Navoiy’s life and the ghazal “Qilg‘il”

The ghazal with the radif “Qilg‘il” is ghazal 371 in “G‘aroyib us-sig‘ar” and has eight couplets. Its radif is a purely Uzbek word. Among its rhymes are Arabic words (“fan”, “vatan”, “rasan”, “kafan”) and Persian ones (“ko‘hkan”, “shikan”, “anjuman”) together with the Uzbek “tikan”. The metre is mujtassi musammani maxbuni maqtu‘. In the matla‘ the word “mardum” means both “person” and “the pupil of the eye”; this tajnis makes it a “husni matla‘”. The lyric hero asks his beloved to settle in the pupil of his eye. In the second couplet he longs for the garden of heart and soul for her face and stature; in the third he says he accepts any suffering from her; in the fourth he alludes to the figure of Farhod, saying that in love his pain is no less; in the fifth, reading the hair as a symbol of worldly cares, he suggests that these must be overcome to reach the beloved’s beauty; the sixth couplet points to the fleetingness of life; in the seventh the lover voices a last request to a friend; in the maqta‘ he likens the eyelash to a candle that lights the gathering of longing. The matla‘ begins with the eye and the maqta‘ ends with the eyelash, and this balance gives the device tanosib. At the start of the 20th century To‘ychi hofiz sang this ghazal to the melody “Ushshoq”. Ghazal 483 in “Navodir ush-shabob”, the one with the radif “Deyin”, has seven couplets: every couplet is a question, and the beloved’s features of beauty and the pains of love are compared in pairs (brow and eye, the snare of the hair and the word of the lips, fate’s grief and the world’s hardship, and so on). Apart from the matla‘, the first lines have an inner rhyme, and the word “deyin” is repeated 20 times in all; the first line returns at the end of the ghazal (radd ul-matla‘).