Muntakhab al-tawarikh 334.3

334.3

“O thou, whose goodly figure resembles a moving cypress, Whose arched eyebrow is bent like a bow, The curl of whose locks is a snare of love’s madness, Whose dark ringlet is the desire of Paradise, Thy bewitching lip is the water of life, The lovely down on thy cheek is the Khizr of these days, Thy fawn’s eyes are calamity’s self, Even a raging tiger would fall before the eyes of such a fawn, The wretched Faizi is bound in the bonds of thy locks, All the world is smitten with thy dark ringlets.” One day, about the time when this hasty essay was being written, Shaikh Faizi saw in my hand the Tazkirah of Mir There is a capricious one the dust of whose door step is my lodging, From whom I have gained naught but cruelty and oppression When I see her face over the corner of the roof Her eye shoots the arrow of cruelty at my heart. This is a couplet of his— “Perfume not the jasmine with musk, Draw not a line of ambergris around the sun.” He wrote the following quatrain to describe a horse which had been given to him by the emperor Humayun: “O King with an army like that of Jamshid, monarch of boundless power, I have a horse which is exceedingly lean and weak, When I mount him, at every two or three steps which he takes He falls, saying, ‘Now you carry me for two or three steps.’ ” The source of this quatrain is certainly that well-known couplet, by whom I know not— “He goes one or two steps and then says, ‘Now do you carry me for an hour or so?’ ”