Drunkenness - Analysis

A plea that is also a performance

The poem’s central move is a paradox: the speaker claims he is too drunk to manage himself, yet he speaks with careful control, giving instructions about just an empty cup and just a drop or two. That contradiction makes the drunkenness feel like more than a physical condition. It becomes a chosen state the speaker both suffers and curates. The tone is apologetic but slyly commanding: Pardon me my friends sounds humble, yet it quickly turns into a set of rules for how others should pour, hold, and escort him.

Empty cup, full dependence

Early on, the poem lingers on measurement and restraint: fill not my goblet to the brim, I should drink no more. The speaker asks for “more” while insisting on “less,” which captures a recognizable human loop: desire negotiating with self-preservation. Even the image of an empty cup is double-edged. It can mean he wants to be done, but it also means he wants the ritual to continue without the consequences. The cup becomes a way to talk about need without naming what, exactly, he needs.

Incoherent speech that still gets its point across

When the speaker says Drunkenness makes my speech incoherent, he is also preemptively defending himself: if he offends, it’s the drink talking. Yet the poem’s voice remains lucid enough to choreograph the social scene. The request say what you wish to say is strikingly open, even inviting; it suggests he expects judgment, gossip, or truth-telling to come out in his vulnerability. The tension here is between exposure and control: he stages his own weakness, but he also sets the terms under which others may witness it.

Hands, glass, and the body treated like an object

The most revealing metaphor arrives when he asks: Either hold me by your hand as like a glass you would. A glass is fragile, and it is also a vessel made to be filled and emptied. By comparing himself to a glass, the speaker turns his body into something breakable and utilitarian at once. He needs care, but he also hints that he has been handled before. The repeated fear of stumbling—lest stumble, fall I should—keeps the mood tender and slightly humiliating, as if dignity is always one wrong step away from shattering.

Friday prayers and delayed obligation

The mention of Friday prayers opens a wider moral horizon. The speaker insists they won't run away, treating sacred duty as something postponable. This is not a grand renunciation; it’s a small, almost comic bargaining with time: I shall come, hold on a while. The poem’s turn here sharpens the question of what the drunkenness stands for. If it is literal intoxication, we see a man rationalizing irresponsibility. If it is the conventional wine of Indo-Persian and Urdu lyric—often used to suggest ecstasy, love, or spiritual transport—then delaying the mosque could imply that his current state feels like an alternative kind of devotion, one that overwhelms ordinary schedules and propriety.

Miirji and the final boundary at the lips

In the closing couplet the speaker addresses himself—Miirji—as if splitting into observer and observed. He blames a frailty of temperament, making the problem sound innate, not merely chosen. And then comes a final, intimate refusal: brush not my lips like a cup. After all the talk of cups and pouring, the lips become the boundary line. The image is both sensual and defensive: he is saying he has had too much, yet he is also guarding the place where drink, desire, and speech meet. The poem ends not with sobriety but with a complicated self-knowledge: he understands his weakness, he anticipates how others will respond, and he still cannot fully step out of the role his own appetite has written for him.

If the speaker is truly out of his senses, why does he keep narrating his condition so precisely? The poem almost dares us to suspect that drunkenness is a mask that permits honesty: by declaring himself impaired, he can ask for touch, forgiveness, and delay—things he might not be allowed to request sober. In that light, the “stupor” looks less like an accident and more like a language the poem chooses because it can say what plain speech cannot.