What Is a Sher

Put the couplet on the bench first. Names can wait.

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

pattā pattā buuṭā buuṭā hāl hamārā jaane hai jaane na jaane gul hī na jaane baaġh to saarā jaane hai

Every leaf, every shrub knows the state I am in; the rose may know or may not, but the whole garden knows.

It is by Mir Taqi Mir, and the text is checked against its page on rekhta.org. Read it twice, once for the sense and once for the sound, before picking up any tool.

The first facet#

Cover the second line with a thumb. What remains is a claim: the leaves know, the shrubs know. It is pretty and it goes nowhere. Nothing presses on it.

A single line like this is a misra (مصرع). The word names one leaf of a double door. One leaf open is a door you can see through but not walk through.

Lift the thumb. The second leaf swings in, and the claim turns over. Everyone knows, says the first line; everyone except, perhaps, the one who matters, says the second. The rose is the beloved. The garden's knowledge is total and useless, because the only reader whose knowledge would change anything is the one who may not have noticed. The whole weight of the couplet sits on that hinge between the lines.

Two misras that close a thought this way are a sher (شعر). That is all the word means, and it is a great deal. A sher is not a stanza waiting for the next one. It is a cut stone: the turn happens inside it, and when it stops, it is finished.

Turn it in the light#

Tilt the couplet so the line-ends catch.

Two different glints. At the very end, the same two words, letter for letter: jaane hai, "knows." Just before them, two words that differ but share a sound: hamārā, saarā, both ringing on -ārā.

The fixed end is the radif (ردیف). The changing rhyme just before it is the qafiya (قافیہ).

Notice the order, because English trains the ear the other way. In an English rhyme the rhyming syllable is the last thing heard. Here the rhyme comes first and the refrain closes the line, so each line ends in two motions: something new, then something known. A change, then a return. Many ghazals have no radif at all (they are called ghair-muraddaf) and end on the rhyme alone, but none goes without a qafiya.

Hold the qafiya words closer and a small flaw shows that is not a flaw. Further down the same ghazal, this sher appears:

مہر و وفا و لطف و عنایت ایک سے واقف ان میں نہیں اور تو سب کچھ طنز و کنایہ رمز و اشارہ جانے ہے

mehr o vafā o lutf-o-ināyat ek se vāqif in meñ nahīñ aur to sab kuchh tanz o kināya ramz o ishāra jaane hai

Kindness, faithfulness, grace, favour: not one of them is known to her; everything else she knows: the taunt, the innuendo, the cipher, the sign.

The rhyme word is ishāra, a sign or gesture, and in the script it ends in ہ, not in ا like hamārā and saarā. To the eye, it does not match. To the ear, it does: the final letter is only spelling a vowel. Rhyme in this tradition is judged by sound, and the eye has to learn to defer to it. That is the first lesson of the bench: the surface of a stone is not always its colour.

There is a quieter joke in the couplet too. The list of what she knows — taunt, innuendo, cipher, sign — is a list of ways of saying something without saying it. The sher itself does exactly that.

The setting#

The opening couplet carries the rhyme and refrain in both lines. Every later couplet carries them only in its second line. Here is the next one:

لگنے نہ دے بس ہو تو اس کے گوہر گوش کو بالے تک اس کو فلک چشم مہ و خور کی پتلی کا تارا جانے ہے

lagne na de bas ho to us ke gauhar-e-gosh ko baale tak us ko falak chashm-e-mah-o-ḳhur kī putlī kā taarā jaane hai

If it could, the sky would not let even an earring touch that pearl of an ear; the sky holds it as the star in the pupil of the eye of moon and sun.

The first line ends on tak, which rhymes with nothing. It is free. The second lands on taarā jaane hai: the same -ārā, the same jaane hai.

So the first couplet is a contract. It is called the matla (مطلع), the place where the sun rises, and it sets both the rhyme and the refrain twice so the ear learns them. Every later sher honours half the contract and spends the other half however it likes:

That free first line is where the surprises come from. It can set up anything, so long as the second line can bring it home to -ārā jaane hai.

The signature on the clasp#

The last couplet of the ghazal:

تشنۂ خوں ہے اپنا کتنا میرؔ بھی ناداں تلخی کش دم دار آب تیغ کو اس کے آب گوارا جانے ہے

tishna-e-ḳhūñ hai apnā kitnā 'mīr' bhī nādāñ talḳhī-kash dam-dār āb-e-teġh ko us ke āb-e-gavārā jaane hai

How thirsty for his own blood is Mir, the fool who drinks bitterness: the keen water of that sword, he takes it for sweet water to drink.

The poet's own name has crept into the first line: Mir. That name is the takhallus (تخلص), the pen name, and in print it often wears a small mark above it, visible here on میرؔ. A couplet that carries it, closing the ghazal, is the maqta (مقطع), the place where something is cut off.

The poet speaks of himself in the third person, the way a letter names its sender at the foot of the page. But the maqta is not a summary, and it does not resolve anything that came before. It is a signature that still has to work as a sher. This one turns on a single word used twice: āb, which means water and also the gleam, the temper, of a blade. The fool sees the sword's shine and thinks it is something to drink. The pun is the hinge.

The grain of the stone#

One thing has not been named because it cannot be seen on the page, only heard. Every misra in the ghazal, first lines and second, moves to the same pattern of long and short syllables. That pattern is the bahr (بحر), literally "sea," and it is the grain running through every stone in the setting.

Urdu meter counts length, not stress. Mir's meter here is a supple one, built from repeated long syllables with permitted substitutions, and is a study of its own. A plainer grain shows in a line of Ghalib, scanned by hand:

ha   zā   roñ  ḳhvā   hi   sheñ  ai   sī
‿    –    –    –      ‿    –    –    –

Short, long, long, long; short, long, long, long. The unit is called mafā'īlun, and the full line runs it four times. A sher may change its subject, its speaker, its mood, its addressee from one couplet to the next. It may not change its grain. The working method is set out at length in Scanning Urdu Meter.

Everything on the cloth#

Laid out together, the tools of the bench:

None of them tells you what a sher means. They describe the setting, not the light. That is why the ghazal can wander from couplet to couplet without apology, a point followed further in The Ghazal Is a Set of Unrelated Rooms.

Go back to the first couplet. Cover the second line again, then lift the thumb. The garden knows. The rose may not. Every name on the cloth is a way of describing how those two lines were cut so that the second one could fall like that.