Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Bir menbaʿ-ı ġamdır şu göñül ṣandıġımız
Aġlar naẓar-ı ʿibrete gül ṣandıġımız
Māhiyyetini keşf ü teʾemmül itseñ
Ḫūn-āb çeker der-gül ü mül ṣandıġımız
In English
1. What we take for the heart is a spring of sorrow; what we take for a rose weeps before the gaze of admonition.
2. If you uncovered and pondered its essence, what we take for rose and wine draws only bloody water.
Literary and Historical Commentary
The refrain "sandığımız", what we take for, keeps the gap between appearance and reality open across all four lines. Three things are turned upside down in turn: what we take for the heart is a spring of sorrow, what we take for a rose weeps, and what we take for rose and wine draws bloody water. The two favourite emblems of pleasure in divan poetry, gül and mül, rose and wine, turn here into a source of pain when looked at with the eye of admonition.
The quatrain's line of thought is stated openly in the third line: uncovering and pondering a thing's essence brings out the pain behind appearance. "Hûn-âb", bloody water or bloody tears, is in divan poetry the name of the lover's tears; the red of the rose and the colour of the wine are tied to the colour of these tears. Thus rose and wine, far from giving joy, become objects of mourning. The quatrain shares the same sorrowful mood as the previous quatrain with the refrain "weep", and the two quatrains side by side read like a small sequence of mourning.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 102 (poem no. 92; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
