Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefā‘īlün Mefā‘īlün Fe‘ūlün

Çü Ṣun‘ullāh [E]mīr’üñ oġlı Maḥmūd
Cinān bāġına ḳıldı ‘azm-i dīdār
Vefātına didi tārīḫ Fażlī
Yirin nūr eylesün Allāh Cebbār (sene 955)

In English

1. When Mahmud, son of Emir Sun'ullah, set out for the garden of paradise to behold the face of God,

2. Fazlî spoke this chronogram on his death: "May God the Compeller fill his resting place with light" (955). ("Cebbâr", the Compeller, is one of the names of God, meaning the one whose will prevails.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a short chronogram (tarih manzumesi) of two couplets (beyit). The second line of the second couplet, "Yirin nūr eylesün Allāh Cebbār", gives the year of death by the ebced system; according to Mustafa Özkat the date is 955 (1548), and like all the chronogram lines of the divan it is arranged by the "târih-i tam" method, that is, by counting all the letters of the line. The metre is the "mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün fe‘ūlün" pattern of the hezec family; the rhyme is the sound "-ār": dīdār, Cebbār. The pen name (mahlas) appears in the second couplet.

Özkat publishes the poem as the sixth chronogram of the divan from the Fazlî divan section (fol. 229a) of a miscellany in the Hazine collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. The letter in square brackets in the word "[E]mīr" in the first couplet is a completion made in the edition. In the edition the Arabic-script form of the chronogram line is also given under the last couplet.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The poem is a plain chronogram that presents death as a journey. The first couplet does not say that Mahmud died; it says "cinān bāġına ḳıldı ‘azm-i dīdār", that he set out for the garden of paradise to behold the face of God. The word "dīdār" alludes to the belief that the faithful will see God in paradise; death is thus presented as a reunion. The chronogram line is a traditional prayer for the grave to be filled with light: "Yirin nūr eylesün". These words carry the same meaning as the prayer "Ḥaḳ ideli münevver" in the seventh chronogram, written for the same young man.

Historical Context

According to Özkat, the sixth, seventh and eighth chronograms were written on the death in 955 (1548) of Mahmud, son of Sun'ullah Beg, one of the viziers of Şehzade Mustafa. The seventh chronogram ends with the line "Ḥaḳ ideli münevver budur Maḳām-ı Maḥmūd"; the eighth is in Persian. Fazlî also wrote a nine-stanza müseddes elegy for the same young man and a kaside for his father Sun'ullah Beg; in that kaside it is stated plainly that Sun'ullah became vizier to Mustafa Han. Özkat writes that he could find no information on Sun'ullah's life. In 955 Şehzade Mustafa was sanjak governor of Amasya and Fazlî was his divan secretary; that several chronograms and an elegy were written for a single event shows the poet's closeness to the vizier's family. Where Mahmud was buried is not stated in the sources.

Bibliography

Online sources