;Gunchagii : 'The being collected together (like a bud); budding, blooming'. (Platts p.773)
pechiidan : 'To twist, distort, bend, involve, wreathe, or coil as a serpent, wind in a sepentine form, surround, envelop, involve; ... to assemble, meet; to disobey, rebel; to wound; to divulge; to be confused in speech; to assist, aid'. (Steingass p.263)
fikr : 'Thought, consideration, reflection; deliberation, opinion, notion, idea, imagination, conceit; counsel, advice; care, concern, solicitude, anxiety, grief, sorrow'. (Platts p.783)
rahn : 'Pledging, pawning; a thing deposited as a pledge, a pledge, a pawn'. (Platts p.610)
That is, the embrace of thought about poetry so captured my heart that it took the form of a bud is in the hands of a theme. That is, the heart only blossoms when some good theme would come to hand.
When I am submerged in the agitation of thought about poetry, then my temperament is closed up like a bud. When I present the theme, then the heart blossoms. So to speak, the heart's blossoming is in the pawning of a theme into the possession of others.
SETS == MUSHAIRAH; POETRY
For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.
The first line tells us that the state of 'buddingness' is a kind of burden on one's lifebreath, for it involves the 'entanglement of thought', and most of the meanings of pechiidan are negative (see the definition above). What kind of thought? The versatility of fikr (see the definition above) gives us a wide range of possibilities. Under mushairah performance conditions, we're of course made to wait in suspence for a time.
Even when we are allowed to hear the second line, it withholds interpretability as long as possible; not until we hear the crucial, closural word ma.zmuu;N do we really know what the verse is about. Even then, it's clear that the verse is some kind of tribute to the power of the theme, but is it a sort of back-handed compliment? To have something 'pawned, pledged' is undesirable; it's something to which one is driven by necessity, as in {18,4}. Perhaps this is where the 'entanglement' comes in. The poet is condemned to a perpetual search for the next 'theme', since only the finding of one can make his constrained, entangled temperament burst into bloom.
Asi:
The state of thought about poetry is for me a state of buddingness-- for when thought about poetry dominates my heart or my mind, then focus and fixation create in me a state of buddingness. So to speak, the blossoming of my heart is pledged to the obtaining of a theme. When I think about a theme, then my heart is narrow and focused like a bad; and when I find a theme, then like a flower it blooms/opens.
== Asi, p. 291