Cezbî is a poet reported to have a syllabic poem in the Merzifon Cönkü, a manuscript compiled in Merzifon. His name appears only in Metin Hakverdioğlu's article of 2019 introducing the cönk. No record has been found of his life, his home or his period. Moreover, the quatrain printed under Cezbî's name in the article is identical, letter for letter, with the quatrain given in the same article as Bezmî's koşma; for this reason the text of Cezbî's poem in the cönk is not known with certainty today. This page explains what is known about this poet, whose name survives in the list of a cönk, and the confusion in the source.

His Place in the Merzifon Cönkü

The Merzifon Cönkü is a poetry notebook which Metin Hakverdioğlu acquired from a bookseller as coming from Merzifon and keeps in his own library; neither its compiler nor its date is written in it. Hakverdioğlu considers it about a hundred years old; it contains 161 poems by 32 poets, with folk and divan poetry represented in almost equal measure. The poet with the most poems is Tokatlı Nûrî. Hakverdioğlu believes the notebook was put together in the literary circle of Eyüp Sabrî of Merzifon, probably by a local poet using the pen name Fethî. His article publishes only the first stanza or couplet of each poem in the cönk; the full texts remain unpublished in the cönk.

In the article's list of poets Cezbî appears as "1 syllabic". The only trace linking Cezbî to Amasya is the presence of his poem in this notebook compiled in Merzifon. Hakverdioğlu describes in some detail how Merzifon was a halting place on the roads to Çorum, Kastamonu, Sinop and Samsun, how folk poets passed through it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how names such as Dertli, Emrah, Nûrî and Âşık Ömer joined the town's gatherings at the invitation of local poets. The pen name Cezbî derives from "cezbe", which in Sufism means God's drawing of His servant towards Himself and the ecstasy this produces, and it is the kind of pen name chosen by poets formed in dervish-lodge circles. This may suggest that the poet came from a milieu close to Sufism, but it is information that goes no further than the meaning of the name.

The State of His Poem

In the article's section on the poems, the first quatrain of a koşma is given under the heading "poems written by Cezbî in syllabic metre (1)": "Kemân ebrûlarıň âhû gözleriň / Mecnûn gibi ḳılar dîvâne meni / ‘Âşıḳı mest ider şîrin sözleriň / Rüsvâ-yı ‘aşḳ ider cihâne meni". The same quatrain, however, with the same page number (Cönk, 87) and without a single letter of difference, is printed a page earlier as the only syllabic poem of Bezmî. Since the list of poets gives one syllabic poem each to Bezmî and to Cezbî, the text of one of two different poems must have taken the place of the other in typesetting. The Cezbî heading comes in the article's section on the poems after Âşık Mustafa's ghazal on page 104; this order suggests that Cezbî's actual poem may be on a later page of the cönk. This inference is ours.

In this situation the quatrain has been given on Bezmî's page, as a separate poem page with the question of attribution noted, because it appears first in the article under Bezmî's heading and its page number fits Bezmî's other poem on page 82. Rather than publish the same text a second time under Cezbî's name, we have thought it right to record plainly that the text of his real poem could not be reached. Once the cönk itself is seen, the pen-name stanza of the koşma on page 87 will show whose it is, and Cezbî's poem, read in its own place, will reveal its text. Until then Cezbî's poem must be regarded as not having been reached.

Bibliography

Online sources