possible model.

Popular Themes

Subject matter and form interact most fruitfully when the poem has something to accumulate and something to reconsider. The musaddas can give sustained thought a ceremonial cadence while allowing each unit to frame a distinct stage of feeling or argument. The possibilities below are literary affinities, not statistical rankings of PoetrySoup submissions.

• Communal loss and remembrance. The movement from gathered detail to an emphatic closing pair can hold both witness and lament. Successive units allow a poet to move among event, memory, consequence, and the responsibilities of those who remain.
• Social change and moral reckoning. A poet can examine causes, symptoms, contradictions, and possible responses without compressing a complex public issue into a single declaration. The form's recurring turns are especially useful when certainty must be questioned.
• Spiritual devotion and doubt. Repetition can evoke prayerful concentration, while the closing pair can intensify praise, introduce humility, or disclose uncertainty. A sequence may therefore dramatize faith as an evolving encounter rather than a static statement.
• Personal grief with a wider horizon. Private mourning can begin in sensory particulars and gradually widen toward family, community, belief, or time. The formal recurrence gives grief somewhere to return, while changing images prevent that return from becoming merely repetitive.
• Rise, decline, and renewal. Subjects involving transformation suit a sequence of distinct stages. A poet might contrast remembered flourishing with present damage, then complicate nostalgia by asking who is included in the remembered account and what renewal would demand.
• Ethical counsel and self-examination. The authoritative sound of repeated closure can support advice, but it also invites scrutiny. Strong poems turn some of that judgment inward, allowing the speaker's own limits and responsibilities to enter the argument.
• Place, exile, and cultural memory. Recurring landscapes, buildings, roads, or domestic objects can gather historical and emotional significance across units. The form allows place to appear not as scenery but as an archive whose meanings change with the speaker's distance from it.

As you read the community poems, compare how writers transform related material through voice, image, scale, and the handling of closure. Two poets may approach grief or social memory yet produce entirely different experiences because one emphasizes intimate detail while another adopts public address.

Editorial Insights

The central artistic tension of a musaddas lies between recurrence and discovery. Its architecture repeatedly promises a recognizable movement, but a memorable poem must ensure that recognition never becomes mere repetition. The reader should feel both the satisfaction of return and the pressure of change. That balance is especially demanding in an extended sequence: each unit needs enough coherence to register as a shaped event, yet enough openness to make the next unit necessary.

Structure feels essential when it embodies the poem's way of thinking. A lament may circle what cannot be repaired; a public meditation may gather evidence before issuing a judgment; a devotional poem may move from praise toward surrender or doubt. In each case, the transition into the closing pair should do more than satisfy an acoustic expectation. It should reveal a consequence, alter the scale of address, or place the preceding images in a sharper moral or emotional light. Editors notice when the shape has become inseparable from the subject-when another arrangement would produce a genuinely different poem.

Technically recognizable drafts often falter through predictability. The rhyme announces a destination too early, syntax is inverted to reach it, and the final pair explains the lesson already implied. Mechanical patterning can also make every unit rise and fall in the same way, flattening narrative or emotional development. At the opposite extreme, a poet may avoid obvious repetition so thoroughly that the form's internal pressure becomes inaudible. Insufficient development is another danger: solemn tone and elevated abstraction cannot substitute for scenes, actions, sensory images, or changes in thought.

Individuality remains visible through diction, rhetorical stance, image systems, sentence movement, and the relationship between private and collective voice. One poet may use the closing pair as a firm pronouncement; another may turn it into an aperture through which uncertainty enters. One may preserve a ceremonial cadence, while another introduces conversational friction without losing the underlying architecture. Comparing multiple community poems develops judgment because it separates surface compliance from artistic necessity. Readers begin to hear which rhymes enlarge meaning, which pauses carry emotional weight, and which endings continue to resonate after their formal work is complete.

Read, Write & Share

Read the community work closely, then return as the collection develops so that one interpretation does not become your only model. Compare how poets handle accumulation, the closing pair, public and private voice, culturally resonant imagery, and the larger movement from one unit to the next. Thoughtful comments can identify a turn that surprised you, an image that deepened through repetition, or a sound choice that changed the poem's emotional pressure.

Then try composing your own musaddas. Publish it on PoetrySoup and invite readers to respond not only to its formal shape, but to the discoveries that shape makes possible.

Collection Statistics

This collection currently contains 1 poem. At this stage, it offers several opportunities for close comparison within the work itself: readers can examine how successive units differ in purpose, how sound affects emphasis, and how local endings contribute to the larger movement. As future poets contribute, they may closely follow, thoughtfully adapt, or deliberately challenge the form's conventions, expanding the range of community interpretations available for discussion.

fard, ghazal, hamd, hazal, hijv, islam, madah, manqabat, marsiya, masnavi, metaphor, munaajaat, musaddas, naat, nazm, qasida, qataa, rhyme, rubaiyat, rubayi, salaam, seharaa, urdu, vaasokht