Even as a child, she knew how poetry should sound. The rhythm of the rhyme her teacher gave her to recite-"I am a yellow rose, the Sultan of all the flowers, the Sultan of all the flowers"-was wrong. She envied the verse bestowed upon a friend, which scanned so much more sweetly, as much as she coveted the red ruffles of her dress, so much finer than her own yellow organdy. So, at the age of 12, Simin Behbahani began writing her own rhymes. She wrote in the style of the old Persian poets: Hafez, Rumi and Sa'adi. Her contemporaries had abandoned traditional forms such as the ghazal, a sonnet of sorts, with its stiff, restrictive structure. With heads full of modernism they used rhymeless, formless verses to criticise their country and its rulers. But she embraced the old ways. After all, that was the sort of poetry that Iranians knew, the sort they could recite from memory, the cadences of their history.
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