This is a poem about need, and about discovering by degrees that need is not something anybody is in a position to meet. It asks for a healer. Then for somewhere in the heart to put a walk like an arrow. Then just for someone to listen. Each request is smaller than the one before it, and by the eighth couplet the asking stops and the question goes flat: who is there who does not need something, and who could possibly supply it?
The middle takes some getting used to. Three couplets in a row hand out perfectly ordinary moral advice. Do not listen to slander. Stop a man who is going wrong. Forgive a mistake. There is no wink anywhere in them, no sign that Ghalib is playing a game. He lets plain decency sit in the middle of a poem about the impossibility of help, so the advice sounds entirely true and completely useless at once.
Then the ninth couplet takes away the last option. Khizr is the immortal guide of legend, Alexander the greatest king there was, and the story has Khizr leading him towards the water of life, where Alexander dies anyway. If the best guide in existence could do nothing for the most powerful man in existence, there is no sense looking for one. The closing couplet follows straight from it, and is offered as a kind of relief: once you have genuinely stopped expecting anything, there is nobody left to complain about. It reads more like the end of something.
One correction, because this one circulates wrongly: this is Ghalib's and not Iqbal's. It gets handed to Iqbal online fairly often, probably on the strength of the religious vocabulary in the opening line.
Begum Akhtar's recording, to a tune by Khayyam, is the one most people mean. Abida Parveen leans into the couplets about guidance and need, and makes it sound less like a man talking to himself.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — کرے کوئی
, kare koi. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The -a sound just before the refrain: hua, dava, kya, ja, khuda, bura, khata, rava, rahnuma, gila.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
