सांझ की लाली सुलग-सुलग कर

The poem evokes a suffocating atmosphere of desolate longing and agonizing separation, cast in the melancholy twilight of a lonely night. A desolate woman sits upon an unshared, burning bed as the red glow of evening fades into black dust, surrounded by scattered flowers she plucked in vain while waiting for her unyielding beloved. Piercing stars prick her heavy, tear-filled eyes as she feels utterly alienated in her own homeland since her husband's departure, a torment amplified when the chilly night wind turns her sleeping mat into bedded coals and blows the wings of moths into ash. The underlying symbolism contrasts the romantic promise of the nuptial couch with the searing agony of abandonment, casting the elements—the cooling breeze, the falling dew, and the evening glow—as cruel adversaries in a deeply romantic yet tragic expression of shringara rasa.

सांझ की लाली सुलग-सुलग कर (Sanjh Ki Lali Sulag Sulag Kar), by Sahir Ludhianvi runs to 8 lines across 8 stanzas, set as Rhyming couplets (Dohe-like structure). Its governing rasa is Shringara, shaded by Karuna. The metre is geet. Rhyme falls as AABBCCDD.

It belongs to the 1921 · 1980 span of Sahir Ludhianvi's working life, and keeps the plain, spoken register that period is known for.

Read it for विरहिणी की व्याकुलता और एकाकीपन and प्रकृति के माध्यम से विरह की तीव्रता का चित्रण. 5 words in it carry older or regional senses, so the poem rewards a second pass.

The verse is hung beside Nala and Damayanti: Bathed in a heavy, melancholic atmosphere of exhaustion and impending doom, this late-nineteenth-century chromolithograph depicts the fallen King Nala keeping a vigilant watch over his sleeping wife, Damayanti, in the…