Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ)
Olduñ yetişir ʿaşḳa hevā-dār göñül
Bes ġayrı bu sevdā-yı sevād-ı kākül
Bir eşk-i nermle temiz it mā-sebḳi
Bir ḫātimeniñ ḥüsni olur ḥükmelʾ-kül
In English
1. Heart, you have been eager enough for love; enough now of this passion for the blackness of the forelock.
2. Wash the past clean with a soft tear; for the beauty of an ending gives judgement on the whole.
Literary and Historical Commentary
A counsel of repentance addressed to the heart, it shares the mood of the divan's poems on old age. The poet tells his heart that it has been eager enough for love, and that the passion for the blackness of the forelock is now enough. The words "sevdâ", passion, and "sevâd", blackness, come from the same root, and the black forelock and the black passion meet in this closeness of sound.
Repentance is pictured in the second couplet through an image of writing: the past is a page to be washed clean with a soft tear. The "hüsn-i hâtime", good ending, of the last line is a well-known phrase in Islamic belief describing being in faith and in a good state at the moment of death. The poet says that this good ending "gives judgement on the whole": the worth of a life is measured by how it ends. The last word is uncertainly read in the thesis, though the general sense of the line still points this way.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 124 (poem no. 171; manuscript fol. 41b-42a). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
