Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Nazar itdikçe o mâhpâreye cân
Gözümün nûruna virür leme'ân
Gül cemâlinden alur şâm ü seher
Ma'rifet feyzini gönlüm her an
Bunun içün viriyor teşnelere
Sözlerim âb-ı zülâl-i 'irfân

In English

1. Whenever the soul gazes at that moon-fair beauty, it adds radiance to the light of my eyes.

2. Evening and morning, every moment, my heart receives from her rose-like face the grace of gnosis, that is, the blessing of perceiving the truth.

3. That is why my words offer the thirsty the limpid, sweet water of gnosis.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem consists of three couplets. The two lines of the first couplet rhyme on "cân" and "leme'ân", and the second lines of the following couplets continue the same rhyme with "her an" and "'irfân". In this arrangement it resembles the first three couplets of a ghazal (gazel) or a short fragment of one; whether it is a complete ghazal or couplets selected from a poem is unknown. Hüsameddin calls it a "fahriye", that is, a poem in which the poet praises himself and his words. The source does not indicate the metre; the lines appear to fit the pattern "fe'ilâtün fe'ilâtün fe'ilün" of aruz (quantitative metre), and this reading is ours.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The poem builds a familiar chain of thought of divan poetry in three steps. First comes the beauty of the beloved: "mâhpâre", a piece of the moon, is a common epithet of the fair-faced beloved, and the light of the eye that gazes on her shines through this gaze. In the second couplet this beauty becomes a source of knowledge: the heart receives "ma'rifet feyzi", the grace of gnosis, from the beloved's rose-like face morning and evening. In divan poetry under the influence of Sufism the beautiful face is regarded as a reflection of divine beauty, and gazing on it leads to a kind of knowledge of the truth. In the third couplet the chain turns back to the poet: the gnosis that has filled his heart has passed into his words, and the poet says that his words are "âb-ı zülâl-i 'irfân", the limpid water of gnosis, for the thirsty. Here the boast of the fahriye comes into the open.

In the last couplet the word "âb", water, clearly recalls the pen name Âbî. Without stating his name, the poet may have pointed to himself by describing his words as water. The relation between eye, light, radiance, moon and rose, and that between the thirsty and limpid water, are examples of tenasüp (congruence of images).

Historical Context and Attribution

The poem appears in Hüsameddin's entry on Âbî Mehmed Çelebi, at the end of the quotation from Abdî Efendi's tezkire (biographical anthology of poets). In the quotation, after the poets of the four elements are named, it is said "Kelâmî Mustafa Efendi bunlarla dem-güzâr olurdu" (Kelâmî Mustafa Efendi used to spend his time with them), and then the poem is introduced with the sentences "Kâtip, şâir, edîp, yazısı güzeldi. Şu fahrîyesi şâyân-ı dikkatdir" (He was a secretary, a poet and a man of letters, his handwriting was beautiful. The following fahriye of his deserves attention). Grammatically these last sentences can also be referred to Kelâmî, the nearest subject. The grounds for assigning the poem to Âbî here are that the entry is his, that the epithet "secretary" fits Âbî, secretary of the treasury, and that the image of water in the last couplet matches the pen name Âbî. These are strong indications, but they do not amount to conclusive proof; the possibility that the poem belongs to Kelâmî Mustafa Efendi remains open. For Âbî's life and this problem of attribution see the article Âbî Mehmed Çelebi.

Bibliography

Online sources