A ghazal likening a street without night to Paradise: a wet-skirted spring cloud, a cypress casting its reflection head down, down like an amulet against fever, and Irem's garden.
A play of light on a garment that looks rose-coloured from the reflection of roses: fire-coloured cloth, fire that burns only what touches it, and a robe half satin, half sackcloth.
Tresses like a musk chain on a silver lamp: a brow that takes the sick eye into its lap, a stature-arrow fletched with tresses, two beauties "making one mouth" and a witch.
A beloved who delights in the lover's blood as a child delights in a coloured house: an eye rhyme on "hoş", a liver turned quiver, a gold-clad candle and a response to Kâsım Paşa.
The refrain "it turns out" gives each couplet the surprise of a discovery: the old lover finds his fortune young, solves a mouth the size of a hair's tip and reads long tresses as long life.
Here the rhymes are almost all plain Turkish words: diş, kiriş, ḳamış, ḳış. The bud whets teeth of dew, and a sugar thief has a reed driven into his finger.
Câfer Çelebi applies the Arabic proverb "the storyteller does not love the storyteller" to preacher and singer, and likens the beloved's mole to a sura written on a lentil.
Every rhyme ends in the Arabic letter ḍād, a narrow list to choose from; the brevity of the rose season becomes a warning, and mouth and waist a dispute over what exists.
A cheek like a page dotted before it is written: the play of script and dots, "no good except in the middle", the calligrapher Yâkut, river and distance, and Ahmed Paşa.
Each second line states a rule known to all. The jeweller loves the gem, the thief shuns the moon; and an eye overrun with blood needs the jujube of the beloved's lip.
A candle blossoming on its wick foretells a guest; Câfer Çelebi ties this household belief to spring and, with the refrain "if the candle were", lets flowers burn in its place.
On a spring morning the rose lights lamps of flowers for the dawn-drinking party; an Old Turkish suffix appears twice, and spring gives the tulip a garden on the mountain.
The fear of a broken promise turns, at the end of the opening, into an Arabic prayer. Muhibbî used the same line, and the rose withdraws into the bud to learn a secret.
The lover asks that the army of down be drowned in the cheek, and the beloved answers "There is no Moses here"; the refrain "there is no" leaves moon and garden bereft.
Separation acts in every couplet here: it bends the stature into a bow, thins the body to a yellow thread fit to wind round a letter, and proves "I shall die without you" false.
The ghazal opens on the idiom of not looking at one's tears and runs on the refrain "there is no". Zâtî took its second line almost unchanged; the beloved's stature raises doomsday.
One of the divan's plainest ghazals: a lover telling the preacher he has no business with him, a play on "ayak" as foot and cup, a lover lower than black earth, and grief that dispels grief.
The lover is jealous of the beloved even for her shadow and stays away on moonlit nights. The refrain "olıcaḳ" sets a condition in every couplet; the cup is a moon lighting the night.
All eleven couplets end in "love", which becomes in turn a sultan, a table, a sea, a scale and a shop; the pen-name couplet calls the repeated word the heading of a letter.
Every rhyme is a Turkish reduplication: varaḳ varaḳ, ṭabaḳ ṭabaḳ, ḳabaḳ ḳabaḳ. The anthology of beauty opens leaf by leaf, and a yellow face becomes saffron pudding.
Peris were said to haunt desolate places, and the lover finds the belief true in his own heart. One line strings three proverbs: no treasure without a snake, no rose without a thorn.
The pen, bowed and weary from writing the lover's longing, has black water over its eyes. Câfer Çelebi restates the pen image of Ahmed Paşa and Necâtî through an everyday idiom.
Lovers have rubbed their faces so often on the beloved's walls that their yellow cheeks gild the hall; in the pen-name couplet the poet's divan leaves the rose's notebook unfinished.
An opening built on a complete pun on "revān": a walking cypress to whose feet souls flow like water, a bud full of blood, souls sacrificed to the brow's bow, and Şeyhî's ground.
In the market where Joseph found no buyer even for dinars, the lover bids for the beloved with his yellow face; on the refrain "yours", even the morning breeze turns lover.
Each couplet pairs a Turkish line with an Arabic one built from everyday formulas of prayer; the ghazal closes on a prayer for the dead, "may your resting-place be pleasant".
The beloved has put on the felt cloak of the Kalenderi dervishes, and the lover follows suit for love; even the iron-hearted mirror turns dervish in its felt case.
The tresses that shade the face in the opening are, by the last couplet, the sun's "hem-sāye", its neighbour, too proud to bow; between, they swim as a crocodile in a sea of tears.
A poet who served as nişancı sees the down as the tughra on beauty's patent. The green down under black tresses is a parrot of India, the teeth the Pleiades hidden in an atom.
A ghazal of a lover who sends the physician away: a doctor of the soul, wine or lips instead of sherbet, a drinking set made of liver's blood and a life too short to bear the pain.
The bud has not opened; the rose branch's gall has burst at the nightingale's wailing. With "do not think", the ghazal denies what is seen and puts poetic causes in its place.
The lover is shut in the six-gate block of grief, and every throw comes up calamity; beside this backgammon couplet the ghazal also jokes about buying with face and coin.
A ghazal of a belt with an appetite for a hair-fine waist: buds flayed by the breeze, knotted sugar cane, beaten musk wrapped in skin, and a moon that will enter the bow of the arms.
A ghazal of colour built on an indigo dress: a sky that whirls with joy, a reflection taken for kohl, a dark-blue arrow in a red bow, and a soul-mirror rusting with envy of a green robe.
Every couplet ends in "Pîrî's": the refrain is a proper name, which suggests a poem for a real young man. The beloved's mole is a Hindu holding a mirror in the west.
The lover's bloodshot eye is treated in the language of old eye medicine: tutty, red powder, a kohl-stick. The road's dust, reddened by tears, becomes a remedy of itself.
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