Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün

Ṭut dilüñi eyleme la‘l-i leb-i cānānı medḥ
Bendeye lāyıḳ degüldür eylemek sulṭānı medḥ
Mihr-i ‘ālem-tābı medḥ itmek düşer mi ẕerreye
Kevkebe lāyıḳ mıdur itmek meh-i tābānı medḥ
Cāna ne leẕẕet irişdügin ḫadeng-i yārdan
Yāremüñ aġzında dil olmış ider peykānı medḥ
Oḳlaruñı medḥ ider cismümde olan her ḳılum
Her çemen dildür ṣanasın kim ider bārānı medḥ
Medḥ-i ‘ālemden çü müstaġnī olupdur āftāb
‘Adliyā nice idersin ol gözi fettānı medḥ

In English

1. Hold your tongue and do not set out to praise the beloved's ruby lip; it is not fitting for a servant to praise the sultan.

2. Is it the place of a mote of dust to praise the sun that lights the world? Is it fitting for a star to praise the shining moon?

3. Such delight reached my soul from the beloved's arrow that a tongue has appeared in the mouth of my wound, and it praises the arrowhead. (The wound is likened to a mouth, and the arrowhead lodged in it to the tongue in that mouth.)

4. Every hair on my body praises your arrows; you would think every blade of grass were a tongue praising the rain. (The arrows that pierce the lover's body are likened to raindrops falling on a meadow.)

5. Since the sun has no need of the world's praise, O Adlî, how can you praise that eye which stirs up mischief?

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a ghazal (gazel) of five couplets. The ghazal is a short verse form on love and beauty in which both lines of the opening couplet (matla) rhyme and, in the couplets that follow, only the second lines carry the same sound; in the last couplet the poet names his pen name (mahlas). Here the redif (refrain word) is "medh" (praise) and the rhyme is the sound "-ânı": cânânı, sultânı, tâbânı, peykânı, bârânı, fettânı. The metre is the remel pattern of aruz (quantitative metre), "fâ‘ilâtün fâ‘ilâtün fâ‘ilâtün fâ‘ilün". In Yavuz Bayram's edition the ghazal stands in the section of the divan that gathers refrains ending in the letter "hâ", and it is found in the OR, T, M1 and M2 manuscripts but not in İBB. The only variant between the manuscripts is that T reads "cismüñde" (in your body) instead of "cismümde" (in my body) in the fourth couplet. To whom and when the poem was written is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The subject of the ghazal is the inadequacy of praise: the poet opens by saying that praising the beloved is beyond his station, yet he never stops praising throughout the poem. Because the refrain "medh" returns in every couplet, this contradiction stays constantly in view. In the second line of the opening couplet the beloved is called "sultan" and the lover "bende", a servant. This arrangement, frequent in Adlî's poems, is especially striking here: the man who says "a servant is not worthy to praise the sultan" was himself a sultan. The convention of divan poetry reverses the real position of the poet.

The second couplet repeats the same thought through a comparison taken from the sky. The sun (mihr), the mote of dust that shows in sunlight, the star (kevkeb) and the moon (meh) are chosen from one field of meaning; this is tenasüp (congruence of images). The absurdity of the small presuming to praise the great is shown through two separate examples. In the fifth couplet the sun appears again: if the sun has no need of the world's praise, the beloved's eye has no need of Adlî's praise either. In this way the beginning and the end of the ghazal are tied together.

The third and fourth couplets carry the liveliest inventions of the poem. In divan poetry the beloved's glances and lashes are arrows shot at the lover. Adlî takes this image a step further: the wound the arrow opens is a mouth, the arrowhead left in it is like the tongue in that mouth, and this tongue praises the arrow that wounded it. In the fourth couplet every hair on the lover's body becomes a tongue praising the arrows; the image is then carried into the garden, and every blade of grass is said to be a tongue praising the rain. These comparisons between things one would not expect to resemble each other express that the lover takes pleasure even in pain. The repeated use of tongue, mouth and praise throughout the poem is again an example of tenasüp.

Bibliography

  • Yavuz Bayram (ed.), Adlî Dîvânı (Dîvân-ı Sultân Bâyezîd-i Sânî), Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yay., 2018, p. 53, poem no. 15 (manuscript variants in the footnote on p. 53). ekitap.ktb.gov.tr