dekhte the ham bah chashm-e ;xvud vuh :tuufaan-e
balaa
aasmaan-e siflah jis me;N yak kaf-e sailaab thaa
1) we used to see, with our own eyes, that typhoon
of calamity
2) in which the low/contemptible sky was a single froth/foam of the flood
siflah : 'Low, mean, ignoble, base, vile, sordid, contemptible'. (Platts p.662)
SETS
EYES {3,1}
GRANDIOSITY: {5,3}
SKY {15,7}
Raza p. 124; Raza p. 125. S. R. Faruqi's choices. Ghalib originally composed one ghazal of eleven verses, and another of twelve verses, from which he selected verses to include in a new ghazal in his published divan. This is the unpublished second verse of the second of the two original ghazals.
There's an enjoyable sense of revision and reactivation that goes on with the second reading. The first time through, 'we used to see with our own eyes' is just as stylized an expression in Urdu as its English counterpart. It's not really about eyes per se, just about an assertion of direct, first-person, eyewitness (sorry, sorry!) observation.
Only after hearing the second line do we realize that that 'with our own eyes' is a wonderfully operative phrase: our typhoon of tears and sighs may well be the origin of the cosmic flood that towers up furiously to the sky, and makes the sky look like a puny handful of grey foam by comparison. (For a similar activation of another such stylized phrase, see {62,5}.)
There are also the implications of the past habitual dekhte the to consider. We used to see this awesome cosmic sea-storm, but apparently we don't expect to see it again. Why not? Because our eyes are now wept out and can't produce any more such storms? That's one possibility, but there might be another as well.
For calamities, as Gyan Chand notes, traditionally originate in the sky. And now the sky has been (perhaps in reality, but at least rhetorically) minimized, turned into froth, and swept away in the wild currents of the flood. So perhaps there are no new calamities left? Or at least, surely there are none so dire-- none that can hold a candle to the ones 'we used to see'.
Compare this verse with its more fortunate, published cousin, {15,15}.
Gyan Chand:
The sky is very extensive; thus it's responsible for calamities descending on the whole world. Our eyes have, weeping, caused such an ocean to flow that its typhoon was more extensive than the sky and more calamitous than the sky. In the typhoon of calamities of the eyes, the sky seemed to be only the foam of the flood; that is, our eyes had filled up a flood of calamities greater than the sky. (80)