A Wish

Ek Arzu — 'A Wish' — is one of Iqbal's earliest poems, written before he left for Europe and gathered into the first part of Bang-e-Dara. It is unusual among his works because it asks not for striving and struggle, the themes of his maturity, but for rest.

The poem is a daydream. Iqbal pictures a small cottage set far from the noise of the city — beside a clear running stream, near a quiet hillside, surrounded by flowers and birdsong. He imagines the simple pleasures of such a place: cool water, the scent of the garden, the company of nature rather than of crowds.

What he is asking for is solitude — not the solitude of loneliness, but of peace. The wish is for a life stripped of ambition's noise, where the heart can breathe. There is a real tenderness in the details; the young poet lingers over the picture the way one lingers over something genuinely wanted.

It is illuminating to read this poem against Iqbal's later work. The mature Iqbal would distrust exactly this wish; his great theme became Khudi — the self that grows only through effort, hardship, and engagement with the world. He came to see withdrawal as a kind of surrender. Ek Arzu shows us the road not taken — the contemplative, quietist temperament he might have followed and chose instead to leave behind.

That tension is what makes the poem valuable. It reveals that Iqbal's philosophy of struggle was not the absence of a longing for peace, but a decision made in full knowledge of that longing. He knew the appeal of the quiet house by the stream; he simply came to believe that a human being is made for more.

Formally the poem is soft and musical, rich in the imagery of nature, in the gentle Romantic style of his early period. It has none of the rhetorical force of his later poetry; it is meant to soothe.

Ek Arzu endures partly for its own delicate beauty and partly for what it tells us about its author — that the poet of restless striving began as a young man who, like everyone, simply wanted a small and peaceful place to call his own.