Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefā‘īlün Mefā‘īlün Fe‘ūlün

Hemān söz ḳaṭre-i nīsāna beñzer
Olur cān āsmānından çü nāzil
Ṣadef aġzına düşse dürr olur pāk
Dehān-ı māre düşse zehr-i ḳātil

In English

1. The word is just like a drop of April (nisan) rain, for it too descends from the sky of the soul.

2. If it falls into the mouth of the oyster shell it becomes a pure pearl; if it falls into the mouth of the snake, a deadly poison.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a kıt'a (fragment) of two couplets (beyit); the words "nāzil" and "ḳātil" at the end of the second lines rhyme, and Özkat counts this kıt'a as having half rhyme. The metre is "mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün fe‘ūlün" of the hezec family. There is no pen name (mahlas). The kıt'a is found on folio 112a of miscellany no. 314 of the Âşir Efendi collection in the Süleymaniye Library, in the same place as the eighteenth and twentieth kıt'as. To whom and when it was written is unknown.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

As Özkat notes, in this kıt'a the poet likens the word to April rain and says that this rain turns into a pearl inside the oyster shell and into poison in the mouth of a snake. The whole force of the kıt'a rests on this simile. In the first couplet the word descends "from the sky of the soul" like rain falling from the heavens; in the second the same drop comes to two opposite ends according to where it falls. There is a clear antithesis between oyster and snake, pearl and poison, and a congruence of images (tenasüp) among drop, oyster shell and pearl. The meaning that follows is that the worth of a word changes with the mouth and the heart that receive it: the same word becomes a pearl in the mouth of the master of words and poison in the mouth of the ill-intentioned. This conclusion is our own interpretation. The kıt'a stands around the same idea of speech and poetry as the thirteenth kıt'a, in which Fazlî separates the poet from the poetaster; this connection too is our own observation.

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. 383, kıt'a no. 19 (Süleymaniye Library, Âşir Efendi 314, fol. 112a); also p. 65 (on the kıt'as) and p. 69 (rhyme), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources