The ghazal is a poetic form that has rhyming couplets and a refrain, with each line sharing the same meter. A ghazal talks about both the pain of loss and the beauty of love in spite of that pain. The form is ancient. It started in 6th century Arabic verse. It comes from the Arabian panegyric qasida. The structure of the ghazal are similar in strictness to those of the Petrarchan sonnet. In its style and content it is a genre with a lot of variety of expression around its central themes of love and separation. It is one of the main poetic forms the Indo-Perso-Arabic civilization gave to the eastern Islamic world.