Syair

---

title: "Syair" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["syairs", "poems-in-malay"] description: "Malay genre of story telling" topic_path: "general/syairs" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syair" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Malay genre of story telling ::

Syair (Jawi: شعير) is a form of traditional Malay (also Brunei and Malaysian) poetry that is made up of four-line stanzas or quatrains. The syair can be a narrative poem, a didactic poem, a poem used to convey ideas on religion or philosophy, or even one to describe a historical event.

In contrast to the pantun, 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 has a rhyme scheme a-a-a-a. Syair is sung in set rhythms that differ from syair to syair. The recitation of a syair, which can take up several hours, can be accompanied by music.

Etymology

The word syair is derived from the Arabic word shi’r, a term that covers all genres of Arabic/Islamic poetry. 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.

History

The earliest known record of syair is from the work of Hamzah Fansuri, a famous Malay poet in the 17th century.

The most famous syair is a 1847 poem by Raja Pengiran Indera Mahkota Shahbandar: Syair Rakis. It is considered to be the passage to modern Malaysian literature and mourns the loss of Labuan.

References

References

1. Stefan Sperl & C. Shackle. (1996). "Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings (Studies in Arabic Literature)". Brill.

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::