Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün

Aldı ‘aḳlım bir perî ṣûret bugün pek yandım âh
Mest olup ḳaldım görünce eyledi ḥâlim tebâh

In English

1. A fairy-faced one took my reason today; ah, I burned so much. On seeing her I was left intoxicated; she laid my state to ruin.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is recorded in the cönk as a güfte. A güfte is a song lyric written to be set to music; in cönks it is often recorded without the name of the mode (makam). Because Hakverdioğlu's article publishes only the first verse unit of each poem in the cönk, we know only the opening couplet of this poem. The rhyme is the "-âh" sound in "âh / tebâh". The identification of the metre is ours; as is usual in the aruz poems of folk poets, some syllables may not fit the pattern exactly. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet describes the moment of falling in love at first sight. The word "bugün" (today) ties the event to a particular day, a recent time, and gives the poem the air of a story. The lover's reason has been taken by a "perî sûret", a fairy-faced beauty; in the tradition the fairy is a being who strikes people and robs them of their wits, and the comparison says that the infatuation was sudden and irresistible. In the second line the lover is left "mest", as if drunk, and his state is "tebâh", ruined. A güfte is a song lyric written to be set to music; the short, exclamatory and fluent manner of this couplet also suits a song.

Historical Context

The poem is recorded under the pen name "Ârif" in the Merzifon Cönkü introduced by Metin Hakverdioğlu in 2019. The cönk contains eleven aruz poems by Ârif: güftes, dîvâns, a ghazal and a semai. Ârif is the poet whose güftes are given most space in the cönk. The article gives no information about the poet; the poet's identity and the century in which he lived have not been determined. Since the cönk is thought to have been compiled in Merzifon within the literary circle of Eyüb Sabrî, the poet may have been one read or living in that circle. For details, see the page on Ârif. The poem is on page 10 of the cönk and page 551 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources