Photo: Zeynel Cebeci, CC BY-SA 4.0

Rubai (quatrain) 1 — Geh râmiş-i lüṭfuñla idüp tâze nevâ

Amasya05 Editorial Board • Editor: Mevlüt Erdem Öztürk • 01 October 2026 • Updated: 13 October 2026 • 2 min reading

Âkif's quatrain addressed to God: a heart that sings like a nightingale in His grace and lives like a salamander in His wrath, between the furnace of fear and the garden of hope.

Contents 4

1Original Ottoman Turkish Text
2In English
3Literary and Historical Commentary
4Bibliography

Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Geh râmiş-i lüṭfuñla idüp tâze nevâ
Geh tâbiş-i ḳahrıñla olup lerze-nümâ
Bülbül mü semender mi göñül kim yeridir
Geh külḫan-ı ḫavf gehî gülzâr-ı recâ

In English

1. Sometimes singing fresh melodies in the delight of Your grace, sometimes trembling before the heat of Your wrath (I live).

2. Is the heart a nightingale or a salamander; its place is sometimes the furnace of fear, sometimes the rose garden of hope.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a rubai (rubâî, quatrain) of four lines; the first, second and fourth lines rhyme with the words "nevâ, nümâ, recâ", and the third line is left free. The edition does not give the metre. According to Öntürk and Tunçadam, the section of the divan headed "rubâ‘îyyât" contains four quatrains, one of them in Persian; this is the first quatrain given as a sample in the article. Since the letter "ṭ" appears as "š" in the PDF of the edition, the word "lüṭfuñla" has been corrected.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain describes the state between fear and hope that Sufism calls "havf ve recâ". The poet addresses God: His grace gladdens the heart and makes it sing fresh melodies, His wrath makes it tremble. In the third line the heart is likened to two creatures: the nightingale singing in the rose garden and the salamander, the legendary creature believed to live in fire. The fourth line completes this pairing in the order of a leff ü neşr (lapping and unlapping): the furnace of fear (the bathhouse furnace) answers to the salamander, the rose garden of hope to the nightingale. The contrasts between "grace" and "wrath", "furnace" and "rose garden", "fear" and "hope" give the four-line poem a tight structure.

Historical Context

The date of the quatrain is unknown. Öntürk and Tunçadam note that Âkif's poems with religious content stand out. For the poet's life, see the article Îdîzâde Âkif Mustafa Efendi.

Bibliography

Tolga Öntürk and Özcan Tunçadam, "Amasyalı 'Îdî-zâde Âkif Mustafa ve Divanı", Hikmet-Akademik Edebiyat Dergisi, 6(12), 2020, pp. 259-281 (text: pp. 280). https://doi.org/10.28981/hikmet.683811

Online sources