This most famous poem of Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Mujh Se Pehli Si Muhabbat) appears in his collection Naqsh-e-Faryadi (The Picture of a Dissenter), published in 1941, the year that Faiz married Alys George, an English journalist and human rights campaigner whom he had met in the late 1930s. Alys would have fully understood the sentiments expressed in Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again, a love poem with a difference in that it celebrates the innocent nature of first love and shows how life (especially anguish caused by brutal injustice) transforms one’s understanding of the meaning of that emotion.
Like Faiz, Alys was a political radical. The activist daughter of a London bookseller, she joined the Communist Party when she was 16 and traveled as a journalist to India in 1938, when she was 23. Upon marrying Faiz, the 26-year-old Alys converted to Islam and eventually became a Pakistani citizen. Her marriage to Faiz lasted to the end of his life. They had two daughters and many grandchildren. Because the poem is a paean to true love of various sorts, the background of Faiz’s relationship to Alys is relevant here.
The poem is composed of two stanzas, the first of 10 lines, the second of 14. The first stanza begins, as the title does, with the exhortation: “That which then was ours, my love, / don’t ask me for that love again” (ll. 1–2). “That love” is then described as wondrous, golden, “burnished with light—/ and only because of you.” When he was in the flush of that miraculous rapture, the only sorrows for which he could weep were, the poet confesses, his lover’s sorrows, since it was impossible to believe that there could be any other sorrows in the world worth considering.
The poet’s life was all bliss and possibility since “A glimpse of [the lover’s] face was evidence of springtime.” In the throes of this obsessive passion, the poet recalls that even the sky “was nothing but [his lover’s] eyes” (l. 9). The stanza ends with the poet’s remembering his feelings then and his aspiration: if he might win her love, “Fate would be helpless” (l. 10).
The second stanza shifts tone abruptly in its first line: “All this I’d thought, all this I’d believed” (l. 11). The poet now acknowledges the existence of “other sorrows” and of “comforts other than love” (l. 12). The rest of the stanza conveys sharply his realization that whole “dark centuries” can be blamed on “the rich” and their greed for material possessions, like “brocades and silks.”
The next seven lines develop the conceit of history as a brocade whose threads unravel symbolically when the poet sees the poverty “in alleys and in open markets” and the bloody deaths all around him, not to mention the long history of slavery, during which human beings, too, were “sold and bought, again and again.” The picture of the present is not a pleasant one, and “This too deserves attention,” he affirms.
Returning from the alleys of current political reality, the poet almost does not know what to say to his lover—“you still are so ravishing—what should I do?” The poem ends with an echo of the sentiments that “there are other sorrows” and “other comforts” and that his lover should not ask the still-loving poet “for that [first] love again.”
Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again is one of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s most celebrated and beloved poems because it combines the two talents for which he is most famous: his ability to evoke luminous, romantic emotions through intimate revelation and to proclaim precisely and sharply the need for a clear understanding of the injustices and crimes of the rich and powerful against their most vulnerable victims, the poor, injured human beings with whom they have dealt so unmercifully and unlovingly through the ages.
The poem has been translated into many languages and into English by many poets, among them Agha Shahid Ali. Faiz recorded the poem in Urdu for the Library of Congress. It can be heard at: http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/tag/poet/faiz-ahmedfaiz/. It is included in many anthologies, among them J. D. McClatchy’s The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (1996), pages 335–336.
Categories: Arabic Literature, British Literature, Literature, Urdu Literature
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