Nothing in this poem raises its voice, and that is what makes it hard to shake off. Mir reports enormous things in the tone you would use about the weather: a life ruined, a religion abandoned, the exact quantity of power a person has over their own existence. He never appears to think any of it is remarkable enough to underline.
The second couplet fits an entire life into a single night. Youth was spent weeping. In old age the eyes closed. Then he explains it, as though you might have missed the point: that is, I was awake most of the night, and when morning came I rested. A whole life becomes one bad night's sleep, and closing your eyes becomes going to sleep and dying at the same time. The explanation is what makes it devastating, and he offers it in the flattest voice available.
The fourth couplet drops a genuine piece of theology into a love poem without ceremony. This charge of free will laid against helpless creatures is unjust; they do exactly as they please, and we are the ones given the bad name for it. That is the old argument about predestination and responsibility, stated as a grievance and then dropped, because the next couplet is about drunks. Six couplets later comes the one that stays with people. Asked what say he has in anything in this world, he answers precisely: he can weep the night through until morning, or somehow drag the day along until evening. That is the sum of his agency. Not despair. An accurate inventory.
Then the closing couplet, one of the boldest things in the language. Why ask about Mir's faith now? He has drawn the caste-mark on his forehead, taken his seat in the temple, and given up Islam long ago. Read one way it is the standard ghazal pose, where the lover abandons religion for love and nobody takes it literally. Read another way, coming from a man who had lived through the destruction of Muslim Delhi and lost his mind once already, it is not a pose at all. Mir leaves it open, which is why it still unsettles people.
Begum Akhtar's is the classic sung reading and takes a handful of the fifteen couplets. Mehdi Hassan takes a different handful. Nobody sings all of it, and nobody ever has.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — کیا
, kiya. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The -am sound just before the refrain: tamam, aram, paigham, badnam, imaam, gaam, ehram, inaam, aam, shaam, ghulam, kham, ibram, raam, islam.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
