Bahr (poetry)

'sea'; Persian: بحر; Azerbaijani: bəhr; Turkish: bahir; Urdu: بحر;[1] Uzbek: bahr) means a meter in Arabic, Persian, Turkic and Urdu poetry.

Essentially, bahr is a specific pattern, combining the arkaan of Urdu prosody that define the "length" of a sher.

However, generally bahr is categorized in three classes: Short, medium, long, depending upon the length of the sher of the ghazal.

As with the scansion of Persian poetry, a syllable such as miid or baat consisting of a long vowel plus consonant, or sharm consisting of a short vowel and two consonants, is "overlong", and counts as a long syllable + a short one.

[3] In Urdu prosody, unlike Persian, any final long vowel can be shortened as the metre requires,[4] for example, in the word kaabaa in the last verse above.