Original Persian Text
از عقس رخت دیدهء من روشن شد
از روشنئ دیده دلم کلشن شد
آن طفل که بر سینهء مردم نبشست
مژکان بتواضع صف پیرامن شد
Latin-letter reading, prepared for this page:
Ez ʿaks-ı ruḫet dîde-i men rûşen şod
Ez rûşenî-i dîde dilem gülşen şod
Ân ṭıfl ki ber sîne-i merdüm be-nişest
Müjgân be-tevâżuʿ ṣaf-ı pîrâmen şod
In English
1. From the reflection of your face my eye grew bright; from the brightness of my eye my heart became a rose garden.
2. For that child who sat upon the breast of the pupil, the lashes ranged themselves in humble rows around it.
Literary and Historical Commentary
A play on words concerning the eye underlies this Persian quatrain. In Persian "merdüm" means both man and the pupil of the eye; the pupil is so called because of the small human image seen at the centre of the eye. The "tıfl", child, in the quatrain's second couplet is also this pupil: the beloved's small image reflected in the eye is like a child that has sat upon the eye's "breast", and the lashes range themselves in rows around it in reverence.
The first couplet builds a chain: the beloved's face is reflected in the eye, and the eye grows bright; the brightness of the eye passes to the heart, and the heart becomes a rose garden. Seeing turning into a garden that blooms in the heart is a Persian summary of the divan's poems on beauty and the gaze. In the thesis this quatrain is followed shortly by a second Persian quatrain whose first two lines are almost the same; it appears that the poet worked twice on the same image.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 123 (poem no. 166; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
