S. R. Faruqi:

To versify the theme of kuu;Re ke ;Dher is no easy thing. Ghalib and Zafar Iqbal come to mind. Ghalib:

G{181,4}.

Zafar Iqbal:

hai duud-e ;xaak-daar bahut paak ho havaa
paanii hai zer-baar bahut kaa))ii ;xatm ho

[there is much dust-filled smoke-- let the air be pure!
water is much overburdened-- let the rubbish be finished!]

Zafar Iqbal's first line is a bit ponderous; otherwise the accomplishment of all three verses is that they have versified such an unpoetic theme as kuuraa or kaa))ii with such flowingness and trimness that there's no feeling of any kind of strain or excessive awkwardness in the language. The theme has come before us as if of its own inclination. By using the phrase duur se , Mir has created a response to the exaggeration. For color to come upon the furnace from the weeping of blood is an enchantment of affinity. The wordplay among ;xirman-e gul , lohuu , rang , gul;xan is superb.

Between the present verse and the previous one,

{1041,4},

the twilight redness has welled up excellently; but this redness is not that of life, but rather that of death. Having read/heard both verses, one feels something like a thrill of fear, because behind them is the power of madness, and its arrogance. Their outer surface is based on oppositions and their innerness on sarcasm-- as though on a pale face blood would be smeared, and by means of death a terrifying parody of life would have been created. The way in Shakespeare's drama 'Cymbeline' (IV,2) Imogen, seeing the blood-smeared body of her step-brother Cloten [whom she thinks to be her beloved Posthumus], cries out,

... O!
Give colour to my pale cheek with thy blood,
That we the horrider may seem to those
Which chance to find us...

See

{1627,5},

where the very same kind of madness is expressed as in the present verse, but without the aspect of sarcasm.

FWP:

SETS == EK
MOTIFS
NAMES
TERMS == WORDPLAY

I was slightly uncertain about the second line, but SRF pointed out (November 2017) that the idiom ik rang par honaa (or ik rang par aa jaanaa ) means 'to have (a special kind of) beauty, to be spectacular'. Thus the prose order of the second line will be hamaare lohuu rone se gul;xan ik rang pah hai .

The lover's bloody tears make everything he sees look red-colored. When he sees in the distance heaps of sticks and straw and other such rubbish, they look like a harvest of roses. They are burned in a 'single / particular / unique / excellent' furnace; in his (blood-filled) eyes, this rose-burning furnace has a special 'color', beauty, style. And of course gul;xan , in perfect wordplay, contains within it gul .

The little word ik plays a notably complex role. It opens up-- and then refuses to resolve-- a shifting set of possibilities for the nature of that 'furnace'. And since whichever of those qualities we might choose to envision is created by, and apparently only by, the lover's weeping of blood, the possibilities proliferate further. Is the 'furnace' really the lover's suffering, fiery heart? Does the 'furnace' exist at all? Perhaps the lover's madness has invented, or hallucinated, it. But if the 'furnace' is only dubiously real, what about the heaps of woodchips and rubbish in the first line? The whole verse then can hardly be stopped from oscillating among realistic, metaphorical, and sheerly crazed possibilities.

Note for grammar fans: In the first line, the first se is short for jaise ; the second one is the regular postposition.