S. R. Faruqi:

It was no small thing to call himself a burnt-up seed-- and then he's given for the farmer too the simile of a seed, and has shown complete sarcasm about the arrangement of the universe. The work of a farmer is to sow seeds (that is, to mingle the seed with/into the dust); here, its mirror-image took place. Because of the speaker's being a burnt-up seed, the farmer's crop could not be fruitful; the grief/regret/longing for flourishingness destroyed the farmer, as if he had been mingled with/into the dust like a seed.

It's not necessary to ask, if the speaker is a burnt-up seed, who the farmer is. This whole verse is in fact a single metaphor in its own right for the speaker's ill fortune and failure, and for the fact that whoever has had any expectations of the speaker has ended up in despair. The power of the verse is of course in its metaphor and sarcasm, and also in the theme that the speaker was not the only one who was ill-fortuned and unsuccessful-- the people who were connected with him were also unsuccessful.

If the speaker is the lover, then the farmer can also be the beloved-- that the beloved wanted to to teach me the lesson of passion very well, she wanted to make me accomplished in the pain and burning of passion. But in the midst of it I failed, like a seed that has been burnt and thus cannot bring forth fruit. Thus I couldn't endure the stages of passion, and the beloved was destined to regret/longing and despair.

It's a strange and uncanny verse. And the final touch is that he has declared himself to be the one responsible for the farmer's destruction as well. That is, despite his being a burnt-up seed, he had sufficient power so that he mingled the farmer with/into the dust.

FWP:

SETS
MOTIFS == 'DEAD LOVER SPEAKS'
NAMES
TERMS == METAPHOR

SRF's final point is worth further consideration. How indeed did a single burnt-up, useless seed cause the farmer's ruin-- cause him to be 'mingled with/into the dust' like a seed himself? Perhaps the seed was so extraordinarily promising and full of potential that the farmer became obsessed with it to the point of madness; or perhaps the seed was emblematic of a whole 'burnt-up' harvest that the farmer tried desperately but vainly to save.

In any case, the verse creates something like a double or recursive metaphor. If the speaker had said that he was a tiger, and had killed the farmer, that would be quite straightforward. But the speaker says he was a seed, and that he had killed the farmer by means of 'grief, regret, longing' [;hasrat]. To 'kill' by causing someone to die of grief is a kind of metaphor in itself, legally and morally speaking. And for a 'burnt-up seed' to have this kind of intentionality and agency requires a further layer of metaphor-- the human-turned-seed must then become a seed-turned-human. The 'seed' must become not only a conscious, morally aware being, but also a murderer-- though perhaps a reluctant or even inadvertent one, who is only recognizing after the fact what has occurred. (What did the seed know, and when did it know it?) This kind of hyper-complexity is futile; it eventually comes to sound like a particularly absurd form of casuistry. The imagery of the verse remains uncanny.