The feeling running underneath this is homelessness, and it works its way down through smaller and smaller spaces. First a country that will not hold him. Then a heart with no room left, so the longings are told to go and live somewhere else. Then a garden that has to make room for its own thorns. And at the end, two yards of ground, which is what a grave takes.
The garden couplet is the gentlest thing in it and the least sentimental. Do not pull the thorns out, he tells the gardener. They came up in the same spring as the flowers and have as much right to be standing there. It is the argument of a man about to be thrown out of his own country, spoken on behalf of the plants nobody wants.
Then the fourth couplet changes the temperature altogether. The caged nightingale has no grievance against the gardener, and none against the hunter either, because captivity was written into its luck back in the season of spring. Coming from a man tried by a foreign power, stripped of a throne and shipped across the sea, it is strange how much it lets everybody off. He takes the blame away from everyone who actually did it and hands the whole business to fate. Resignation, or the only safe way to write it down. The poem does not say which.
And then the couplet everybody knows, usually quoted without the four in front of it. Zafar died in Rangoon in 1862 and the British buried him in a grave they deliberately left unmarked, so that it could not become a place people came to. The poem asks for the smallest imaginable piece of home and reports not getting it.
One honest caveat. Verses of this kind attached themselves to Zafar's name partly because his life made them so quotable, and scholars have long questioned how much of what circulates under his pen name is really his. That does not change what the poem says, though it may well be part of why it survived. Mohammed Rafi sang it in the 1960 film Lal Qila, which is how most listeners first met these lines. Habib Wali Mohammad's reading is quieter, without a film orchestra behind it.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — میں
, men. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The -ar sound just before the refrain: dayar, na-paedar, dagh-dar, bahar, ku-e-yar.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
