Hammad Niazi is among the few poets in Pakistan whose work speaks equally to the heart and the mind. In the generation that followed Zafar Iqbal and Iftikhar Arif, poets such as Akhtar Usman, Shaheen Abbas, Aftab Husain, Ahmad Fareed, Ambareen Haseeb Amber and Hammad Niazi have explored the complexities of human experience in ways that have become a defining feature of contemporary Urdu poetry.

In my view, Hammad Niazi’s latest collection, Duaon Bharay Dalan, is important because the poet remains visible in the world he creates. Perhaps that is why he does not transform any aspect of life into poetry until it has first become part of his own experience. One of his couplets reads:The verse is remarkable for its delicacy. The poet reports an inner state in which fragrance becomes a part of sight. By associating fragrance with flowers, flowers with the eyes and the act of seeing, he creates a musical quality. The couplet is open to multiple layers of meaning.

On an immediate level, the couplet suggests that the speaker has reached a point in their experience of love where conventional boundaries of the senses begin to dissolve. Fragrance belongs to the faculty of smell but the poet ascribes it to an aspect of vision, suggesting that the memory of the beloved has acquired a tangible presence through the intensity of feeling.

A second dimension of meaning lies in the way the couplet becomes a metaphor for the rare moment of creative intuition in which perception transcends its routine limits and is transformed into a unified inner experience. In such moments, different realms of sensation merge into one another. The visibility of fragrance in this couplet is an expression of that experience. Beauty rises above its material form and becomes something that can not only be felt but also seen.

It is as though the poet’s inner self has been illuminated so completely by the presence of beauty that the conventional boundaries separating the senses have disappeared, giving rise to an entirely new mode of perception. Consciousness enters a state in which sensations transcend their material form and fragrance emerges as a reality in the realm of inner vision.

The image of rubbing flowers against the eyes also evokes Sufi thought and the seeker’s longing for spiritual fulfilment. Here, the flower becomes a symbol of delicacy, beauty and purity and the eyes a metaphor for insight and gnosis. The suggestion is that the seeker’s inner world has become so illuminated that vision is no longer confined to the outward appearance of things. In this state, every object in the universe becomes a sign of a greater reality.

From a psychological perspective, the couplet represents a state in which the intensity of feeling dissolves the ordinary boundaries between the senses. In psychology, this phenomenon is known as synaesthesia, a condition in which sounds assume the qualities of colours and fragrances take on the form of images.

In its fusion of the senses and its emphasis on inner experience, Hammad’s couplet bears a striking resemblance to French symbolists. Here, one is reminded of Charles Baudelaire’s poem, Correspondences, in which he writes:

“Perfumes, colours and sounds correspond.”

In Baudelaire’s poem, the senses dissolve into one another. Fragrance becomes colour and sound assumes a visual form. Much the same idea is at work in Hammad’s couplet, where fragrance becomes visible.

In Western literary criticism, this technique, known as synaesthesia, is regarded as one of the defining features of symbolist poetry.

Baudelaire believed that nature resembles a sacred temple in which every object points towards a hidden reality. In a similar way, fragrance in Hammad’s couplet is not merely fragrance; it becomes a symbol of love, spiritual revelation and ecstasy.

Here’s another remarkable couplets:

Superficially, the couplet expresses a social contradiction. From a deconstructive perspective, however, its semantic structure unsettles its internal balance. The poet brings together opposing images such as settlement and desolation in such a way that no single meaning remains fixed. Instead, meaning is continually displaced and deferred. The text thus moves beyond its apparent certainty and opens up a range of possible interpretations, with each idea carrying within it the possibility of its opposite.

In the first line of the couplet, the juxtaposition of desolation and settlement appears, at first glance, contradictory. Settlement is usually associated with human life and civilisation, while desolation suggests absence, silence and emptiness. By bringing these opposing conditions together, the poet challenges the assumption that settlement is always a sign of life. The couplet suggests that even the busiest human communities may conceal a profound inner emptiness.

The lands in the couplet do not remain merely geographical spaces but become a metaphor for human self and collective memory. The couplet raises an unsettling question: is the settlement truly inhabited, or is it merely a gathering of bodies beneath which there lies a deep emptiness?

From a deconstructive perspective, the strength of the couplet lies in its instability. The text does not direct the reader towards a single, fixed meaning. Instead, each meaning gives rise to another. Desolation is not presented simply as the consequence of absence, nor is settlement portrayed as a symbol of fulfilment. In this way, the couplet moves beyond the level of social commentary and becomes a meditation on the fragility of human existence and civilisation.

TS Eliot’s The Waste Land offers a similar vision of spiritual decay. Eliot depicts a world in which cities appear vibrant and inhabited, while the inner lives of their inhabitants are marked by loneliness and alienation. This is why he describes London as an “Unreal City” — a place that appears alive on the surface but is inwardly desolate.

Hammad’s couplet points to a similar condition. Beneath the appearance of completeness, modern life often conceals a sense of spiritual emptiness. Human beings may remain socially connected, yet inwardly isolated. Eliot evokes much the same atmosphere in passages such as the following:

“Crowd flowed over London Bridge.”

Such images depict the loneliness hiding within crowds.

In Hammad Niazi’s poetry we repeatedly encounter a rich metaphorical imagination through which existential fragmentation and the mysteries of existence are expressed in the language of nature. The following couplet offers an example:

Despite its apparent simplicity, this couplet creates an atmosphere of temporal awareness and existential anguish in which the tragedy of human life seems to converge upon a single point. Its greatest strength lies in its system of metaphors. The image of “the branches of time” is unusual and powerful. Time is often imagined as a river in constant motion. However, here it is transformed into a tree and endowed with the qualities of a living organism.

As a result, the passing day appears like a leaf or a fruit that has fallen from the branches of time and withered away. The poet is therefore doing more than merely describing the passage of time; he is turning it into a symbol of the transience of human experience.

A similar sense of loss can be found in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which the relationship between memory and time becomes an existential question and the human mind remains engaged in the search for what has vanished. Hammad’s couplet likewise reads as an elegy for a lost moment.

The same current of thought can also be seen in WB Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium, where the human body is shown to be subject to decay and the passage of time. Yeats ultimately seeks a realm beyond mortality and change. Hammad’s couplet expresses something of the same awareness of mortality but whereas Yeats seeks refuge in a spiritual realm beyond decline and decay, Hammad accepts the transience of human existence with quiet resignation. This depth of perception and this subtle distinction give Hammad’s poetry its distinctive power and secures its place in the most significant traditions of Urdu poetry.

The writer, a poet and a critic, is an assistant professor of Urdu at Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj University in Kanpur, India, and the author of three books.