Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Cūyende-i esbāb-ı beḳā ehl-i ḥayāt
Eñ sevmedigi şey var ise rūy-ı memāt
Bilmez ki fenā elçisidir müştehiyāt
Leẕẕetle gelir hādim-i beyt-i leẕẕāt
In English
1. The people of life are seekers of the means of lasting; if there is one thing they love least, it is the face of death.
2. They do not know that the things desired are envoys of nonbeing; the destroyer of the house of pleasures (death) comes with pleasure.
Literary and Historical Commentary
Man flees death, yet his desires lead him to it; that contradiction is what the quatrain is about. The living seek the means of lasting and like the face of death least of all; yet the things they seek, "müştehiyât", desires, are in truth envoys of nonbeing. What wears man away is what he loves.
The last line rests on a hadith: "Remember often the destroyer of pleasures"; in this hadith death is called "hâzimü'l-lezzât", the destroyer of pleasures. Cûdî turns this saying into an image of place: death is "the destroyer of the house of pleasures", and this destroyer comes to the door of the house with pleasure itself. That is, death approaches from within the beloved pleasures, in their guise. This final reversal of the quatrain says more sharply the thought found in other poems of the divan, that "the market of the world is a loss".
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 105 (poem no. 105; manuscript fol. 36a-37a). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
