Verse 11xafter 1821aa-egul


G3

1
how would there be reach/access for a fragment of the liver, as far as the eyelashes?!
2
oh, alas, if the gaze would not be an acquaintance/familiar of the rose!

'Arriving; entrance, access; accessibleness; reach, compass'.
'Acquaintance; friend; associate; intimate friend, familiar; lover, sweetheart; paramour; mistress, concubine; —adj. Acquainted (with, -) , knowing, known; attached (to), fond (of)'.

References
Arshi, Imtiyaz Ali Ghazal# 80
Raza, Kalidas Gupta 358
Nuskhah-e-Hamidiyah 132-133
Asi, Abdul Bari 148-149
Gyan Chand 250
Hamid Ali Khan Open Image

For background see S. R. Faruqi's choices . This verse is NOT one of his choices; mostly for the sake of completeness, I have added it myself. For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in 4,8x . Here's an 'A,B' verse, in which we're left to decide for ourselves how the two lines should be connected to each other. And it's also a verse in which both lines are highly exclamatory and . The effect is one of obscurely extreme emotional pressure, the exact cause of which we are left to puzzle out for ourselves. Since the two lines are entirely independent, we must look for ways to connect them. The most obvious way is by analogizing the 'fragment of the liver' and the 'rose'. Both are red, organic, and connected somehow with vision. But are they similar, or are they identical? If they are similar, then the speaker apparently fears that if he would somehow be deprived of (visual?) access to the real rose, he would be unable to find a substitute for it in the form of sufficiently bloody tears, or of actual fragments of the liver that could somehow rise to his head and appear as red blobs in his eyeballs. If they are identical, then what the speaker means by 'rose' is 'fragment of the liver', and what he fears is that 'roses', fragments of his liver, would not be available to his eyes (for viewing) or to his eyelashes (for producing bloody tears). This second (and rather grotesque) possibility is the more piquant, because it tells us by implication that the speaker has never seen a real rose. Perhaps there might even be no 'real' roses in the world. Perhaps the only way lovers have visions of roses is by creating them, in some difficult and uncertain way, within their own bloody eyeballs. Verses like this always remind me of 62,8 , with its evocation of the lover's wounds as the sun. graphics/bloodtears.jpg