raat dil garm-e ;xayaal-e jalvah-e jaanaanah thaa
rang-e ruu-e sham((a barq-e ;xirmaan-e parvaanah thaa
1) last night, the heart was enthusiastic/'hot' with the thought of the glory/appearance of the beloved one
2) the color of the face of the candle was the 'lightning of the harvest' of the Moth
In the second line, by rang-ruu-e sham((a is meant the thought of the glory/appearance of the beloved; and by Moth, the heart of the lover. The simile is mixed [murakkab], with an unacceptable effect.
== Zamin, p. 97
This is a layered [pahluu-daar] verse, and it has two meanings.
(1) In the night, he was imagining the beloved's glory/appearance. He has called the thought of the glory/appearance the 'color of the face of the candle', and himself the 'Moth'. The color of her face-- that is, the thought of her glory/appearance-- was doing the work of lightning on my harvest-- that is, it burned me up.
(2) I thought of the beloved's glory/appearance. For this reason, the color fled from the face of the candle. When the Moth saw that the color of his beloved's face had fled-- that is, that she was absorbed in some anxiety-- then lightning fell on his harvest.
Sarkhush and Asi have written that 'From the heat of my thought, in the face of the candle too have come to be that brightness and that brilliance that acted as lightning for the Moth'.
The Moth in any case yearns/'burns' for the candle. The 'delicacy of thought' is that even from a distance the candle's flown-away color burned him up.
SETS == A,B
CANDLE: {39,1}
JALVAH: {7,4}
For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.
For other 'lightning of the harvest' verses, see {10,6}.
Raza and Gyan Chand read rang-e ruu , with an i.zaafat . Asi and Zamin read rang-ruu , as a compound (similar, apparently, to the more common rang-ruup ). It doesn't seem to make much interpretive difference in this case.
The question the commentators are discussing really seems to hinge on the relationship between the two lines; this is, in fact, a conspicuously 'A,B' verse. When the lover thinks of the glory/appearance of the beloved, his thought seems to affect the (nearby?) candle either by enhancing its radiance (through some kind of transference), or else by depriving it of radiance (through its dismay and jealousy/envy). In either case, the Moth is doomed: he succumbs either to his beloved candle's heightened radiance (he at once flies in and dies) or else to his own dismay and anxiety at his beloved's lost radiance (perhaps he dies of heartbreak because he can't fly in).
In the former (enhanced-radiance) case, the 'lightning of the harvest' works more literally: the candle's radiant face is the lightning, and it sets fire to the 'harvest' that is the Moth himself. In the latter (lost-radiance) case, the ghazal metaphor ('lightning of the harvest' = destroyer of the hoped-for fruits of labor; on this see {10,6}) is taken more seriously: the candle's pallor destroys the Moth's hope for a burning mystical union.
Asi:
Last night, when the heart was eager in the thought of the glory/appearance of the beloved, the aspect [rang-ruu] of the candle had become, for the harvest of the Moth, the 'lightning of the harvest'. From this two meanings can emerge. One is that the thought of the glory/appearance was a dazzling lightning-flash and my heart had become the harvest of the Moth. The other is that the effect of this thought of mine encompassed/embraced the night, and for this reason had become lightning for the aspect of the candle of the harvest of the Moth.
== Asi, p. 77