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;Gussah : 'Choking, strangulation, suffocation; —(choking) wrath, rage, anger, passion; —grief, disquietude of mind, anxiety'. (Platts p.771)
FWP:
SETS
MOTIFS == SWORD
NAMES
TERMS == IHAMIt's an appropriately vivid depiction of the vexed lover, 'choking' in his anger and grief and confusion, holding his own sword to his throat, fighting back the temptation to run the sword right in and end it all. But I'm puzzled by SRF's use of the term 'iham'. The two meanings that he cites for ;Gu.s.sah are both derived from the same Arabic root, meaning 'to be choked', and are obviously are closely related, since the emotions of anger and grief often occur together, and are both often associated with a feeling of choking. Moreover, how could the verse be said to reject either one in favor of the other, as Mir's classic definition of 'misdirection' would have it? For further discussion see {178,1}.
Note for grammar fans: In the first line, the future tense of jaan'naa can be taken to apply to some generalized 'they' (as in 'they say'). If we don't want to import a subject, it could be taken in a presumptive way; this would mean something like 'How will we (presumably) consider/know...?' as applied to a 'best guess' judgment about the present. It's unusual to see this form used in the first person, since people normally don't have to make 'presumptions' about their own present state of knowledge or judgment-- by definition, they 'know' it. But after all the lover is a madman, and lives in the crazed and hyperbolic ghazal world, so anything is possible.