Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fe‘ilātün Fe‘ilātün Fe‘ilātün Fe‘ilün

Şem‘ gibi dutuşup çıḳdı depemden dütünüm
Şu‘le-i āhumı başuma külāh itdi firāḳ

In English

1. Catching fire like a candle, smoke rose from the crown of my head; separation made the flame of my sigh a cap upon my head.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text before us is the single couplet surviving from a ghazal (gazel) written in the "fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilün" pattern of the remel family of aruz (quantitative metre). Özkat gives this fragment under the heading "incomplete ghazals rhyming in the letter ḳāf", among those whose first couplets are missing; in a footnote to the heading he explains that these ghazals were not left unfinished by the poet, but that because of missing pages in the miscellanies the first couplets of some and the last couplets of others have been lost. The couplet is found in the Fazlî divan section (fol. 245a) of the miscellany in the Hazine collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library and is numbered as ghazal a hundred and fifteen in Özkat's edition.

Since it is not an opening couplet, its two lines do not rhyme with each other; Özkat counts this fragment among the single-couplet incomplete ghazals whose lines have no rhyme between them. The word "firāḳ" (separation) at the end of the second line shows the rhyme of the ghazal, built on the sound "-āḳ"; this is why the fragment has been placed in the section of the letter ḳāf. The couplet contains no pen name (mahlas). It is not known to whom or when the ghazal was written.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet is built on one of the most frequently used images of divan poetry, the candle. The lover has caught fire like a candle, and smoke rises from the crown of his head like the smoke that rises from the tip of a candle. In the second line separation sets the flame of the lover's sigh on his head as a cap; the resemblance between the pointed shape of the flame on top of a candle and the shape of a cap is the basis of the image. This resemblance of shape is our own observation. The words candle, smoke, flame and catching fire form a congruence of images (tenasüp). The word "dütün" means smoke in Old Anatolian Turkish and contributes to the plain Turkish diction of the couplet.

Bibliography

  • Mustafa Özkat, Kara Fazlî'nin Hayatı, Eserleri, Edebî Kişiliği ve Dîvânı (İnceleme-Tenkitli Metin), MA thesis, Marmara University Institute of Turkic Studies, Istanbul 2005, p. 352, ghazal no. 115 (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine, fol. 245a); also p. 62 (incomplete ghazals) and p. 69 (single couplets without rhyme), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources