Kara Fazlî, Ghazal 93: Deathless Like Khidr

Ghazal 93 — Ölümden Ḥıżr-veş pervāsuz-isem n’ola iy Fażlī

Amasya05 Editorial Board • Editor: Mevlüt Erdem Öztürk • 01 October 2026 • Updated: 07 October 2026 • 3 min reading

The single surviving couplet of a Kara Fazlî ghazal whose first couplets are lost: a lover who fears death no more than Khidr, the beloved's lip his water of life.

Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefā‘īlün Mefā‘īlün Mefā‘īlün Mefā‘īlün

Ölümden Ḥıżr-veş pervāsuz-isem n’ola iy Fażlī
Lebi āb-ı ḥayātumdur ṣaçı ‘ömr-i dırāzumdur

In English

1. O Fazlî, what wonder if, like Khidr, I have no fear of death? (The beloved's) lip is my water of life, and his hair my long life.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text we have is a single couplet, written in the "mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün" pattern of the hezec family of aruz (quantitative metre). The ghazal is the ninety-third in Özkat's edition and is found only in the Fazlî divan section (fol. 235a) of the miscellany in the Hazine collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. Özkat gives it under the heading "incomplete ghazals rhyming in the letter rā", among those whose first couplets are missing; the couplet that remains is the last one, in which the pen name (mahlas) occurs. According to Özkat, in single couplets of this kind, whose beginning and end could not be recovered, there is no rhyme between the lines, and this couplet is one of them. The ending "-umdur" (is my) at the close of the second line must be part of the redif (refrain word) of the ghazal; this is our own inference. It is not known to whom or when it was written.

In the ghazal section of the divan, Özkat gathers the ghazals whose beginning or end is missing because of lost pages into a separate group at the end of the letter in which they rhyme, and notes that these ghazals were not left unfinished by the poet but owe their state to missing pages in the miscellanies. According to him, among the 153 poems of the ghazal section there are 15 ghazals that could not be recovered in full because of lost or torn-out leaves; of this ghazal only one couplet remains.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet joins two familiar images of immortality. Khidr is known as the one who does not die because he drank the water of life (ab-ı hayat); the lover too has no fear of death, because he counts the beloved's lip as the water of life. In divan poetry the beloved's lip is thought of as a life-giving water. The second image is the hair: the relation set up between the length of the hair and the length of life is given in the words "ṣaçı ‘ömr-i dırāzumdur" (his hair is my long life). Khidr, the water of life, death and life form a congruence of images (tenasüp) in 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. 340, ghazal no. 93 (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine, fol. 235a); also p. 62 (incomplete ghazals), p. 69 (rhyme) and pp. 119-120 (description of the manuscripts), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources