Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Beni ger öldürürse ḥasretiyle ḫaṭṭ-ı Pîrûze
Benüm ey seng-dil ola mezârum ṭaşı pîrûze
Maḥabbet dûdıdur yir yir belürmiş şemʿ-i ḥüsninde
Ḫaṭı gelmiş diyen kimdür o mâh-ı ʿâlem-efrûze

In English

1. If Pîrûze's down kills me with longing, O stone-hearted one, let my gravestone be of turquoise.

2. What has appeared here and there in the candle of his beauty is the smoke of love; who is it that says down has come to that world-illumining moon?

Literary and Historical Commentary

Âşık Çelebi says plainly that he took these two couplets from a ghazal Bâlî Çelebi wrote for Pîrûze Ali Bâlî, the youth he fell for in his youth. We thus have one of the rare divan couplets whose occasion, the person who gave rise to the poem, is known with his story. The beloved's name is the axis of the ghazal. "Pîrûze" is turquoise; in the matla the first line names him as "hatt-ı Pîrûze", Pîrûze's down, while the second uses the same word in the sense of the stone: if the lover dies of this longing, let his gravestone be of turquoise. Addressing the beloved as "seng-dil", stone-hearted, sets up a congruence of stones with the gravestone and the turquoise.

The second couplet is the most moving point of the ghazal. In divan poetry the appearance of down on a youth's face counts as the end of beauty. The poet denies it: what is seen on the beloved's face is not down but the smoke of love that the candle of beauty gives off here and there. The question "who says down has come?" is a wish to keep the beloved in the age of beauty. According to Kınalızâde and Hüsameddin, Pîrûze died just as down appeared on his face. The sources do not say whether the couplets were written before or after this death; but for a reader who knows the story the second couplet reads less as a denial than as a lament.

The rhyme of the ghazal falls on the words ending in the sound "-ze", Pîrûze, pîrûze, efrûze; the word Pîrûze repeats like a refrain in two different senses. A footnote in the edition points out that the word "mâh" in the second couplet reads "hüsn-i" in some manuscripts. The whole story is told in the article Cevherî (Serhoş Bâlî Efendi).

Bibliography

Online sources