Syair (Jawi: شعير) is a form of traditional Malay (also Brunei and Malaysian) poetry that is made up of four-line stanzas or quatrains.
In contrast to pantun form, the syair conveys a continuous idea from one stanza to the next, maintains a unity of ideas from the first line to the last line in each stanza, and each stanza is rhymed a-a-a-a-a.
However, the Malay form which goes by the name syair is somewhat different and not modeled on Arabic poetry or on any of the genres of Perso-Arab poetry.
[1] The earliest known record of syair is from the work of Hamzah Fansuri, a famous Malay poet in the 17th century.
It is considered to be the passage to modern Malaysian literature and mourns the loss of Labuan.