Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Vezin: Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilün

Düşdüm ayaḳlara elden ḳomadum yâr etegin
Gerçi yârüm ḳomadı bir nefes aġyâr etegin
Olalı ‘aşḳ ile şîrîn lebinüñ Ferhâd'ı
Dil-i dîvâne vaṭan eyledi ṭaġlar etegin
Degmedüm bir güle bu ṭâli‘i yoḳ başumı gör
Ṭutaram bunca zamân oldı ki gülzâr etegin
Mihrî yâr ister iseñ dâmen-i aġyâra yapış
Gül ele girmez imiş ṭutmayıcaḳ ḫâr etegin
Öl diril ol yaḳasuz Nâmi eger ‘ârif iseñ
Ḫûblaruñ ḳoma elden hele zinhâr etegin

In English

1. I have fallen underfoot, I have lost my standing, yet I have not let go of the beloved's hem; though my beloved, for her part, has not let go of the rivals' hem for a single breath. (To hold the hem means to take refuge in someone and cling to them. The lover clings to the beloved, and the beloved to the rivals.)

2. Ever since, through love, my heart became the Ferhad of your sweet lip, this mad heart has made the foothills of the mountains its homeland. (The allusion is to Ferhad, who fell in love with Şirin and pierced the mountains; şîrîn means both "sweet" and is the name of Şirin.)

3. See my unlucky head: for so long I have been holding the hem of the rose garden, wandering about there, and I have not touched a single rose. (The rose is the beloved; she says she has waited for years in the rose garden without reaching her.)

4. O Mihrî, if you want the beloved, cling to the rivals' hem; for it is said the rose does not come to hand unless one holds the thorn's hem. (The thorn is the rival. Whoever wants to pluck the rose must put up with the thorn; whoever wants to reach the beloved must put up with the rivals.)

5. According to the reading in the edition: O Nâmî, if you are wise, die and be revived, become collarless; never let go of the hem of the beautiful. According to the reading "Öl diril al yakasuz nâmı" proposed by Günay Tulum: if you are wise, die before you die, be born again, and take the name "collarless", that is, the spiritual rank not yet written on any paper; never let go of the hem of the beautiful, that is, of those who show the way. (One manuscript has "ey dil", "O heart", in place of "Nâmi". The phrase "öl diril" alludes to the Sufi saying "die before you die", and the collarless shirt to the dervish's cloak.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The hundred and twenty-fourth ghazal (gazel) of the divan has five couplets (beyit) and is composed in the remel metre of aruz (quantitative metre), in the pattern "Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilün". The redif (refrain word) of the ghazal is "etegin" ("the hem"), and its rhyme is the sound "-âr" in the words "yâr, aġyâr, ṭaġlar, gülzâr, ḫâr, zinhâr". The pen name (mahlas) stands in the fourth couplet, departing a little from the tradition; the fifth couplet closes the poem as a couplet of counsel. There are two ghazals in the divan written with this rhyme and redif; the hundred and twenty-fifth ghazal, which follows immediately, uses the same metre, rhyme and redif.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

All the couplets of the poem are built around the word "etek" ("hem, skirt, foot of a mountain"), and in every couplet the word takes on a different sense: in the first couplet the hem of the beloved and of the rivals, in the second the foot of a mountain, in the third the edge and path of a rose garden, in the fourth the thorn itself, and in the fifth the hem of the spiritual guide. Günay Tulum shows that in Necâtî's model poem and the nazires written to it the word etek is used, according to context, in many senses, such as the beloved's hem, the foot of a mountain, the path and edge of a rose garden, the rose and the thorn. Rose and thorn are the familiar pairing of beloved and rival; the line in the fourth couplet "gül ele girmez imiş ṭutmayıcaḳ ḫâr etegin" ("the rose does not come to hand unless one holds the thorn's hem") can be read as the divan-poetry counterpart of the popular saying "whoever loves the rose puts up with its thorn". In the second couplet the word "şîrîn" recalls both the sweet lip and Şirin, and a congruence of images (tenasüp) is built between Ferhad and the foot of the mountain.

The fifth couplet is the most debated place in the ghazal. The word read "Nâmi" in the edition has so far been taken to be a personal name or pen name; Gülşen Kaya too, in her thesis, interprets this ghazal and the next as poems in which Mihrî confides her troubles to Nâmî. Günay Tulum, in his article published in 2025, says that this reading breaks the grammar, that no poet with the pen name Nâmî contemporary with Mihrî is known, and he proposes that the word be read as "nâmı", that is, "nâm" (name) with the accusative ending. In his view the beginning of the line should also be corrected, not with "ol" but with the verb "al", as "Öl diril al yakasuz nâmı eger ‘ârif iseñ". Tulum ties the command "öl diril" to the Sufi saying "die before you die"; recalling that the dervish's shirt is collarless and that the "collarless shirt" also evokes the shroud, he explains "yakasız nâm" as a spiritual rank not yet written on paper and not yet pinned on the shoulder. In this reading the couplet turns, at the end of a love ghazal, into a mystical counsel, and the "ḫûblar" (beautiful ones) too point to spiritual guides.

Historical Context

The ghazal is a nazire (response poem) to Necâtî's ghazal opening "Şöyle muhkem tutayın bir dahi dil-dâr eteğin / Yâ elüm kat‘ ideler yâ keseler yâr eteğin". In the Mecma‘u'n-Neẓâ’ir compiled by Nazmî of Edirne, Mihrî's ghazal is among the nazires written to this poem of Necâtî; poets such as Kemalpaşazâde, Zâtî and Lâmiîzâde Lem‘î Çelebi also wrote nazires on the same ground. Necâtî's poem is itself a link in another chain: according to Latîfî, Necâtî's opening couplet was compared with Ahmed Pasha's couplet "Destümi kesseñ kalur dâmân-ı lutfuñda elüm", and Necâtî humbly acknowledged Ahmed Pasha's superiority.

There is one more striking detail in the fate of the ghazal. In the Pervâne Bey Mecmuası this poem is attributed, with small differences, to the sixteenth-century poet Emrî; in Emrî's divan too the same ghazal is found, with the first three couplets exactly the same and only the pen name changed. Tulum, taking into account that Mihrî lived before Emrî, says that Emrî appropriated this poem and that this is a clear example of poetic theft of the kind old rhetoric books call "nesh". This shows that Mihrî's poems were read after her own time and that the lines of a woman poet circulated widely enough to pass into the divan of a male poet. Tulum also draws attention to the importance of Mihrî's being the first woman poet to be compared with male poets among the crowd, mostly men, who wrote nazires to Necâtî.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Online sources