Xmas meme(s) -- jenlight's fault

[maeve66]

On the twelfth day of Christmas, maeve66 sent to me...

Twelve museums swimming

Eleven plays writing

Ten dykes a-doodling

Nine cafes cooking

Eight wobblies a-singing

Seven cats a-teaching

Six linguistics a-drawing

Five chi-i-i-ild ballads

Four sherlock holmes

Three ethical sluts

Two party names

...and a farsi in an american history.

Get your own Twelve Days:

I hate when I lose a lot of stuff I typed and I can't restore it. Hardly ever happens, but.

Okay. What had I written? First, that this meme seems very similar to the one I got last year, except that since then I added Farsi as an interest (also Hindi and Urdu and Arabic, I believe). Second, that those languages, especially Farsi and Arabic remind me that I learned something this Thanksgiving break: I was writing my niece Ruby and making a nonsense rhyme of her name -- Ruby-Rubaiyyat, and realized that I had no idea what that actually meant: I think I have always erroneously associated it with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that opium-addled poet, and his Xanadu, where Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome did decree.

Turns out a rubaiyyat is just a four-line stanza and poetic form common to Arabic and Farsi literature, with the rhyme scheme AABA, and sometimes the interlocking form AABA, BBCB, CCDC. I had no idea. I also didn't know that Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" was a rubaiyyat, but it is. Look:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Anyway, I wrote both my nieces little rubaiyyats, utter doggerel, of course. But it was fun.