Ghazal 16, Verse 10x

Gyan Chand:

'Wolf's tail' is a Persian idiom for the crack of dawn. Whether you put an i.zaafat after sho;x or you don't, it makes no difference. In the dawn of Doomsday, there will be a great turmoil and commotion, a great wailing and lamentation. But the jungle in which our beloved, hunter of the two worlds, went to hunt-- there she made prey of so many animals, she created such a Doomsday, that compared to it the dawn of Doomsday was diminished: it was reduced to merely the crack of dawn, in which there's no turmoil and confusion, no mischief and confusion. (95)

FWP:

SETS
DESERT: {3,1}
DOOMSDAY: {10,11}

Raza p. 227. S. R. Faruqi's choices. This is the tenth and last verse of the ten-verse ghazal that Ghalib originally composed; in his published divan he included only verses three through seven.

In an enjoyable feat of wordplay, the dawn of Doomsday becomes merely a single 'wolf's tail' (an idiom for the white line of the first dawn along the dark horizon) in the desert where the beloved hunts. The dawn of Doomsday is thus reduced merely to an ordinary 'crack of dawn'; and in addition, a 'wolf's tail' is just the kind of minor trophy that the beloved might expect to bear home from her hunt.

The i.zaafat after sho;x is metrically optional; I reproduce it, following Raza. It also seems to be semantically optional. With it, we have a desert in which that uniquely and universally mischievous one, that 'two-worlds mischievous one' [sho;x-e do-((aalam], was a hunter; without it, we have a desert in which that mischievous one was a 'two-worlds hunter' [do-((alam-shikaar]. Either way, the extension of her power over the two worlds (this present world and the world to come) works excellently with the idea of her treating Doomsday as a mere wolf's tail. (For more on such 'two worlds' constructions, see {18,2}.)