The ghazal, a poetic form originating in seventh-century Arabic poetry, has an intricate structure. The twentieth-century Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali explains that each one of a ghazal’s couplets, while adhering to the patterns of rhyme (qafia) and refrain (radif) established in the poem’s opening lines (matla), ______blank thematically and logically autonomous, resulting in a poem with “a stringently formal disunity.”