Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün

‘Asker-i İslâma serdâr oldu gitdi dâverim
Çoḳ du‘âlar eyleyip gönderdi anı enverim

In English

1. My sovereign (my beloved) has become commander of the army of Islam and gone; my most radiant one sent him off with many prayers.

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 refrain is the possessive suffix "-im"; the rhyme is the "-ver" sound in "dâverim / enverim". 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

This güfte differs in subject from the cönk's other love poems: it describes a departure on campaign. "Dâver" means sovereign or judge and is also used of the beloved in divan poetry; here "dâverim" (my sovereign) has become "serdâr", commander, of the army of Islam and gone. Whom the word "enverim" (my most radiant one) in the second line refers to is not clear. On one reading, the one who sends the commander off and prays for him is another person, perhaps a sultan or someone close to him; on another, both words refer to the same person. Since the cönk is estimated to be about a hundred years old, it may be tempting to see a proper name in the word "enver"; but there is no other sign in the text to support this, and the word is also used of a beloved in the sense of "most radiant". For which campaign the poem was written is not known.

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 13 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