===
1135,
6
===

 

{1135,6}

khi;Nchii te;G us kii to yaa;N niim-jaa;N the
;xajaalat se ham rah ga))e sar jhukaa kar

1) when her sword was grasped, then-- here, we were half-alive,
2) from shame, we remained with our head bowed

 

Notes:

;xajaalat : 'Bashfulness, shame, sense of shame'. (Platts p.487)

S. R. Faruqi:

In keeping the head bowed from shame, the point is that at the time when the head is to be cut of, the neck is caused to bow down. Thus when from shame our head remains constantly bowed, then it's as if we've attained two goals. One is that we have expressed our sense of shame; and the other is that we've expressed our readiness to have our head cut off.

There's also the suggestion that the life-abradingness of passion has so oppressed the speaker that in the interval before the time for his head to be cut off, half his life has already left him. That is, now he's no longer capable of sacrificing a whole life for the beloved-- he's arrived at the execution-ground with only half a life. Then, there's also the shame that the beloved might suspect that from fear of death, his life has dried up until only half of it has remained.

The theme of being half-alive at the time of death, and lacking in strength, Naziri has versified [in Persian] in an entirely new way:

'My supply of weakness is such that at the place of my sacrifice
Instead of blood, sweat emerged from the murderer's sword.'

Naziri's verse is a superior example of rarity of thought, but in Mir's verse the narrativity is greater, because his view is founded on everyday life (the head bows in shame, and also when the head is to be cut off). Although in Naziri's verse there's certainly one excellence that isn't found in Mir's verse: that sweat is called 'water' [aab], and one meaning of aab is 'glitter, glisten', and another is 'the sharpness of a sword'. Thus at the time of my murder the beloved's sword became so ashamed that its glitter and sharpness both kept disappearing.

FWP:

SETS == MIDPOINTS
MOTIFS == SWORD
NAMES
TERMS

The adverbial phrase ;xajaalat se can be read either with the first line ('here, we were half-alive, from shame') or with the second ('from shame, we remained with our head bowed').