Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11'li hece ölçüsü

Tecrübe eyledim kendimi gördüm
Hercâî sevmeden göňül farımış
Ben kendimi ‘âşıḳ onu yâr dirdim
Ne ben ‘âşıḳ mışım ne ol yâr imiş

In English

1. I put myself to the test and saw what I was: the heart has grown weary of loving a fickle one. I used to call myself the lover and that one the beloved; it turns out I was no lover and that one was no beloved.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The quatrain is the beginning of a koşma recorded under the name Gevherî on page 89 of the Merzifon Cönkü. The koşma, built of eleven-syllable quatrains, is the most common form of aşık (minstrel) poetry. Since Hakverdioğlu gives only the first quatrain, the rest of the koşma is unknown, and the closing quatrain with the pen name is not visible. The lines have eleven syllables with a caesura after the sixth; the syllable count is ours. The second and fourth lines rhyme in "farımış" and "yâr imiş", while "gördüm" and "dirdim" in the first and third lines form a half rhyme. This is the usual rhyme pattern for the first quatrain of a koşma.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain is spoken like a confession. The poet says that he put himself to the test and saw that his heart had grown weary of a fickle beloved. "Farımak" is used in Anatolian dialects in the sense of growing tired or fed up, and it gives the line the sound of popular speech. "Hercâî" means one who goes everywhere, does not keep his word and whose heart does not stay in one place. The last two lines carry the main thought of the stanza: the roles of lover and beloved were an illusion. The suffix "-mış/-miş" in "Ne ben âşıkmışım ne o yâr imiş" reports a truth noticed only afterwards and expresses a heavy disappointment in plain language. Reproach of the beloved is common in aşık poetry; here the reproach is turned on the poet himself as well.

Historical Context

Since we could not compare it with the divan published by Elçin, we cannot say whether the poem is among Gevherî's known poems. In cönks a poem may belong to another poet even when the pen name is the same; for this quatrain too the attribution rests on the record in the cönk. The presence of Gevherî in the Merzifon Cönkü shows that his poems were read in nineteenth-century Merzifon. The poet's life and the family tradition concerning Gümüş and Merzifon are in the article Gevherî.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Şükrü Elçin, Gevherî Divanı: İnceleme-Metin-Dizin-Bibliyografya, Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Millî Folklor Araştırma Dairesi Yayınları, 1984 (as cited by Albayrak 1996).

Academic studies

Online sources