Gazel

From Freepedia

A gazel is a Turkish poem form similar to a sonnet.

Turkish poetry has chiefly followed the Arabic fashion of expending itself upon language rather than upon thought. We are told that when the first Turkish epic poet Ahmedi presented to Sultan Bajazet's son his long epic history of Alexander the Great, the prince rebuked the poet's years of labor, saying that one tiny, perfectly polished poem would have been worth more than all the epics. Hence it is chiefly to the polishing of tiny poems that the poetic genius of the Turks has been applied. They have a favorite form called the gazel which might be likened to the English sonnet, except that the gazel is, by far, more intricate. It is, in fact, compared by the Turks to a flower with its petals constantly overlapping, forming a circle, and ending at the point where they began. In rhyme, for instance, the gazel opens with a rhyming couplet, and then through the whole poem the second line of each couplet repeats this opening rhyme.