In 1916 the literary world marked the 300th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. To honour the occasion, a Book of Homage to Shakespeare was assembled, gathering tributes from writers across many countries and languages. Among the contributors was a Punjabi poet then in his late thirties: Muhammad Iqbal.
Iqbal's tribute, which appears in his Urdu collection Bang-e-Dara, is simply titled 'Shakespeare'. It is fourteen lines long — the length of a Shakespearean sonnet — a quiet formal bow from one poet to another. To write a poem of homage in the shape of the honoured poet's own signature form is a deliberate, knowing act of craft.
The poem's theme is the mystery of Shakespeare's vision. Iqbal pictures the dramatist as a kind of mirror held up to life itself — a mind in which the beauty and truth of the world saw their own reflection. Where ordinary eyes catch only fragments, Shakespeare's caught the whole, and held it still long enough for others to look. The tribute is one of admiration without reservation.
What makes the small poem matter is what it reveals about Iqbal's sense of his own company. He did not read Shakespeare as a foreign curiosity or a colonial inheritance to be resented. He read him as a peer in a worldwide guild of poets, and felt entitled — obliged, even — to add his voice to a global act of remembrance.
It is a modest piece beside the Javid Nama or the great odes. But it belongs on this site precisely because it is modest. Here is Iqbal, unprompted by politics or philosophy, simply taking his place in a chorus of the world's writers honouring one of their own. The instinct behind that fourteen-line poem is the same instinct that makes Iqbal a poet for everyone.