It has been usually recognized that rhymed prose was first used among the Hebrews in the Liturgy by Jannai, who flourished in the seventh century. Metre was introduced in the tenth century by Dunash ben Labrat. Both these poets followed Arabic models. Saadyah, the Hebrew philosopher, blamed Dunash for having ruined the
beauty and naturalness of the Hebrew language for poetry. Even Jehudah HaLevi, the great national poet who used Arabic meters, regretted, in his philosophical work, Hacuzari,[105-A] that these foreign Arabian influences should prevail among the Hebrew poets.
The oldest Arab poetry was also in prose. The earliest pattern for poetry among the Arabians was the Saj (cooing), or rhymed but unmetrical prose. Goldziher calls the Saj the oldest form of poetic speech; it continued to exist even after the regular metres were established, the Koran, for instance, being in Saj. At first it was unrhymed, as Goldziher says; the earliest Arabic poetry was in unmetrical prose.
From Saj arose Rajaz (trembling), which is partly metrical, and forms the transition to the artificial Arabic meters.
The earliest surviving Arabic poetry, the seven poems of the Muallaqat, composed before Mohammed, are so perfect in form that all Arabic scholars assume they were produced after a long period extending through many years of poetic practice. They were not rude products, but had an historical background, as did the Iliad. They are written in perfected and complicated metres, but the Saj is older than these.
We have two other proofs that poetry was in early times written in rhythmical prose, or at least in a rhythm that makes only a slight approach to metre. These are to be found in two of the oldest Aryan literary monuments extant, the Rigveda of India and the Avesta of Iran.
Two-fifths of the hymns of the Rigveda are composed in a metre called trishtubh, the most frequent measure in the Veda. It is made up of stanzas of four lines, each of
eleven syllables, the last four of which only have to follow a pattern, this consisting of two iambuses or an iambus and a spondee. This requirement left a good deal of liberty to the poet. Here is an example of it, in the Hymn to Dawn, in MacDonnels' Sanskrit Literature (P. 83):
Arise! the breath, the life again has reached us:
Darkness has gone away and light is coming.
She leaves a pathway for the sun to travel:
We have arrived where men prolong existence.
Max Müller in his translation in prose has adhered in many cases to the original metre, and the reader feels he is reading prose. The Hindus, like the free verse writers, merely arranged their lines to call attention to the rhythm, but it was really prose employing metrical rules only at the end of the line. It has none of the hampering qualities of classic or English metres, or of the metres in the later Indian epics when the quantity of every syllable was determined.