FWP:
SETS == BAH; IDIOMS
CANDLE: {39,1}
This verse completes (and 'finishes off'?) what I think of as a quasi-verse-set consisting of the first three verses of this ghazal. The first verse presents the candle's eternal life vs. its imminent death; the second juxtaposes the candle's (and the poet's) speech/life to its silence/death; in this one, the candle ends its tale in the style of the 'people of oblivion'. Are the people of oblivion dead, or alive? We can hardly say. They have traded in this mortal, transient world for a mystical realm that is utterly beyond our comprehension.
Like the other verses in this little set of three, this one is so rich you almost can't cut through the glowing, radiant, tightly-meshed surface to be sure of more than a rather basic meaning. And as in the others, much of the pleasure is to be found not in contemplation of a spelled-out, literal meaning, but in the whole ornate but flawlessly integrated, elaborate but perfectly relaxed, 'informal'-feeling quality of the verse.
The praise that Ghalib offers, in the letter cited above, to Surur's verse about story-telling has two elements: the second line's being 'hot' or passionate, and the affinity between the imagery of story-telling and the injunction to 'remember'. He thus praises in another poet's work the same effects he himself creates, through the (suggested) idea of the 'tongue' of the candle-flame, and the wordplay about story-telling, in the present verse.
The word ṣirf ('only, merely, exclusively') can be distinguished from the word ṣarf (see the definitions above) only by its short vowel, and of course short vowels aren't commonly marked in Urdu. I take the reading ṣirf from Arshi, who does show the zer marker. But without that diacritic, or in an oral performance in which such short vowels are often ambiguous or half-swallowed, the audience might well think of ṣarf as in ṣarf karnā -- especially since a form of karnā is positioned so conveniently right before it. And if we made that guess, we could still read the first line quite comfortably:
(1) 'it turns/changes/uses/expends, with the sign/suggestion of the flame, the whole tale'
Indeed, not until the last possible moment, when we heard the 'punch' word fasānah-ḳhvānī , could we perceive that our reading, while far from impossible, was a bit less satisfactory in its connection than a reading of ṣirf . (That is, we'd be unable to mobilize the elegant doubleness of qiṣṣah tamām karnā ('to finish' and 'to finish off'), because we'd need the karnā for ṣarf karnā .)
For other 'tongue of the candle' verses, see {75,2}.
Ghalib:
[1858, to Taftah:] Rajab 'Ali Beg 'Surur', who has written fasānah-e ʿajāʾib -- the first verse at the beginning of the narrative [dāstān] gives me much pleasure now:
yādgār-e zamānah haiñ ham log
yād rakhnā fasānah haiñ ham log
[we people are a memorial of the age
remember-- we people are a story]
How 'hot' [garm] the second line is, and with regard to a story, what an affinity 'remember' has! (Arshi, introduction, p. 35)
==Urdu text: Khaliq Anjum vol. 1, p. 278