SETS == POETRY MOTIFS == [BELOVED IS A BOY] NAMES == HINDUSTAN; IRAN; REKHTAH; TURK TERMS
SRF understandably didn't include this one in his anthology, since its literary merit is minor. But it has other kinds of interest, so I wanted to add it in on the website.
Most centrally, it shows how even specific real-world references are deployed in the service of wordplay rather than any sort of 'natural-poetry' descriptive accuracy. The idea that Mir's poetry gradually traveled to Iran in pursuit of a Turkish boy is literarily clever, rather than in any sense realistic. The possibility of 'Iran' as a rhyme-word obviously triggered the whole verse, and the enjoyable wordplay of raftah raftah (which normally means 'gradually', but here can be envisioned as describing the actual process of traveling by stages) surely helped to seal the deal. There's also the enjoyable wordplay of 'gone gone' and 'went'.
The verse also, unusually, uses re;xtah in the plural, and in a context that shows indisputably that the term refers to a genre of poetry, rather than being used as a language name (that is, as an archaic name for Urdu).
Note for meter fans: We have to choose between scanning turk as one long syllable, and scanning bachche without the tashdiid , as bache , short-long. I vote for the latter, though I don't like it.
