The ghazal’s sher, being syntactically and thematically an independent entity, compels the poet to cultivate a style that is allusive, symbolic, and, most importantly, resonant with images and metaphors found in the tradition of ghazal poetry reaching as far back as the seventh century CE in Arabic, and to the eleventh century in Persian.
#Mirza ghalib ghazals series#
He owed this accomplishment as much to his unique imagination and mastery of Urdu language as to his access to two traditions of ghazal form.Ĭomprising a series of closed couplets, similar to heroic couplets in English, the ghazal form’s natural tendency is to craft either an epigram or an aphorism - a fact that was exploited by Ghalib in all its varied possibilities. Ghalib wrote countless Urdu couplets of this kind, in which the sheer microcosmic intensity of his ashār captivates the readers’ mind and heart. The couplet is vintage Ghalib – lyrical, dense, polysemous, metaphysical, and endowed with universal content. Through all this, Ghalib references the artist’s perennial struggle to mirror and embody in the earthly world the sacred essence of the beyond.
The grating sound of a reed pen scratching on paper suggest the exacting efforts of creativity - ‘I was sentenced to the hard labour of writing prose and poetry,’ laments Ghalib in a letter. The sound of the reed pen, substituted metonymically for poetry, is likened to the voice of an angel to emphasise the role of inspiration in a poet’s vocation. In this couplet, Ghalib expresses the age-old belief that the provenance of poetry is divine and mystical.
(These ideas visit the imagination from the beyond: in the scratchings of the reed pen (I hear) the angel’s song.)
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