Ghazal 389x, Verse 6

Asi:

Oh Asad, when these beloveds with Doomsday-statures stand up at the time of adornment, then it seems that some lofty theme has arisen from being cast in the mold of poetry, and has become higher than high.

== Asi, p. 228

Zamin:

The simile is a conveyance from the sensory to the non-sensory, and the eloquence is subtle/refined.

== Zamin, p. 344

Gyan Chand:

It is a very famous verse. The arising of fine-statured beautiful ones, at the time of adorning themselves, is as if in a verse some elevated theme would be welling up. Instead of vaqt-e ārāʾish , baʿd-e ārāʾish would have been better.

== Gyan Chand, p. 350

FWP:

SETS == POETRY; REPETITION; SYMMETRY; WORDPLAY
CLOTHING/NAKEDNESS: {3,5}
DOOMSDAY: {10,11}

For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}.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

At the center of the first line, both literally and metaphorically, is the fascinating qiyāmat-qāmatoñ . The two words qiyāmat and qāmat differ only through a single extra letter in the former, so that both the eye and the ear strongly feel the repetition. The 'Doomsday-statured' ones are not just tall, but 'devastatingly' tall; their stature includes the overpoweringness of Doomsday, which has a literal etymological sense of 'rising up' (see qiyām , Platts p.796), since it's the time when the dead will 'rise up' to face God's judgment.

And indeed the wordplay (and meaning-play) of 'rising up' is elegantly present all over the verse. There's the 'arising' of those with a 'Doomsday/rising-up' stature-- and their tallness in itself suggests a form of 'rising above' others. The second line brings us the Persian bālīdan ('to grow, to wax great'), and the vision of a 'lofty' or 'sublime' (see the definition above) theme.

But the best thing the verse does is make a brilliant conflation. The verse makes an equational statement; and thanks to the 'symmetry' effect of Urdu grammar, to say 'A is B' is equally to say that 'B is A'. So in this verse the arising of tall beautiful women is the arising of lofty poetic themes; and equally, the arising of lofty poetic themes is the arising of tall beautiful women. Women are themes (a statement about the sources of poetry), and/or themes are women (a statement about the powerful effects of poetry). The verse well deserves to be as famous as it is.