Original Ottoman Turkish Text

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

Sâḳiyâ ṣoḥbeti germ it ḳadeḥi ṣun yürisün
Şöyle ḳan mest olalum ‘âlemi ḥumret bürisün
İçelüm ṭurma maḥabbet ayaġın ṭolu getür
El bir idüp açalum defter-i ‘işret dürisin
Āl ile aldayı aldayı şikâr eyleyelüm
Meclise cem‘ idelüm gözleri âhû sürüsin
Ḫâce vuṣlat ḳapusın kimse çün âsân açamaz
‘Ömr naḳdin virelüm vaṣlı yolında çürüsün
Ġoncalar bezmine ol zâġ raḳîbi ḳomasun
Diyelüm gülşeni bülbüllere her dem ḳorusun
Silelüm la‘l-i meyin ol büt-i ‘ayyârelerüñ
Bu ḥasedden dili aġzında raḳîbüñ ḳurusun
Zâhidâ saña behişt Mihrî'ye dîdâr gerek
Aña maḥbûbı yeter saña cinânuñ ḥûrisin

In English

1. O cupbearer, warm up the gathering, hold out the cup and let it go round; let us get so drunk, our fill, that redness covers the whole world. (Humret is redness; the colour of the wine and the flush that drunkenness brings to the face are thought of together.)

2. Let us drink, do not stand still, bring the cup of affection full; let us join hands and open the rolled-up pages of the register of revelry. (Ayak means "cup" in the old language. İşret is a drinking gathering; "to open its register" means to begin the entertainment.)

3. Let us hunt by trickery, by deceiving and deceiving; let us gather into the gathering the herd of the gazelle-eyed. (Âl means trick and ruse. The gazelle-eyed are the beautiful; the poet likens them to a herd of game.)

4. Master, since no one can open the door of union easily, let us pay down the capital of our lives and let it rot on the road to union. (Union, vuslat, is reaching the beloved; the poet is willing to spend her whole life for it.)

5. Let them not admit that crow of a rival to the gathering of buds; let us say that the rose garden should always guard itself for the nightingales. (The bud and the rose are the beautiful, the nightingale is the lover, and the crow is the rival who hovers around the beloved.)

6. Let us wipe away the wine on the ruby lips of those cunning idols; out of this envy may the rival's tongue dry up in his mouth. (In divan poetry, an idol means a beauty loved to the point of worship. The couplet can be read as a figure for drinking from the lips of the beautiful and kissing them.)

7. O ascetic, you need paradise, while Mihrî needs the beloved's face. Her beloved is enough for her, and for you the houris of the paradises. (The ascetic, zâhid, is the pietist who withdraws from the world and hopes for paradise through worship; in divan poetry he is set against the lover.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The hundred and twenty-sixth ghazal (gazel) of the divan has seven 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 ghazal has no redif (refrain word); the rhyme is built on the syllable that follows the sound "-r" in the words "yürisün, bürisün, dürisin, sürüsin, çürüsün, ḳorusun, ḳurusun, ḥûrisin". In this rhyme the vowels change from word to word; the ear hears the sound "r-sün" repeated in the same rhythm in all the words. The pen name (mahlas) stands in the last couplet. The ghazal is found only in the Istanbul University (Ü) manuscript; there is no record of whom it was written for.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The ghazal is a poem of the drinking gathering, opening with an address to the cupbearer. In divan poetry the drinking gathering (bezm) stands both for a real entertainment at which friends assemble and for a symbol of love and ecstasy. In this poem Mihrî calls for the gathering to be set up: the cup must go round, the register of revelry must be opened, the gazelle-eyed beauties must be gathered. In the first couplet the redness of the wine covering the whole world is hyperbole (mübalağa); in the second the word "ayak" builds a double entendre (tevriye) with its senses of "cup" and "foot". In the phrase "Āl ile aldayı aldayı" in the third couplet there is a play on sound between "âl" and "aldamak" ("to deceive"); in the same couplet game, herd of game and gazelle eye form a congruence of images (tenasüp). Gülşen Kaya cites this couplet among the examples in which the divan imagines the lover as a hunter and the gazelle-eyed beauties as the game.

In the fourth couplet the poem moves from the gaiety of the gathering to the difficulty of union. Kaya counts this couplet among the examples showing that union is a door not easily opened and requires the devotion of a whole lifetime. The phrase "ömür nakdi" ("the capital of life") is an old comparison that imagines life as capital to be spent. In the fifth couplet the words rose garden, bud, nightingale and crow are used together; the crow is, in the divan, the counterpart of the rival who makes difficulties for the lover, who is a nightingale or a parrot. In the sixth couplet the idiom "dili kurumak" ("for the tongue to dry up") conveys the rival's being unable to find a word to say out of envy and gives the poem a liveliness drawn from spoken language.

The last couplet rests on one of the best-known oppositions of divan poetry: the ascetic and the lover. The ascetic hopes for paradise and the houris, while the lover wants only the beloved's face (dîdâr). Kaya mentions this couplet as one of the examples in which the lover takes absolute beauty as the goal and leaves the houris of paradise to the ascetic. That Mihrî places her own pen name on the lover's side shows that a woman poet adopted the lover's voice of the tradition as it stood; in the poem there is no separate expression that marks the poet as a woman.

Bibliography

Online sources