===
1554,
1
===

 

{1554,1}

ʿishq-e ṣamad meñ jān chalī vuh chāhat kā armān gayā
tāzah kiyā paimān ṣanam se dīn gayā īmān gayā

1) in passion for the Lofty One, life went away; that eagerness/regret of/for desire went away
2) I renewed/freshened the vow to the idol; religion went away, faith went away

 

Notes:

ṣamad : 'A lord, chief man, master, head (of a family, &c.); the Most High, the Eternal, God; —adj. High, sublime; perpetual, eternal'. (Platts p.746)

 

armān : 'Wish, desire, inclination; longing; eagerness; hope; —regret, grief, sorrow; vexation; contrition, remorse; anguish of repentance'. (Platts p.41)

S. R. Faruqi:

ṣamad = independent, detached

The verse is commonplace; between the two lines the 'connection' too is not complete. But to use for the beloved ṣamad , which with us is used only as a name for God, is interesting.

There's also the aspect that the adjective ṣamad may have been used for ʿishq -- that is, that ʿishq-e ṣamad may mean 'passion, which is lofty/detached'. This usage too is uncommon, but it's more subtle than to construe it as 'love of some lofty/detached one (that is, the beloved)', because in this case 'in' will mean 'because of' or 'absorbed in' or the like.

If ṣamad is taken to really mean 'Allah', then the connection between the two lines becomes powerful, but no special excellence of meaning is created. That is, 'I loved God the Most High, but he is lofty/detached, he paid no attention to me. Thus that longing of/for desire (that is, the desire for God, or the desire to be God's beloved servant) was wasted, or came to an end. Now I have renewed with the idol the vow of faithfulness; that is, I have left the Ka'bah and taken the road to the idol-house. Now there's no knowing whether the desire for the idols will be attained or not, but religion and faith have definitely gone away.' In this meaning there's no pleasure, because the situation that it's describing has in it neither imaginative, nor emotional, nor insightful, nor any other kind of truth.

But from the foregoing commentary it becomes obvious that even Mir's seemingly weak and commonplace verses cannot be left behind as one moves along. If this verse had been by Ghalib or Momin, people would have made excellent arrays of speculations about it. But with regard to Mir the assumption has become common that in his verses there's only 'easiness' and 'simplicity' and 'clarity', etc., so that the kind of scrutiny and analysis that's often necessary for Ghalib's verses is not warranted. The reality is that Mir too is a great 'meaning-creator'; to pass over his verses in a superficial way, and to consider that in Mir there's only the immediate action of emotion and feeling, is to do him no justice.

The word ṣamad has already been discussed to some extent in:

{139,6}.

[See also {453,6}.]

FWP:

SETS == IZAFAT; KA/KE/KI
MOTIFS == VOWS
NAMES
TERMS == CONNECTION; MEANING-CREATION

SRF points to the iẓāfat at the beginning of the first line as a source of multivalence; an even more powerful source is the that joins chāhat and armān . For armān can mean something agreeable and future-oriented ('wish, desire, longing, eagerness'), or something painful and past-oriented ('regret, grief, sorrow, remorse'); see the definition above. So the phrase can refer to an 'eagerness for desire', or to a 'remorse for desire'. And if instead of 'for' we read 'of', as we are well entitled to do, the range of possible relationships becomes even wider. It's even possible to envision a 'desire for desire' or a 'desire of desire'. It's thus impossible to extract from the first line any single coherent emotion, much less any action.

So the relationship between the lines can't help but seem ungrounded or arbitrary. No matter how and in what order we arrange them, nothing very coherent emerges. 'In lofty passion, A went away; B went away; I did C; D went away; E went away'-- it's just not possible to arrange all those vague and multivalent elements into a really satisfactory, well-motivated pattern.

 

 
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