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;xaak-e paa : 'Dust of the feet; earth trodden under foot; the lowest or most worthless thing'. (Platts p.484)
FWP:
SETS == HI; SYMMETRY
MOTIFS == EYES
NAMES
TERMS == DRAMATICNESS; HYPERBOLE; METAPHOR; MOODThe first line, thanks to the symmetry of Urdu grammar, has two readings: either the speaker is talking about the dust of the kings' feet, and calling it (as precious as) jewel-collyrium (1a); or else he's invoking jewel-collyrium, and describing it as dust beneath the kings' feet-- that is, the kings live in such regal luxury that they don't even value jewel-collyrium any more than they value the dust under their feet (1b). SRF takes note in his discussion of both these possibilities.
Apart from the generally suspect nature of claims made by natural-poetry proponents (often, as in this case, in defiance of the relevant dates), several points about the verse make it a dubious choice as a case of historical specificity. The speaker uses the plural and says that 'kings' have been blinded; their blinding is presented intransitively, with 'needles moving'-- phirnaa , not phernaa -- and no mention of any agent; furthermore, the speaker claims to have 'seen' this horrible process. How likely is it that Mir himself would actually have 'seen' any king blinded, much less more than one of them? And once we recognize that no doubt he has only mentally or imaginatively 'seen' them, then the whole claim to historical specificity is lost anyway-- for why should we think that he has mentally imagined or 'seen' any one particular individual rather than another, out of the sad host of blinded kings and princes?
Surely it's far more plausible that the verse emerged from the need to have rhyme words ending in aa))iyaa;N that could be so arranged as to be followed by dekhii;N . Once the poet has thought of 'needles' and joined it to 'seeing', the imagery of collyrium, its being applied to the eyes with a needle to enhance vision, and the contrastive use of a needle for blinding (with its negation of 'seeing'), would hardly have been far behind. It doesn't take a Mir to think of this cluster of imagery. But it takes a Mir to weave it so tightly and powerfully together that the words are intertwined 'like a hand gripping a collar'.