FWP:
This is one of only a handful of ghazals from which Faruqi has selected every single verse as superior.
I was sure that gul-e na;Gmah would be a technical musical term of some kind, as it ought to be for reasons of Ghalibian affinity-creation and parallelism with pardah-e saaz . I was counting on the commentators to know what exactly it meant, and was surprised that not one of them seemed to have any well-grounded notion. After much questioning of musical experts, it turned out that the best information came from S. R. Faruqi (Feb. 2003); now the information he searched out and gave me has also been incorporated into the new edition of his commentary (see above).
The phrase caught on, though whether because of Ghalib's popularity or that of Mir Hasan's masnavi is impossible to tell. Yashowanto Narayan Ghosh points out that gul-e na;Gmah went on not only to become the title of Firaq Gorakhpuri's divan, but also to feature in this verse by Ziya Jalandhari: dil bujhaa ho to gul-e na;Gmah bhii nashtar hai .ziyaa / shiddat-e ;Gam kaa ((ilaaj anjuman-aaraa))ii nahii;N .
As Faruqi shows, we can document the fact that Ghalib didn't just make up the phrase himself; instead (and characteristically, in a case like this), he used a pre-existing phrase, one from the most famous and popular masnavi in Urdu-- a phrase that would probably have been recognizable to his audience, and would thus have added to the pleasure of the verse.
There's another use of gul-e na;Gmah in {294x,5}; commenting on it, Gyan Chand says (p. 217) that gul-e na;Gmah means 'the best part' of a melody. And in {261x,1} there's a gul-e payaam that according to Gyan Chand means 'the best of' the message. (Only in {424x,6} with its gul-e aa))iinah does he take a more specific tack.) In English too we have the archaic phrase 'the flower of' to mean 'the best of', 'the supreme example of'.
I am not, the speaker says, the 'flower of melody', not am I a string or fret of an instrument. Instead, I'm something unfamiliar, shocking, discordant. 'I am the sound of my own breaking'-- some of the effect even comes across in translation. Chishti's idea that this should be taken as a serious philosophical statement is not persuasive. The image is striking, it's arresting, it's provoking; and in Urdu, it also sounds beautiful. It has a sense of what might be called shorish -- turbulence, bitterness, strong emotion. In a background of related imagery, what more does a two-line verse need to offer? This is a very famous verse, one that people often memorize and recite.
In {13,1} we see the pardah of a saaz invoked in another context: as part of a mystery, an interplay between the meaning of pardah as concealment and as stringed instrument. For further comparison: on suffering and music, {196,1}; on complaint and music, {319x,7}.
For an indication that shikast might not be only a negative experience, see: {214,8}. And finally, here's a cleverly ambiguous use of the whole Persian infinitive, shikastan : {37,5x}.
Compare Mir's depiction of himself as his own sunset: M{328,7}.
Nazm:
That is, I have no connectiion with joy or music, I am entirely made of pain and in my own difficulty. (71)
== Nazm page 71