Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ)
Deryā didigim baḥr-i vücūb-ı evvel
Emvāc-ı müṣādem şu ḥudūŝ-ı muḫtel
Şerh itmede emvāc-ı be-hem-peyvest
Deryā-yı ki lā yusʾelu ʿammā yefʿal
In English
1. What I call the sea is the sea of the first Necessary Being; the colliding waves are these confused things that come to be.
2. The waves, joined one to another, are expounding that sea of which (Arabic) "He is not questioned about what He does."
Literary and Historical Commentary
The image of sea and wave built in the previous quatrain is explained in this one. The sea is "bahr-i vücûb-ı evvel", the sea of the first and necessary being, that is, God; and the colliding waves are "hudûs-ı muhtel", confused things that come to be, that is, the created world. The kalâm concepts of the necessary and the contingent are set here into a seascape.
The second couplet states the real work of the waves: the waves joined to one another "şerh", expound, the sea. Created things are signs that show and tell of God. The last line, as Tok Yıldız also notes in a footnote, is the first part of the verse in the sura al-Anbiyâ', "He is not questioned about what He does, but they will be questioned" (21:23). So the question of the previous quatrain, "who condemns the sea as oppressor", closes with a Qur'anic answer. This quatrain is the last poem of the section Tok Yıldız transcribed, that is, of the first half of the manuscript.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 128 (poem no. 182; manuscript fol. 43a). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
