Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl

Günden güne maḥv olmada farż u sünnet
ʿAḳl oldı seḳāmetle ḳarīn-i cinnet
Hep şehvet-i ḥissiyyedir aḳṣā-yı mürām
Efsāne gelir ḫalḳa ṣafā-yı cennet

In English

1. Day by day the obligatory and the customary duties are fading away; reason, together with sickness, has become a companion of madness.

2. The furthest aim desired is ever the lust of the senses; the delight of Paradise sounds to people like a fable.

Literary and Historical Commentary

The obligatory and customary duties are forgotten day by day, and reason, losing its soundness, is becoming a companion of madness. This short example of the divan's criticisms of the age paints a gloomy picture. The words "sekâmet", sickness, and "cinnet", madness, are the diagnoses the poet gives of the mental state of his age.

The cause of this state is shown in the second couplet: the furthest aim people wish to reach, "aksâ-yı merâm", is the lust of the senses; and the delight of Paradise sounds to people like a legend. This picture of a time in which materialist views spread and religion was reduced to a fable carries the same concern as the divan's quatrain saying "the works are God's, not nature's" and the satire written on the poets of wine. That a new series of numbering begins with this quatrain in the thesis may suggest that the copyist or the poet transferred this section from a separate notebook; this is a guess.

Bibliography

  • Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 120 (poem no. 155; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf

Online sources