Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: eleven-syllable syllabic metre

Vücudun evini seyran eyledim
Gördüm ki kafeste bir bülbül öter
Üçyüzaltmış altı daireden geldim
Yanıyor ateşim külhanım tüter
Gördüm bir değirmen dönüyor çarkı
Kırk yerde tartarlar verirler narkı
Herkesin dilinden çektiği korku
Düşerse hürmetten zindanda yatar
Gördüm bir ejderha yedidir başı
Kendi sahtekârdır hiledir işi
Kul olsa peşine düşse bir kişi
Götürürde onu bir yerde yutar
Ey FEDAYİ budur sözün doğrusu
Yağmalar dükkanı imân uğrusu
Yok ise dükkanda Aslan yavrusu
Yoktur ticareti her dem pul satar

In English

1. I walked through and contemplated the house of the body; I saw that a nightingale sings in a cage. I came through three hundred and sixty-six circles; my fire is burning, my furnace is smoking.

2. I saw a mill whose wheel is turning; they weigh in forty places and set its price. There is a fear everyone suffers from his tongue: if he falls from respect, he lies in a dungeon.

3. I saw a dragon with seven heads; it is a fraud itself, its work is deceit. If a man became its slave and followed it, it would take him and swallow him somewhere.

4. O Fedâî, this is the truth of the matter: the thief of faith plunders the shop. If there is no lion's cub in the shop, it has no trade, it always sells mere trinkets.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

It is a koşma of four quatrains in the eleven-syllable metre. The last lines of the quatrains rhyme in the words "öter, tüter, yatar, yutar, satar"; in the first quatrain the rhyme "eyledim, geldim" is used, and in the following ones "çarkı, narkı, korku", "başı, işi, kişi" and "doğrusu, uğrusu, yavrusu". The pen name appears in the last quatrain. The poem rests on an allusive narrative pattern common in folk and dervish-lodge poetry, which lists astonishing things seen in a place visited with the words "I saw" and hides another meaning beneath each of them. To whom and when it was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The first line gives the key: the place the poet walks through is the human body. The nightingale in the cage is the soul or the heart inside the body; the burning fire and the smoking furnace express the way divine love burns a person from within. The "three hundred and sixty-six circles" evoke the number three hundred and sixty-six, known in folk belief as the number of veins in the human body; this correspondence is our interpretation. The turning mill of the second quatrain and the "fear everyone suffers from his tongue" seem to point, through the mouth and the tongue, to the value and the danger of speech: words not weighed before they are spoken bring a person down from respect.

The seven-headed, fraudulent dragon of the third quatrain is a widespread symbol in mystical literature of the carnal self that leads man astray; this is why its "swallowing somewhere" whoever becomes its slave is meaningful. Cafer Özdemir notes that Fedâî was influenced by lines of Yunus Emre in which the word "küt" is used in the sense of the carnal self, and that he often takes up the carnal self as a theme in his poems. In the last quatrain the heart is likened to a shop: the "thief of faith" plunders it. Considering Ali's epithet "Esedullah", the Lion of God, the "lion's cub" must denote a true dervish devoted to Ali's path; a shop without such a one cannot sell anything of value and sells "trinkets". This reading too is an interpretation, but it is consistent with the love of Ali in the poet's other poems.

Bibliography

Online sources