Verse 21816aahai


G2

1
what is autumn?! what do they call rose-season?! whatever season might be
2
there's only/emphatically we, there's the cage, and there's the mourning of/for wing and feather

References
Arshi, Imtiyaz Ali Ghazal# 181
Raza, Kalidas Gupta 277-79
Nuskhah-e-Hamidiyah 234-241
Asi, Abdul Bari 238-240
Gyan Chand 367-371
Hamid Ali Khan Open Image

The commentators generally locate the verse's center of gravity in the first line, with its burst of small abrupt phrases. It's indeed unusual, as Nazm points out, for a two-line verse to accommodate so many separate utterances at all, much less with such ease and colloquialness. He counts six. Technically he's right, but rhetorically the three in the second line really work as one. This is one of the verses in which the lover speaks as a bird; for others, see 126,5 . graphics/cagedbird.jpg