Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilün

Eyledi yâr beni derd ile âvâre meded
Ölürem itmez ise ḥasret ile çâre meded
Öldürürem dir imiş zülfüñe çeşmüñ beni yâr
Virme cellâd eline aṣ beni ol dâra meded
Çeşm-i mestüñ yine nâ-ḥaḳ yere ḳan eylemesün
Ṣuçını bildüre ḳatlansun a bir pâre meded
Şerbet-i la‘lüñ imiş ḫaste dile dost şifâ
Demidür eyle devâ bu dil-i bîmâra meded
Bir nefes ḳaldı ki Mihrî vire cân fürḳat ile
Çıḳmasun ḥasret ile hey meded ol yâre meded

In English

1. The beloved has made me wretched and wandering with pain; help! If she finds no cure for my longing I shall die; help!

2. The beloved's eye is said to be telling her hair, "I shall kill him." Do not hand me over to the executioner; hang me on that gallows instead; help! (The eye is likened to an executioner, and the long curling hair to the rope of the gallows. The lover prefers to be hanged by the rope of the hair rather than die at the hand of the eye.)

3. Let that drunken eye not shed blood unjustly again; let it first declare my offence, so that I may bear it a little; help! (The couplet can be read in two ways: if "ḳatlansun" is taken from the verb "katlanmak" (to endure), the sense is the one above; if it is linked with the word "ḳatl" (killing), the sense is "let it first declare my offence, then kill me". In manuscripts F and Ü, "ḳatlansun a" is read "ḳatlin sine", which brings the sense of killing to the fore; in F, moreover, "Ṣaçını" is written in place of "Ṣuçını". "Bir pâre" means a little, somewhat.)

4. Friend, the sherbet of your lip is said to be a healing for the sick heart. Give this sick heart a cure from that sherbet, for it is the very moment; help! ("La‘l" is both the red precious stone and the lip. In old medicine remedies were given as sherbets; the beloved's lip, too, becomes the sherbet for the lover's pain.)

5. Mihrî has only a breath left before giving up her life through separation. Let her soul not depart in longing; oh, help, help for that beloved's sake. (The closing words "ol yâre meded" can be understood as "bring me to that beloved" or as "help against that beloved".)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The fourteenth ghazal (gazel) has five couplets (beyit) and is written in the remel metre of the aruz (quantitative metre), in the pattern "Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilün". The rhyme is the sounds "-âre/-âra" (âvâre, çâre, dâra, pâre, bîmâra, yâre). The redif (refrain word) "meded" is Arabic for "help" and is used in Turkish as a call for help in the sense of "come quickly, help". Because every couplet ends with this call, the ghazal has an air of outcry from beginning to end; in the last line the redif is repeated twice, as "hey meded ol yâre meded", carrying this air to its highest point. Since "meded" ends in the letter dâl, the poem is in the section "Ḥarfü'd-Dâl" in the edition. It is found in all four manuscripts (F 36a, M 50b, S 38b, Ü 30b).

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The ghazal is the plea for help of a lover brought to the edge of death by the pain of separation. The lover first tells her pain and longing, then presents the beloved's eye as an executioner and her hair as a gallows, then asks that blood not be shed unjustly, begs the sherbet of the lip as a remedy, and in the last couplet announces that her soul is about to leave her. In this order the couplets are tied together as if telling the last hours of a patient.

In the second couplet the eye's telling the hair "I shall kill him" is a personification (teşhis), which presents the elements of beauty as speaking persons. Gülşen Kaya points to this couplet when examining the similes of hair in the divan: in answer to the eye's saying, as executioner, that it will kill the lover, the lover prefers to be hanged by the hair, which is the gallows, rather than die in the executioner's hands. The words executioner, dâr (gallows), killing and ḳatl form a congruence of images (tenasüp). In the third couplet the eye is this time drunk (çeşm-i mest); according to Kaya the drunken eye sheds blood unjustly and makes an attempt on the life of the guiltless lover. In the fourth couplet the beloved's lip is likened to sherbet. Kaya gives this couplet as an example where the lip is counted as the only cure for the lover's pain and where there is an allusion to remedies being given as sherbet so that they are easier to drink. The words sherbet, şifâ (healing), devâ (cure), ḫaste (sick) and bîmâr (ailing) draw a picture of medicine.

Nazire to Necâtî

This ghazal is a nazire (response poem) to a ghazal by Necâtî Bey, Mihrî's contemporary and, according to the tezkires (biographical anthologies of poets), the poet she took as her model. A nazire is a reply written to an admired poem in the same metre, rhyme and redif. In his study comparing the twenty nazires Mihrî wrote to Necâtî by going through both divans, Metin Hakverdioğlu sets this ghazal beside ghazal number XLVII of Necâtî's divan (Ali Nihat Tarlan's edition). Necâtî's ghazal is written in the same metre, with the same redif "meded", and begins: "Eşigüñden gider oldı dil-i âvâre meded / Dostlar olmaya mı bu ġama bir çâre meded". Necâtî's poem has seven couplets, Mihrî's five.

When the two poems are compared, Mihrî is seen to keep most of the rhyme words and to use some images in a new context. In his second couplet Necâtî says that his pain is not light enough to be cured by sherbet; Mihrî, in the fourth couplet, praises the beloved's lip as sherbet and counts it a remedy for the sick heart. Necâtî mentions the phrase "dil-i bîmâr" (sick heart) together with the sherbet of union; Mihrî uses the same phrase, in the same rhyme position, with the sherbet of the lip. In Necâtî the words "meded ol yâre meded" occur in the second couplet; Mihrî carries them to the pen-name couplet and ends her poem with this call as "hey meded ol yâre meded". Necâtî's rhyme "bir pâre meded" also appears, with another meaning, in Mihrî's third couplet.

Hakverdioğlu says that Mihrî's ghazals are far more successful than her kaside (qasida) and the poems in the Tażarru‘-nâme, that one can find in her lines a lyricism that some of Necâtî's ghazals lack, and he adds that a woman's sensibility gives it a distinct flavour. The relation between Necâtî and Mihrî is also told in the tezkires. Âşık Çelebi records that Mihrî answered Necâtî's line "Örti döşek Necâtiye bir bûriyâ yiter" (A mat is enough for Necâtî as cover and bed) with the couplet that stands in the divan as the sixth couplet of the forty-sixth ghazal: "Sen ey Necâtî ister iseñ bûriyâ döşek / Yâr işiginde Mihrî'ye bir ḳurı câ yeter". This ghazal is likewise one of the examples, reflected in the divan, of the exchange of words between the two poets; when it was written is not known.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Mehmet Arslan (ed.), Mihrî Hâtun Dîvânı, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları (Kültür Eserleri Dizisi 576), 2018, p. 58, Gazel 14 (F 36a, M 50b, S 38b, Ü 30b) and the footnotes on manuscript variants. ekitap.ktb.gov.tr
  • Âşık Çelebi, Meşâ‘irü'ş-Şu‘arâ, ed. Filiz Kılıç, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı e-kitap, entry on Mihrî, pp. 355-356. ekitap.ktb.gov.tr

Academic studies

  • Metin Hakverdioğlu, "Mihrî Hâtun'un Necâtî Bey'in Şiirlerine Nazîreleri", Turkish Studies 4/2 (Winter 2009), pp. 522-551 (comparison: Necâtî XLVII / Mihrî XV, by the number in the author's own edition, pp. 528-529), doi:10.7827/TurkishStudies.638.
  • Gülşen Kaya, Mihrî Hâtun Divânı'nın Tahlili, master's thesis, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Elazığ 2010 (entries on hair, eye and lip). openaccess.firat.edu.tr

Online sources