Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Outside the rubai metre (no metre is given in the thesis)
Şuʿarā zümresi pek ḥāsiddir
Münṣifi şiʿr gibi kāsiddir
Ṣıḥḥat-ı naẓm-ārā elfāẓında
Yoḳlama fikrini kim fāsiddir
In English
1. The company of poets is very envious; the fair-minded among them, like poetry, finds no buyers.
2. Do not stop at the correctness of the words of the one who adorns verse; probe his thought, for it is unsound. (The sense of the second couplet is not entirely clear.)
Literary and Historical Commentary
"Poets are very envious": the first line of this quatrain outside the metre is an open judgement on the company of poets. In the second line both poetry and the fair-minded poet are said to be "kâsid", slack, without demand; poetry is a ware that finds no buyer in the market, and the fair-minded man is seen as worthless like it.
The thesis reading leaves the sense of the second couplet unsettled. As far as can be understood, the poet counsels not to be deceived by the smoothness and ornament of a poem's words but to look at the poet's thought; behind smooth words an unsound idea may lie. This quatrain should be read together with the one that follows, which objects to poets being gathered in an anthology; the two poems give a hint as to why Cûdî did not publish his poems and why he avoided appearing in anthologies.
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. 167; manuscript fol. 41b). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
