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taab : 'Heat, warmth; burning, inflaming; pain, affliction, grief; anger, indignation, wrath, rage; light, radiance, lustre, splendour; strength, power, ability, capability; endurance, brooking; —bending, twisting (by heat); bend, twist, contortion; curling, curl'. (Platts p.303)
baa-ham : 'Together, conjointly, one with another, reciprocally, mutually; among themselves (or ourselves), privately'. (Platts p.129)
FWP:
SETS == GROTESQUERIE; MULTIVALENT WORDS ( taab )
MOTIFS == [BELOVED IS NOT GOD]; CURLS
NAMES
TERMS == AFFINITYIt's also enjoyable that the unspecified subject, presumably God, didn't just combine a hundred jugular veins with their pre-existing, surely substantial amounts of taab . On the contrary, in fact: he took them up and 'gave' them some kind or degree of 'mutual' taab that they hadn't had before. Perhaps this means he twisted them together, like a rope, for strength. Or perhaps it means that he made them more dazzling (for the fine wordplay with taar ), or more twisting, or more powerful, or more deadly. (Or perhaps, of course both.) Only then were they worthy to become a single strand of the beloved's tangled, all-ensnaring curls. The remarkable multivalence of taab (see the definition above) is deployed to full advantage here. For another such masterful use of taab , see {1237,5}.
The 'hundred jugular veins' image, in its novelty and ingenuity, is what really makes the verse. It also, of course makes the verse grotesque, if we take the image too literally. It makes the beloved sound like Medusa, with her thick writhing snakey curls.