Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ)
Bir nūr-ı tecellīye ilāhīydim ben
Ṭopraġı taʿalluḳla iderdim rūşen
İẓhār-ı ʿayān itmek içün ḥaddimce
Āyīnelik itdi baña birḳaç köhne ten
In English
1. I was a light of divine manifestation; I lit up the earth by attaching myself (to it).
2. To show myself in the visible world as far as my measure allowed, a few old bodies served me as mirrors.
Literary and Historical Commentary
This quatrain, set among the quatrains on marriage and the world, carries the same subject to the relation of soul and body. The soul is a light of divine manifestation; by attaching itself to the earth, that is, to the body, it lights it up. Man's existence is described as a light's "taalluk", its entering into relation with earth.
The second couplet strikes with an unexpected word: "birkaç köhne ten", a few old bodies. The soul used these bodies as mirrors to show itself in the visible world. The plural here seems to point not to a belief that the soul enters more than one body but to man's body changing over a lifetime, the bodies of childhood, youth and old age; but the text is not clear on this. As in the divan's ghazal "Âyîne Karşısında", the body here too is not a lasting self but a passing mirror in which the light is reflected.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 112 (poem no. 130; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
