S. R. Faruqi:

It's well known that Mir had taken the 'two-water' theme from Baqaullah Baqa Allahabadi. Muhammad Husain Azad reproduced Baqa's two verses in āb-e ḥayāt [pp. 211-12]:

in āñkhoñ kā nit giryah dastūr hai
do-ābah jahāñ meñ yih mashhūr hai

[the constant weeping of these eyes is a custom
this 'two-water' is famous in the world]

sailāb se āñkhoñ ke rahte haiñ ḳharābe meñ
ṭukṛe jo mire dil ke baste haiñ do-ābe meñ

[from the flood of the eyes, we stay in a ruin
in that the fragments of my heart live in a 'two-water']

Muhammad Husain Azad says, 'The Lord knows whether Mir Sahib had head this and then composed his verse, or whether a 'coincidence' [tavārud] occurred'. In any case, Baqa became angry, and composed this verse-set as a 'satire' [hajv]:

mīr ne gar tirā maẓmūn do-ābe kā liyā
ai baqā tū bhī duʾā de jo duʿā denī ho

[if Mir took your theme of the 'two-water'
oh Baqa, you too give a blessing, if it would be necessary to give a blessing]

yā ḳhudā mīr kī āñkhoñ ko do-ābah kar de
aur bīnī kā yih ʿālam ho ki tirbenī ho

[oh Lord, make Mir's eyes a 'two-water'
and of his vision this condition: that it would be a 'three-strander' [where three rivers converge]]

But the truth is that Mir has taken this theme from one level to a whole different one. His verse is complex/layered to the maximum possible degree. In contrast to this, both of Baqa's verses that Muhammad Husain has presented are entirely superficial, and the second verse is based on an extreme artificiality; or rather, the second verse of Baqa's satiric verse-set is truly in a class by itself:

In any case, in Mir's verse it's not revealed whether the tears are dry because now the heart doesn't want to weep, or because the speaker wept so much that the tears have entirely dried up. The same idea appears in this [unpublished] verse of Ghalib's too:

G{417x,5}

But Ghalib's first line is trifling-- as contrasted with Mir's verse, in which both lines are equally effective. In the first line the harmony of the word 'river' is so effective that the mood of rolling waves comes before one. If in place of ve din gaʾe there were some expression of repentance, or some straightforward account, then the ambiguity-created meaningfulness would not be obtained.

For the inner self to become so fed up with grief that it would renounce grief; or for grief to settle within the depths of the heart in such a way that it couldn't be expressed through tears; or to have wept to such an extent that now there wouldn't be any tears left-- these are all states of extreme grief. The outward colorlessness of the style of expression has illumined all these possibilities of meaning.

As against this, Fani has used the 'vasokht' [vāsoḳht] style and made the verse limited, although the second half of the first line is a very affecting phrase, and saves the verse from being commonplace:

fānī jis meñ āñsū kyā dil ke lahū kā kāl nah thā
hāʾe vuh āñkh ab pānī kī do būñdoñ ko tarastī hai

[Fani, that in which-- not to speak of tears-- there was no famine of the heart's blood
alas, that eye now longs for two drops of water]

In this present verse, too, Mir has used the theme of helplessness with his own special dignity. The theme of the eyes' being a river, and then drying up, Mir has versified elsewhere as well. But not every verse has been able to have what the present verse does. No doubt there's the 'two-water' image, and to that extent it will be necessary to recognize his indebtedness to Baqa Allahabadi. From the first divan [{366,10}]:

āge daryā the dīdah-e tar mīr
ab jo dekho sarāb haiñ donoñ

[formerly, the wet eyes were a river, Mir
now if you look, they are both a mirage]

From the third divan [{1222,2}]:

daryā-sī āñkheñ bahtī hī rahtī thīñ so kahāñ
hotī hai koʾī koʾī palak ab to tar kabhū

[river-like eyes kept flowing; but where
is one or another eyelash now ever even wet?]

The theme of the eyes' becoming dry, Mir has also finely versified in the sixth divan [{1807,3}]:

sūkhī paṛī haiñ āñkheñ mirī der se jo ab
sailāb un hī raḳhnoñ se muddat ravāñ rahā

[my eyes, which have been lying there dry for a long time now--
from those very breaches/holes for a long time a flood kept flowing]

Farqi Anjadani too has well composed [in Persian] the theme of the eyes becoming dry:

'My eyes, which at one time used to have the wealth of a hundred treasuries--
now their work has remained to wring out the eyelashes.'

[See also {483,2}; {518,3}; {1806,2}.]

FWP:

SETS == MUSHAIRAH
MOTIFS == EYES
NAMES
TERMS == SATIRE; THEME; VASOKHT

Like

{60,3},

this verse is a splendid mushairah verse, and it works just the same way. For do-ābah , withheld to the last possible moment, energizes the verse with a sudden enjoyableness just as do-ḳhvābah does. And like a typical mushairah verse, this one then immediately bursts like a bubble; we know we've gotten the full pleasure that it has to offer, and there's no point in lingering over it. (Whereas {60,3} is so brilliantly enjoyable that it's hard not to linger over it, even after its 'punch' has been delivered.)

In English, for a tract of land between two rivers there's no other word than 'island'; it's a pity we don't have anything like Greek's 'mesopotamia'. In Urdu of course there's the excellent do-āb or do-ābah , which is immediately and intuitively clear, and also makes for a rich flow of wordplay, as SRF demonstrates. So I've coined the absurdly clumsy 'two-water' in order to keep the imagery transparent.

On the translation of gaʾe as 'have gone', see {48,7}.