S. R. Faruqi:

Among the excellent things that Askari Sahib has said about Mir, one is that Mir had the ability to express 'extremely minor experiences in such a beautiful manner' that 'in this respect too other poets cannot easily rival him'. But Mir also had the opposite quality: that (as I have often said) he could bring major ideas and major experiences of passion down to the level of everyday life and express them accordingly.

What an excellent thing Askari Sahib himself said about Mir's verse

{734,7},

that 'Whether a sigh would reach to the sky or not, if it would take a man to the earth then this itself is a very great power'. It's a pity that after that he says 'In this regard let's pause to listen to a verse by Firaq'. Then he notes this verse:

furṣat ẓarūrī kāmoñ se pāʾo to ro bhī lo
ai ahl-e dil yih kār-e ʿabaṡ bhī kiʾe chalo

[when you would find leisure from necessary tasks, then even/also weep
oh people of the heart, do even/also this vain task before you move on]

It's a pity that between the lines there's not even a connection of usage and grammar, and there's also repetition. This was an example of making a major experience into a small one and showing it as such.

Yaganah too was gripped by this same illness: to make the two lines correspond was difficult for him, and he didn't manage to sustain the theme. Thus even his major themes often became small when he wrote them down. Yaganah:

sharbat kā ghūñṭ jān ke pītā hūñ ḳhūn-e dil
ġham khāte khāte muñh kā mazā tak bigaṛ gayā

[taking it to be a swallow of sherbet, I drink the blood of the heart
while constantly enduring/'eating' grief, even the relish of the mouth has been ruined]

Leaving aside the fact that here instead of tak it's an occasion for hī , Yaganah has construed grief as something such that eating it is harmful. That is, he has established it as something like an everyday action.

In Mir's present verse, the feeling of dying of hunger doesn't prevail over passion, because in the second line is the idea of be-żauqī as causing the absence of a relish for food and the lack of pleasure in eating and drinking. Only/emphatically passion has caused the speaker to abandon eating and drinking. But because he has shaped this experience through the image of hunger, and of the mouth filling with the taste of the bitterness of bile, the surface of the verse has become that of ordinary life, in which passion and hunger can both be causes of death. Passion and hunger, two kinds of experience, suddenly become an immediate unity. Then, there's also the fact that Mir's image is more powerful and narrative than Yaganah's.

The word ṣafrā also gestures toward the pallidness/'yellowness' of the face. Of the word żauq (meaning 'taste' [żāʾiqah], meaning ardor, inclination) too, Mir took fine advantage.

In Persian be-żauq means 'a pleasureless thing', and be-żauqī is the quality of something that is pleasureless. But in Urdu be-żauq is used for someone who has no taste. (Taste can be good or bad. But when we call someone bā-żauq , the sense is 'of good taste'.) The meanings of żauq include, besides taste: 'to attempt', 'to distinguish between good and bad', 'to have an inclination', and so on. Thus in Urdu the meaning of be-żauq is not only 'a pleasureless thing', but also a person is called be-żauq who has in his heart no longing to do anything, who has no inclination toward anything, etc. As in Iqbal:

naumīd nah ho un se ai rahbar-e farzānah
kam kosh to haiñ lekin be-żauq nahīñ rāhī

[don't be hopeless about them, oh wise guide
they do lack endeavor, but they are not devoid of longing, the travelers]

Thus in Mir's verse be-żauqī and then żauq have abundant meaningfulness, and they also form a zila with bhūk , muñh , talḳhī . Alas, that apart from Platts, all the important Urdu dictionaries turn out to lack be-żauq and be-żauqī . Iqbal's verse was right there in front of them. Despite this, the urdū luġhat too has ignored be-żauq .

The initial impression of Mir's verse is the same as that of Firaq's verse: that passion too is a human experience and a human situation; and there can be other situations too, like passion, that can would be important and meaningful. Then, a person does not show passion like that of Farhad and Majnun in every situation. Even while living in the world, he can show passion, and does. With regard to the temperament of the twentieth century, Firaq Sahib has well placed the phrase ẓarūrī kāmoñ se . But his second line is very uncouth and grammatically incorrect.

But the real weakness of his verse is not this; rather, it is his theme, of which Askari Sahib took no notice. In passion, the task of weeping accompanies other necessary tasks. It's not as though when affairs of life and domestic tasks would offer leisure, then the lover would feel or express his grief. Sufistic Muslims have long ago said that the occupations of life, and the love of God, and grief at one's distance from the Divine beauty, all move along together.

One venerable elder gave as an example of this the way that if someone's dearest young son would die, he would still do all the tasks of the world, but always in his heart the memory of his son would torment him. The tasks of the world would not please him; sometimes he would even despise them. But those tasks would keep on occurring, and his heart would also keep on weeping. The venerable elder said that in his distance from God a man ought to remain/live in the world like just such a person as that-- that his heart would remain absorbed in God, and his body would fulfill all those bodily tasks that are his duty.

In Mir's verse this very reality has been versified with complete mastery. The immediate cause of death is hunger; and it's necessary to feel it, to be aware of it-- and in fact, to acknowledge and respect this reality. But he feels an aversion to the eating and drinking required by hunger, and the cause of the aversion to eating and drinking is passion.

Mir bestowed on passion the image of death by starvation, but death by starvation has the rank of the purpose of life itself. The greatness of the experience of passion has not lessened in our heart, but he has shown us a picture of it in a smallish mirror. He has composed an uncommon verse.

Mir Soz has composed a whole ghazal with the refrain talḳh , but he did not take up Mir's theme, nor does any of his verses arrive anywhere near the level of Mir's. As an example, I present one verse, which certainly has the pleasure of wordplay and 'device':

shukr hai ḥaq kā zabāñ kī ham ne lażżat chhoṛ dī
jo milā so khā liyā ḳhvāh-e shirīñ ḳhvāh-e talaḳh

[thanks to the Lord, we abandoned pleasure of the tongue
what we got, we ate-- whether sweet, or whether bitter]

In Miraji's poetry, the images based on taste/relish are numerous. Formerly I thought that in this characteristic Miraji was unique among Urdu poets. But when I saw the abundance of taste/relish verses in Mir, I felt that here too, as usual, Mir was ahead of them all. Consider these examples. From the sixth divan [{1884,6}]:

shīrīñ namak laboñ bin us ke nahīñ ḥalāvat
is talḳh zindagī meñ ab kuchh mazā nahīñ hai

[without her sweet salt lips, there is no sweetness/relish
in this bitter life, now there is no relish/pleasure]

From the second divan [{868,3}]:

ab laʿl-e nau-ḳhat̤ us ke kam baḳhshte haiñ farḥat
quvvat kahāñ rahe hai yāqūtī-e kuhan meñ

[now his ruby lips with their new downy moustache give little pleasure
how much strength has remained in the old 'yaquti'?!]

(The word yāqūtī can refer to: a kind of colorful, pleasant-tasting, strength-giving medicine; a kind of pleasant-tasting and colorful halwah; red-colored wine.)

From the second divan [{962,3}]:

hāʾe us ke sharbatī lab se judā
kuchh batāshā sā ghulā jātā hai jī

[alas, separated from her sherbet-like lip
somewhat like a batasha it goes on melting, the inner-self]

[[The idiom is actually batāshā sā ghulnā , 'to dissolve or melt away like a kind of hollow, spongy sugar-cake' (Platts p.131).]]

From the second divan [{942,5}]:

maiñ jo narmī kī to dūnā sar chaṛhā vuh bad-maʿāsh
khāne hī ko dauṛtā hai ab mujhe ḥalvah samajh

[if I become gentle/soft, then that ruffian becomes twice as high-headed
she runs only/emphatically to eat, now considering me to be halwah]

[[There's also the wordplay of donā as meaning a leaf-cup used for holding sweets.]]

From the second divan [{948,5}]:

ḳhiẓr us ḳhat̤t̤-e sabz par to muʾā
dhun hai ab apne zahr khāne kī

[Khizr died [with love] over that green down [on a boy's cheek]
now his longing/agitation is to eat poison]

From the third divan [{1086,3}]:

kyā dūr hai sharbat pah agar qand ke thūke
ṭuk jin ne tire sharbatī in hoñṭoñ ko chūsā

[what slur/slight is it on sherbet, if he would spit out a morsel of sugar--
he who, just a bit, kissed/sucked these sherbet-like lips of yours]

From the third divan [{1109,6}]:

ham ḍarte shakar-ranjī se kahte nahīñ yih bhī
ḳhajlat se tire hoñṭoñ kī haiñ shahd-o-shakar āb

[we are afraid of your displeasure; we don't say even/also this:
from shame before your lips, honey and sugar [turn to] water]

From the first divan:

{84,1}.

From the third divan [{1186,3}]:

kahā maiñ dard-e dil yā āg uglī
phaphole paṛ gaʾe merī zabāñ meñ

[did I speak the pain of my heart, or did fire spring up?
blisters appeared on my tongue]

From the fifth divan [{1686,1}]:

risāte ho āte ho ahl-e havas meñ
mazah ras meñ hai loge kyā tum kuras meñ

[you are vexed; you come among the lustful ones
the relish is in taste/flavor; what pleasure will you take in filth?]

FWP:

SETS
MOTIFS == FOOD
NAMES
TERMS == THEME

'While' the speaker was dying of hunger, his mouth became filled with the bitterness of bile. The grammar tells us only that these two things are happening at the same time.

Where exactly is the be-żauqī located? It could be a state of the world in general (it is a 'tasteless', unsatisfying place). It could be in the speaker's mind (he is full of 'distaste' for life). It could be in the speaker's body (he is perhaps 'sick' with passion). It could be a quality of food in general (the speaker perceives it as 'tasteless').

Or it could even conceivably be a particular quality not of bile but of ṣufrā , the 'food of a traveler' (see the definitions above). This reading of ṣufrā instead of ṣafrā is definitely secondary; it's a sort of hovering alternative possibility. For travel-food might well be plain, monotonous, uninviting; it might also evoke the 'bitterness' that a traveler would feel at being exiled, isolated, alone.