Urdu Poetry is associated with the lyric poetry and tradition. There are numerous forms of Urdu Poetry and two of them are Ghazal and Nazm. They both are the foundation of the Urdu Poetry. All the Urdu poetry forms are used as a feeling of expression by the writer.
It is being said that the Ghazal is the heart of the Urdu Poetry tradition. Despite the various variations between a Ghazal and a Nazm, the major difference between the two is that the Ghazals are subjective while the Nazms are objective in nature. Many people are not aware of the fact that the Urdu Poetry is only shaped for a Ghazal and a Nazm.
Being objective in nature, a person has to fully go through the Nazm in order to understand its meaning because throughout the flow it is written in the same theme. On another hand, all the verses of a Ghazal have their own theme and thus, a reader can easily understand the meaning of it. There is no specific theme of a Ghazal.
Nazm is also known as ‘Geet’ which is considered to be a logically developing poem where every verse serves its own purpose or theme. On other hand, Ghazal means ‘talking to women’, which means praising a woman through poetry. A Ghazal is a collection of couplets where each of them is completely different and unrelated to each other, yet are complete individually.
The twin deities who preside over the Ghazal are Bachhus and Eros whose influence has made a Ghazal as a passionate, expressive, longing and an emotional desire. So, Ghazal and Nazm have quite differences and there are numerous people who when to develop an interest in reading or knowing more about Urdu poetry, often gets confused between these two poetry forms.
Both, Ghazal and Nazm are the meaningful and a polite Urdu poetry forms but have some common differences.
Apart from the nature of Ghazal and Nazm, another difference between the two is their size where Ghazal is a combination of short poems which includes 9 to 10 verses with minimum five couplets written in the same meter. On the other hand, Nazm doesn’t follow any rules for the rhyming scheme as well as the length and thus, it contains multiple paragraphs depending on the content and the writer.
In terms of restrictions, a Ghazal has two restrictions, a first verse, Matla and the last verse, Maqta. On the other hand, there is no restriction while writing a Nazm. Maqta means pen name, which is used at the last in a Ghazal whereas, in Nazm, the writer can use his pen name anywhere between the lines.
A Ghazal cannot be divided into the categories, but a Nazm can be subdivided according to the topics and the themes. The three sub-categories of a Nazm include Masnavi, Qasida, and Marsia.
All in all, we can say that a Ghazal and a Nazm are two corners of Urdu Poetry which binds all the other forms together.
