A Mother's Dream

Maan ka Khwab — 'A Mother's Dream' — is one of the most tender poems in the children's section of Bang-e-Dara, and one that adults find harder to read than children do. It is spoken by a mother, and it recounts a dream she had one night about a child she has lost.

The poem appears in the early part of Bang-e-Dara, Iqbal's first Urdu collection, which was published together as a book in 1924. It belongs to the group of short poems Iqbal wrote for the young, and like several of those it follows an English-language model — verse of consolation about a dead child was a recognised form in the schoolroom poetry of his time. Iqbal reshaped that form into Urdu, and the source is part of the poem's history.

The poem is built as a remembered dream, told step by step. The mother dreams she is walking somewhere in the dark, frightened, unable to find the path. Gathering her courage, she sees a line of children dressed in emerald green, each carrying a lit lamp, walking quietly onward. Among them, at the back, she recognises her own son — and she sees that his lamp alone is not burning.

What follows is the conversation that gives the poem its weight. The mother, overcome, reproaches the child: how could you leave me, I am restless without you, every day I string necklaces of tears. It is the most natural speech of grief imaginable, and Iqbal lets her say all of it. Then the child turns and answers, and the answer is the turn of the poem.

The child's reply is gentle and devastating. Your weeping for me, he tells her, does you no good — and then he holds up his dark, unlit lamp and asks: do you understand what put this out? It was your tears that extinguished it. The moral is handled with great delicacy. Iqbal does not scold the mother; grief is not a sin in this poem. But he offers a hard, consoling thought: that love expressed only as endless sorrow can weigh on the one who is mourned, and that the kindest love sometimes has to learn to let its lamp stay lit.

Maan ka Khwab endures because it speaks to the oldest grief there is, and offers a comfort that needs no particular creed to receive. The image of the child's quenched lamp is simple enough for a child and deep enough for anyone who has lost someone. Iqbal asks the bereaved, very softly, to grieve in a way that does not darken the one they loved.