Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

Kemân ebrûlarıň âhû gözleriň
Mecnûn gibi ḳılar dîvâne meni
‘Âşıḳı mest ider şîrin sözleriň
Rüsvâ-yı ‘aşḳ ider cihâne meni

In English

1. Your bow-shaped brows and gazelle eyes drive me mad like Mecnun. Your sweet words intoxicate the lover; they make me a byword of love, disgraced before the whole world.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The quatrain is the first stanza of an eleven-syllable koşma on page 87 of the Merzifon Cönkü. The koşma is the commonest form of folk poetry; it is built of quatrains in which the second and fourth lines of the first stanza, and the fourth lines of the following stanzas, rhyme together. Here the endings "dîvâne meni" and "cihâne meni" carry the rhyme and the refrain; the first and third lines also rhyme with each other in "gözleriň" and "sözleriň". Because Metin Hakverdioğlu gives only the first unit of each poem, the rest of the koşma and the stanza with the pen name are not known; the whole poem is in the cönk. There is a problem of attribution: the article also prints this quatrain, unchanged and with the same page number, as Cezbî's only syllabic poem. Since the list of poets gives one syllabic poem each to Bezmî and Cezbî, one text must have taken the place of the other in typesetting; to whom the poem belongs can be settled only by reading the pen-name stanza in the cönk.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain draws the beloved's beauty with the best-known images of folk poetry. The brow is likened to a bow and the eye to a gazelle's; the bow shoots arrows while the gazelle's eye is large and shy, so that together the two images describe a glance that both wounds and attracts. Mecnun, the lover who lost his mind for Leylâ and wandered into the desert, is the emblem of love's madness and its commonest example in Turkish poetry. In the third and fourth lines the beloved's words intoxicate the lover like wine and make him "rüsvâ-yı ‘aşk", one disgraced before everyone because of his love. The sequence from brow and eye to speech shows the beloved capturing the lover first through her looks and then through her voice. The form "meni" is found in the dialects of eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan and gives the sense of a saz poem passed from mouth to mouth.

Historical Context

Whether the koşma belongs to Bezmî or to Cezbî is uncertain because of the typesetting confusion described above; it is given here because it appears first under Bezmî's heading in the section on the poems. The possibility that Bezmî is the nineteenth-century Âşık Bezmî of Çankırı, known for his contests with Tokatlı Nûrî, is discussed in the poet's biography and on Cezbî's page; this identification is not in the source.

Bibliography

Online sources