FWP:
SETS == GENERATORS,
IZAFAT
SHAME/HONOR: {3,5}
This brilliant verse is as sharp and powerful as the previous one, {220,1}, is muddy and elusive. 'Like an egg'-- what more potent and complex image is there? An egg is an utterly helpless, vulnerable, delicate thing-- and also radically potent, exciting, full of promise. To be compared to an egg might thus, depending on the context, mean almost anything. Then of course nang means both 'shame' and 'honor' (as discussed and documented in {3,5}), so as we move on through the first line, our choices don't narrow at all.
Then the multivalence of the i.zaafat makes kaj-e qafas a further source of complexity. The adjective kaj can refer either to a physical quality of being 'crooked' or 'bent', or to a temperamental or even moral quality of being 'perverse' or 'wry' or 'cross'. So what is a 'crooked-one of the cage'? Here are some of the possibilities:
=one who is made crooked by having to fit inside the confined
space of a cage
=one who is crooked/perverse and is owned or possessed by a cage
=one who is crooked/perverse and lives in a cage by choice
=one who is crooked/perverse and is somehow or other associated with a cage
Thus the interpretive range is 180 degrees broad. At one extreme, we have an insulting depiction of a bird who perversely chooses to live (or has become crooked through being forced to live) in a cage, and thus becomes a disgrace to the feather and wing he ought to be using, so that in fact he's as humiliatingly helpless as an egg. At the other extreme we have a flattering evocation of a bird who, though now confined by a cage, has the kind of powerful potential that an egg does, and is destined one day, when he leaves the cage, to be a credit to, to be part of the 'honor' of, feather and wing.
And all this only in the first line! We look hopefully to the second line-- and find only an enticing, wistful speculation: there would be a new, fresh life, if 'it' would become 'released'. (The polite imperative is here used colloquially as a kind of subjunctive, so that ho jaa))iye is more like ho jaa))e .) We first of course think of rihaa in its most common sense of 'liberated' or 'freed', of the 'it' as 'this crooked-one' who would become liberated from the cage that confines him.
But rihaa karnaa , of which rihaa honaa is the intransitive form, can also mean 'to quit, leave, discard, abandon'. So there's the possibility that the 'it' would be the cage that would be left behind. Or, alternatively, perhaps the 'crooked' bird itself is being regarded with contempt, and the speaker imagines that things would be better all around if such a wretched creature were 'abandoned' or 'discarded', so that everybody in the vicinity would then have a 'fresh start' without being constantly oppressed by such a dismal sight. For after all, the verse tells us that there would be a 'fresh start' if the bird were released and/or tossed aside-- but it carefully doesn't tell us for whom.
The speaker might very well be another bird; a phrase like 'a disgrace to wing and feather', and the comparison to an egg, would come naturally to the lips (beak?) of a fellow-bird. The lover often speaks as a bird (for examples see {126,5}), and this verse might well be another such instance.
On any reading, the wistfulness, the hope, the uncertainty remain. The petrified phrase az sar-e nau literally means 'from a new head', which works beautifully with the image of an egg hatching open.
Compare {3,5}, with its equally
complex use of nang ; instead of playing with the egg
and the cage, it plays with the shroud and the garment.
Nazm:
For coming out of the cage and the starting of a new life, the verse was in need of a proof. Calling him 'like an egg', the author proved it. That is, a bird's new life begins after emerging from the egg. In the same way, after being released from this crooked cage-- that is, the egg of the sky-- a new life in the world of spirits will begin. (251)
== Nazm page 251