Simin Behbahani’s Gift for Persian Prosody: The Rule of Simineh in Persian Meters

After organizing prosodic feet and presenting so-called Najafi’s circle, Abolhasan Najafi managed to classify most of the Persian poetic meters, provide a criterion for their pleasantness or unpleasantness, and divide them into muttafiq al-arkan (i.e., each consisting of a repeated foot) and mutanawib al-arkan (i.e., each consisting of two types of feet alternately repeated) meters. Nevertheless he found some meters adopted by Persian poets since Rudaki which could not be placed in either group of meters, but, towards the end of his life, he found a way of including these meters in his classification. According the rule he called “tafarro‘-e vazni” or “metrical branching”, all meters of both groups which started with a foot of ᴗ - ᴗ, the foot could be changed into - - ᴗ, bringing about a new and distinct meter. Re-explicating this rule in this paper by introducing some of Simin Behbahani’s poems versified in this meter, we rename the rule into “qa’ede-ye Simineh” (“Siminegi”) or “Simin’s rule.” There are three reasons for calling the rule in this way. The first is that no one has taken advantage of this rule as much as Simin, and the second one is that the scansion of the word “Simineh” reveals exactly the same foot appears in the new meter (- - ᴗ). Finally, it is possible that Najafi was partly led to this rule by investigating part of Simin’s poetry written in this meter.