Tonight by Agha Shahid Ali, Reading

The poem Tonight by Agha Shahid Ali is the one interested and confused me most. Just like what Burt said, “it is a poem about lost love and loneliness, about Islamic and Western religious inheritance, and-in characteristically evasive ghazal style-about Ali’s life between cultures, languages, and continents, first within and then away from his native Kashmir.” I had a same feeling with Ali’s about loneliness after reading Ali’s poem.

This poem has 13 stanzas with two lines each, the poetic form is Ghazal and the repeated word “tonight” rhymes with other word in the end of every stanzas. Rhyme seems to be enjoyed simply as a repeating pattern that is pleasant to read or hear, but English is not first language and I am struggling with reading. So I could not see the pleasant from the rhyme. From another level, the repeated word “tonight” told us that all sad things were happened at that night, it leads us into a deeper sense of sadness.

The stanzas that interested me most is the last stanza in this poem:

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee-

God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

This stanza has given me strongest feeling. There are two images come out from my mind when I read it. First is from “God sobs in my arms”: in a vast desert, no one else except he and the god. God was so lonely, he came over and hold god in his arms. There are two reasons that I feel the setting is in a vast desert: first, this poem is a sad poem, it should be happened in an extreme environment; second, Ali is from Kashmir where all deserts. In poem, Ali has showed the loneliness of god many times. Such as in stanza -------------------------------------------------. Ali is a person