Nine short lines, no full stop, and an entire night has slipped away. Ram Krishna Singh's "Hazy Sun" is about a particular kind of wakefulness, where the body lies on a pillow while the mind keeps working. Its central idea is that desire is not only a feeling but a maker of pictures. It can fill a night so completely that morning arrives unnoticed.
The first stanza gives desire a body. "Sweating desire / inhales new sketches / with mind's pen": the abstract noun sweats and breathes, as if it were someone feverish in a warm room. The verb "inhales" is the surprise, because nobody breathes in a drawing. The senses blur, and the image is taken into the lungs, absorbed into the body. The "mind's pen" does the drawing, so the same restless energy is both artist and audience. The word "new" matters too. These are not old memories replayed but fresh attempts, begun as the last one fades. The poem never says whose desire this is or what it wants. It might be longing for a person, for a poem, or for sleep itself, and the reader is left to decide.
In the second stanza the setting turns physical and plain: "on the pillow." Then comes the poem's cleverest measurement of time. "Image by image" echoes the earlier "sketches" and works as a clock. The night is counted in pictures rather than hours, like a slow run of film frames. Repeating "image" within a single line also acts out the circling of sleepless thought. "Night passes" is quiet, almost indifferent. The night is not fought or endured. It simply goes.
Then the poem shifts. "Not knowing" hangs without a subject, so we cannot be sure who has lost track, though the speaker is the likeliest candidate. The reader is caught out as well, because the sea has not been mentioned until now. Judging by the imagery, this could be a literal view of a shoreline at daybreak. It might also be a quiet answer to the sweat and breathing of the first stanza, with the sea as a larger version of that surge. That second reading is an inference, but the abruptness invites it. "Hazy" is the word the title borrows, and it describes both the sun and the mind after a night of images, with blurred edges and unfinished lines. There is a contrast between the "mind's pen," which makes things deliberately, and the sun, which simply rises, "rose from the sea," with no effort from anyone. The last image is given rather than drawn, and even so it is not sharp.
The form supports this. The poem is three unrhymed tercets, and each follows the same short-long-short shape. The middle lines all run to five syllables ("inhales new sketches," "image by image," "how a hazy sun"), while the outer lines are three or four. Each stanza swells slightly in the middle and then lets go, much like a breath. There is no punctuation, and the only capital letter is the first. The whole poem reads as a single unbroken sentence, so the stanza breaks work as pauses between hours. The missing punctuation also lets phrases lean both ways. "On the pillow" can attach to the sketching before it or the passing night after it, and "not knowing" can look back at the night or forward to the sunrise.
The sound is soft and hushed. Sibilants run through the poem ("sweating," "desire," "inhales," "sketches," "passes," "sun," "sea"), like whispering or sheets shifting. The poem begins on "Sweating" and ends on "sea," so the hush frames the whole night.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It turns ordinary insomnia into a quiet creative act and makes imagination feel physical, something that sweats, breathes and works through the dark. It recalls the compression of haiku, trusting a few precise images and leaving the interpretation to the reader. It also ends without explanation, on a dim sun the speaker did not see coming, which leaves us as unsure as the speaker is how the night became morning.