S. R. Faruqi:

Atish has taken this theme much farther. His verse has deservedly become proverbially famous:

ba;Raa shor sunte the pahluu me;N dil kaa
jo chiiraa to ik qa:trah-e ;xuu;N nah niklaa

[we used to hear a great turmoil in the side, of the heart
when we tore it open, then not a single drop of blood emerged]

But it's possible that Atish might have had before him this verse of Mir's [{711,9}]:

;Gairat se miir .saa;hib sab ja;zb ho ga))e the
niklaa nah buu;Nd lohuu siinah jo un kaa chiiraa

[out of pride, Mir Sahib, all had become absorbed
not a drop of blood emerged, when they tore his breast open]

For the present verse of Mir's, there are two interpretations. One is that because of the madness of passion all the blood had dried up; when in order to open a vein they applied a lancet (here the beloved herself is acting as a helper; this is an additional pleasure), then even after applying hundreds of lancets, blood didn't emerge.

The second interpretation is of the lover's 'tough-lifedness' [sa;xt-jaanii]; hundreds of times the beloved pierced him with the lancets of her eyelashes, but the lover was so stubborn-hearted that even his blood wouldn't emerge. He's placed the word saudaa well, because in old times a cure for madness was to open a vein, and passion was also called 'madness'. See {711,9}.

FWP:

SETS
MOTIFS == EYES; MADNESS
NAMES
TERMS == IMPLICATION

On the nature of a 'lancet' and the practice of bleeding, see G{166,2}.

Why will the speaker 'presumably' not have had 'such' a fit of madness before? No doubt because during previous fits of madness he used to have sufficient tears of blood in his eyes, so that blood drops emerged when the lancets of her eyelashes were applied. This time, however, his blood is all dried up, expended, gone; or else his madness is now such that he's petrified, stupefied, with even his bodily processes frozen into immobility.

And why the 'presumably'? (On the grammar of the 'presumptive', see {54,1}.) Since the speaker is describing his own history, surely he should be able to speak with more certainty? Really, the (grammatically suggested) 'presumably' is the best part of the verse, because it has two kinds of 'implication'. One implication is that the speaker is so deeply crazed that he's beside himself, he can't even remember his own history, he has to make relatively tentative assumptions about things that a sane person would know about himself with great confidence. The other implication is that this present fit of madness, with its total drying-up of the blood, is fatal and will be his last; thus it follows, since he's still (barely) alive, that he must never have had 'such' a fit of madness before.

The speaker could theoretically be someone else-- someone who addresses 'Mir' as an intimate, but still is uncertain about his medical history. But it's a less piquant possibility.