It might seem ironical that Saqi had a wider readership in Lahore and was a more familiar literary personality there than in Karachi where he lived. The literary journals in Lahore, Adab-e-LatIf and Sawera particularly, had more to publish about him and by him than the journals in Karachi. But in reality, there is little irony here: Lahore has always been more accomodating towards, if not actually welcoming, literary eccentricities than any other city in Pakistan. During his last five years in Karachi when he was busy trying to create a legendary role for himself -- perhaps in the shadow of the critic Saleem Ahmad -- he had yet to earn recognition as a poet. That happened later, about a decade later. The poetry he wrote during his Karachi years is largely uneven in quality, though by no means lacking in assertiveness and vitality. He had yet to discover and adopt abruptness of tone as a stylistic device, and yet to arrive at the poetic diction which bears his signature in his later poetry. However, even as early as in the late Fifties, he had begun the search for adequate metaphors and symbols to clothe his poetic inspirations. In an early poem entitled "Titll" ("Butterfly"), he uses the butterfly as an effective symbol of the fragility of love. With one impulsive move, the butterfly breaks her wings, bruises her feet (sic), and destroys her beauty and appeal. At the end of the short poem, she sits beneath a yellow leaf and mourns the brittleness of her existence and the brevity of her love. The poems of pyas ka s_ahra are by and large a demonstration of the poet's active search for his own voice. The majority of the poems from this earlier volume included in RazoN se" BHara Basta (25 out of 31) are written within metrical and formal constraints, and are intensely lyrical and romantic. The influence of the three masters of modern Urdy poetry -- Faiz, Rashed and Miraji -- is discernible in many of these early poems. "^allb^N" ("crosses"), whether made of "samSad" ("the box-tree") as they are in one of Saqi's poems, or of any metal, remind the reader of Faiz in whose poetry they have become a dominant image of enslavement and suppression. The images of ugliness and cruelty in Saqi's "Murda-xana" ("Mortuary") are equally reminiscent of those which Faiz employs to describe the victims of repression. Rashed immediately comes to mind whenever one comes across an irreverant or blasphemous reference to God, as one does in the poem "sehr-zada Sahr" ("Bewitched City"). The poem's rhythm and Persianized diction also carry echoes of Rashed. Miraji's influence, however, seems more pervasive in Saqi's early poetry, as it was in the early poetry of Ghalib Ahmad and many another poet during the Fifties. "Par? ka 5'a'ya" ("Fairy's Shadow"), "Kail JiNdnl" ("Black Dust-storm"), "Mart's Lamha" ("Dying Moment"), "zinda Pan? 5acca" ("Living, Truthful"Water") -- all these poems remind the reader of the langorous rhythms, deliberately ambiguous, and often even inelegant, phraseology, and predominantly Hindi diction of Miraji's poetry. In his early poetry Saqi is essentially a romantic poet --and some traces of Romanticism are still noticeable in his recent poetry. Almost every Twentieth century poet in the Indian subcontinent has been affected by Romanticism in one form or another. Saqi's mentors, Rashed and Miraji, were romantics in their early poetry. Faiz was, and still is. In fact, it might even be 28