Mirrors and the Couplet

Hang two mirrors on opposite walls and stand between them, and the room goes on forever: each glass holding the other, smaller and smaller, down a green corridor of light.

A couplet is a smaller version of that room. Two lines, and the thought ends when the second one does, so each line has nowhere to look except at the other. Traditions that never borrowed from one another arrived at the same unit, the Chinese parallel couplet, the English heroic couplet, the Persian bayt, the Urdu sher, the Hindi doha, and each found its own way to hang the two glasses. Some reflect word for word. Some reflect only in sound. Some reflect by contradiction, which is still a reflection, the way a mirror gives back your left hand as a right one.

Below, one couplet from each, set so the halves face each other.

Du Fu: the exact mirror#

Chinese regulated verse requires its middle couplets to be parallel, duìzhàng (對仗): the two lines must match slot by slot. Du Fu's "Spring View" (春望), written in 757 in an occupied capital, gives the standard example. As printed on zh.wikisource:

感時花濺淚，恨別鳥驚心。

gǎn shí huā jiàn lèi, hèn bié niǎo jīng xīn

Grieving the times, the flowers spill tears; hating the parting, the birds startle the heart.

Fold the couplet down the middle and every character lands on its partner.

Two mirrors are hung here at once. One reflects meaning: flower faces bird, tears face heart, verb faces verb. The other reflects sound, and it reverses. In Middle Chinese every syllable was either level or oblique in tone, and at the stressed second and fourth positions the lines must disagree: level against oblique, oblique against level. Same shape, opposite colour. A perfect parallel couplet is a photograph and its negative laid on top of each other.

The poem opens the same way:

Broken faces spring. Rivers face trees. A ruin, and a season that does not care.

Pope: the mirror inside the line#

The English heroic couplet is two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter, closed at the end of the second. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711), in the Project Gutenberg text (ebook #7409):

Good-nature and good-sense must ever join; To err is human, to forgive, divine.

True wit is nature to advantage dressed; What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;

Set the two lines of either couplet side by side and they do not mirror much. Their grammar runs differently; their words do not pair off. What locks each couplet is the rhyme, join / divine, dressed / expressed, and the full stop.

The mirror is there, but Pope has moved it. It hangs inside the single line, at the pause in the middle:

The second half drops its verb. Grammarians call that gapping; the comma after forgive is where is used to be. The missing word makes the reflection faster, almost a flash: human, divine, two words a breath apart that are as far apart as two words can be. The heroic couplet holds itself together with rhyme, and does its mirroring at the half-line.

Saadi: the mirror of sound#

The Persian bayt is two half-lines, misra, in one meter, usually rhyming. It asks for no word-by-word parallel. Saadi, in the Gulistan (book 1, story 10), as printed on ganjoor.net:

بنی آدم اعضایِ یکدیگرند که در آفرینش ز یک گوهرند

banī ādam aʿzā-ye yekdīgarand ke dar āfarīnesh ze yek gowharand

The children of Adam are limbs of one another, for in their making they are of one substance.

The first half-line says what is true; the second, opened by ke, "for", says why. They are not shaped alike. What faces across the gap is sound: the rhyme -arand on both ends, and the word yek, "one", hidden inside yekdīgar, "one another", then standing on its own in the answer. The claim already holds the ground inside it. The second line only takes it out and shows it.

A widely circulated version reads aʿzā-ye yek peykarand, "limbs of one body". Ganjoor's edition has yekdīgarand. Verse that lived in memory before it lived in print often arrives in two versions, and both are quoted with love.

Mir: one against all#

The Urdu sher inherits the bayt's two misras, one meter, a complete thought (its anatomy is in What Is a Sher). Mir Taqi Mir, as printed on rekhta.org:

پتا پتا بوٹا بوٹا حال ہمارا جانے ہے جانے نہ جانے گل ہی نہ جانے باغ تو سارا جانے ہے

pattā pattā buuTā buuTā haal hamārā jaane hai jaane na jaane gul hī na jaane, baaġh to saarā jaane hai

Every leaf, every bush knows the state I am in; the one flower may not know, may never know; the whole garden knows.

The first line is a crowd, leaf after leaf, all knowing. The second line holds up a single flower, the gul, the beloved, the only one whose knowing would matter, and sets it against the whole garden. The verb jaane rings four times in that second line, and the repetition is the mirror: knows, not knows, not knows, knows. Everyone is a reflection of the speaker's state except the one face he is looking for.

Kabir: the mirror at the water's edge#

The Hindi doha is two lines of 13 and 11 matras, rhyming at the end (counted beat by beat in Kabir and the Doha). From the Kabir page on hi.wikiquote.org:

जिन खोजा तिन पाइया, गहरे पानी पैठि। मैं बपुरा बूडन डरा, रहा किनारे बैठि॥

jin khojā tin pāiyā, gahare pānī paiṭhi maiñ bapurā būḍan ḍarā, rahā kināre baiṭhi

Those who searched, found, going down into deep water; I, poor thing, afraid of drowning, stayed sitting on the shore.

This is antithesis at full strength: the seekers against the self, deep water against the shore, the plunge against the sitting still. And it is all gathered into the rhyme. Paiṭhi and baiṭhi differ by a single consonant, p against b, one breath of air. Going in and staying out sound almost the same. They are two whole lives.

That is the last trick of the facing glasses. The closer the two lines come to each other in sound and shape, the more clearly you can see what is different, the way two mirrors show you, at the end of their long green corridor, only the one small figure standing between them, on the shore, not going in.