The verse is crammed about as full of literary wordplay as it could possibly be. The words affair , selection , verse s all have their own glossary entries. An additional pleasure is the presence in the first line of the verb 'to be open/apparent to someone' [], which directly evokes the 'opening' and reading of a book-- say, an anthology or ' selection ' of poetry. As for the 'affair' [], it not only has excellently multifarious meanings (from the commercial to the directly sexual; see the definition above), but also strongly invokes the kind of ghazal called ' description of an affair '. Almost the same sense of 'opening' or 'public revelation' is in fact the literal meaning of ; for discussion, see 20,9 . The first line is contrafactual, and suggests that the secret of the speaker's 'affair(s)' could have been kept if it were not for the anthology or 'selection' that gave the secret away. But why was this the case? =Was this because his 'affair(s)' took place not in the real world but only in his heart, so that they could be revealed only by his words? =Was this because every verse he wrote-- and thus every verse in the anthology-- was one of obsessive passion, or some secret of that kind? =Was this because when someone (not necessarily the poet himself) selected some of his verses for an anthology, the ones about obsessive passion at once stood out through their superior merit, and demanded to be chosen? =Or, as Bekhud Dihlavi suggests, was this because he himself always chose and recited verses about obsessive passion at mushairah s? What it really is, obviously, is an enjoyable display of wordplay about words, of poetry about poetry, even of a perverse pride in one's (in)famous celebrity. graphics/poetscorner.jpg