Qafiya or Radif? Marking a Couplet
A poetry exercise prints this couplet without vowel marks: دلم از هجر تو پُر است، ای دوست / ره عمرم ز غمت دور است، ای دوست. Students must label the qafiya and the radif. One student circles پُر است and دور است and calls them the radif because they come at the end of each line. Another circles ای دوست and calls it the qafiya because it is repeated. A third underlines the whole phrase پُر است، ای دوست in the first line and دور است، ای دوست in the second and says the entire repeated block is the radif. The teacher has five minutes and wants the class to settle the question by a test that can be applied to any couplet, not by appealing to the textbook's answer key.
1. Identify the qafiya and the radif, and justify each label.
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The radif is ای دوست, because it is the exact repeated element after the rhyme and carries no new rhyme sound. The qafiya is the rhyming material before it: پُر است and دور است, which share the rhyme sound -or ast. The test is removal: take away the suspected radif and see whether the remaining line-endings still rhyme. Remove ای دوست and we are left with پُر است / دور است, which rhyme, so the rhyme lives in those words and the repeated vocative is the radif. If we instead remove پُر است and دور است, the remaining endings are identical words, not a rhyme pattern, which confirms that the whole block is not the radif.
2. How should the teacher answer the student who circled the entire phrase as radif?
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Explain that radif is the repeated element that follows the qafiya; it may be one word or several, but it must be distinguishable from the rhyming part. In this couplet the repeated element is only ای دوست. The words پُر است and دور است are not identical; they rhyme but differ, so they cannot be part of a radif, which by definition repeats exactly. The student's block includes both the rhyme and the radif. A quick diagnostic: if the repeated block contains a sound that changes from line to line while the rest stays fixed, split the block at the point of change. Here the change is between پُر and دور, so the split falls before است, leaving است, ای دوست as the fixed part. That fixed part is the radif plus the shared word است; the variable rhyme-bearing words are the qafiya.
3. Apply the test to a couplet in which the repeated word is needed for the meaning of both lines. Does that change the label?
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No. Whether a repeated element is needed for meaning is irrelevant to the qafiya/radif distinction. Radif is defined by position and exact repetition after the rhyme, not by dispensability. If a couplet ends both lines with a meaningful repeated phrase such as جان من, and the words before it rhyme, then جان من is the radif and the rhyming words before it form the qafiya. The test remains: remove the candidate radif; if the remaining line-endings rhyme, the candidate was the radif. Meaning is a separate question that belongs to interpretation, not to the labelling of rhyme structure.