Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11'li hece ölçüsü

Fiġân eylemesün yoḳ yere bülbül
Bülbül-i dal bilir gül ḳıymetini
Ḳıymetini kendi ne bilsin göňül
Göňül veren bilir dil ḳıymetini

In English

1. Let the nightingale not lament in vain; the nightingale on the branch knows the worth of the rose. How should the heart know its own worth? Only one who has given his heart, the lover, knows the worth of a heart.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text is the first quatrain of a poem recorded under the name Gevherî on page 26 of the Merzifon Cönkü. Since Metin Hakverdioğlu gives only the first stanza of each poem in the cönk, the rest of the poem and the number of its quatrains are unknown. Hakverdioğlu calls the poem a "zencirî". The zencirî, or chain poem, is a form in which the last word of a line is repeated at the beginning of the next, so that the lines are linked like the rings of a chain. In this quatrain the words "bülbül", "kıymetini" and "göňül" form such links. The lines have eleven syllables each; the metre is not stated in the source, and the syllable count is ours. The second and fourth lines share the redif (refrain word) "kıymetini", while "gül" and "dil" carry the rhyme.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain is about who knows the true worth of a thing. The rose and the nightingale are a shared image of divan and folk poetry: the nightingale loves the rose and laments for it. The poet tells the nightingale not to cry in vain, for the nightingale on the branch already knows the rose's worth. In the third line the thought moves a step further: the heart cannot know its own value; only one who has given his heart understands it. The word "dil" in the last line means heart in Persian, while in Turkish it also means tongue, the organ of speech. This double meaning, a tevriye (double entendre), allows the reading that the one who has given his heart knows the worth of both the heart and the word. The chain structure serves the meaning as well: a ring is drawn from the nightingale to the rose, from the rose to the heart and from the heart to the lover, each idea born from the one before.

Historical Context

Gevherî is one of the most widely read minstrel poets of the seventeenth century, and his poems are scattered across cönks in Anatolia, Rumelia and Azerbaijan; the divan published by Şükrü Elçin brings together 979 poems with their variants. We could not check whether this quatrain appears in Elçin's edition. Two poems under Gevherî's name are found in the Merzifon Cönkü; the cönk is thought to have been compiled in Merzifon in the nineteenth century, and it shows that the poet was still recited in Merzifon gatherings about a century and a half after his death. The family tradition linking Gevherî to the town of Gümüş near Amasya and to Merzifon, and the poet's life, are discussed 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