Bekhud Mohani in effect claims, though without using the term, that this verse is an example of the verbal device called ' elegance in assigning a cause '. Wine tends to show small wave movements in its surface when the flagon or glass that holds it is moved. Now the verse tells us what those movements are: they are caused by the 'trembling' of the wine as it anticipates the punishment it will receive for the murder of those thousands who have been slain by the ravishing loveliness of the way the beloved walks, swaying slightly, when she is intoxicated. Of course, this explanation doesn't account for the trembling of the wine drunk by other people in other gatherings, so the causality is not ideally universal. Usually murderers are spoken of as having the blood of their victims on their 'neck' [], the way in English murderers have blood on their 'head' or 'hands'. And a wine-flagon too has a thin, elegant 'neck'; if the flagon is held by the neck for pouring, the main body of it will be especially likely to 'tremble'. If the punishment for capital crimes is thought of as loss of one's head (as in 59,4 ), then the flagon's neck, which actually poured out the blood-red, murder-causing wine, is an aptly anthromorphic part of it to mention. There is also a nice connection between the beloved's 'swaying' gait and the 'trembling' of the wine in the flagon. Even more elegantly, this likeness is made entirely through implication -- there's not a word in the verse that describes the beloved's gait. There's a wordplay connection too, since 'trembling' and 'swaying' contrast so directly with the 'fixed, stationary, standing' (see the definition above) sense of . graphics/winequiver.jpg graphics/winewave.jpg