Ghazal 424x, Verse 6

Asi:

There's no limit or boundary to your benevolence and your gracious presence. Your graciousness and kindness is shared by everything, and within the embrace of every desire/lust you have piled up hundreds of gardens. And on this side, before the gaze of hope you have placed a single garden, and made hope the spectator of the garden.

== Asi, p. 309

Zamin:

In the text gul has been given an i.zaafat, but what can gul-e aa))iinah mean? Thus gul ought to be read without an i.zaafat . [He proceeds to interpret this form of the verse, even though on his reading the first line doesn't scan.]

== Zamin, pp. 450-451

Gyan Chand:

Asi has written for the verse this meaning: [as above].

Vajahat Ali [Sandelvi] has written this kind of meaning, and has added that in this verse a well-developed sarcasm is also hidden: 'On the lustful you have bestowed flowerbed after flowerbed; but my hope, which is fixed on you, is only gazing on a garden from afar, and is still deprived of the enjoyment of it'. But in the verse, in the putting-aside of desire/lust he has placed not the rose, but the 'rose of the mirror'. In my opinion desire/lust and hope are connected to the same single person, and he is the poet or the lover.

gul-e aa))iinah = a mirror that is like a flower. In the grasp of desire/lust are a number of gardens filled with 'roses of the mirror'. That is, the lover's desire/lust keeps near itself a number of mirrors, so that you might come and show your reflection in them (perhaps at the time of self-adornment). And the lover hopes that he will see in that mirror the spectacle of the garden and enjoy the mood of springtime. It's clear that as yet the spectacle of the garden has not come into existence.

== Gyan Chand, pp. 473-474

FWP:

SETS == LIST; GENERATORS; MIDPOINTS
MIRROR: {8,3}
TAMASHA: {8,1}

For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.

As Gyan Chand notes in discussing {424x,1}, the addressee throughout this ghazal seems to be the Lord (or else a beloved so divinized that it's hard to tell the difference).

One question that looms over this verse is the meaning of gul-e aa))iinah . It doesn't seem to bother Asi, but it drives Zamin so crazy that he simply abolishes the i.zaafat , even though this ruins the scansion of the line. (This is really a shocking and flagrant mistake, one that I've never seen before in all my years of reading commentaries.) Gyan Chand improvises a baroque but relatively plausible meaning. But actually, we've been here before: the problematical gul-e occurs in {71,1}, and is extensively discussed there. The consensus of the commentators (including Gyan Chand) is that the best meaning for it is 'the flower of', in the sense of 'the best of, the supreme example of'.

The verb-free, list-like structure of the first line, combined with an extremely versatile adverbial phrase, results in a considerable range of possibilities: 'item A, item B, unspecific adverbial phrase'. What is the relationship between 'flowerbed after flowerbed' and 'the flower/rose of the mirror'? Are they to be entirely equated? Or, are they to be taken as parallel items in a list? Or, is '[in] flowerbed after flowerbed' to be taken as a location where 'the flower/rose of the mirror' might be found?

But even more centrally, who or what is 'putting aside desire/lust'? One possibility would seem to be 'the flower/rose of the mirror'; another would be 'hope'; another would be the speaker himself. And what is the relation between the 'flowerbed after flowerbed' and the 'flower/rose of the mirror' in the first line, and the 'garden' that's a 'spectacle' for hope in the second line? Are they to be equated or analogized, or are they in opposition to each other? It would be quite possible to spin out half a dozen interpretations-- but quite impossible to have any special confidence in any one of them.