Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mef‘ûlü Fâ‘ilâtü Mefâ‘îlü Fâ‘ilün

Geh hecr-i yâr u gâh beni ġamlar öldürür
Geh vaṣl-ı dilber ile geçen demler öldürür
Düşmen güler bu ḥâlüme ben aġlaram müdâm
Hey buña cân mı ḳatlanur âdemler öldürür
Aġlañ gülüñ ki bir gün eyâ dostlar raḳîb
Ecel irişmedin beni derhemler öldürür
Ḫaste dile ḫayâli idi emsem eyleyen
Müşkil budur ki şimdi beni emler öldürür
Ḫâr-ı cefâda Mihrî ölürse ne ġam raḳîb
İt ḳırıcı seni anı gül-femler öldürür

In English

1. Sometimes the beloved's separation kills me, sometimes griefs; and sometimes the memory of the moments spent in union with the beauty kills me.

2. The enemy laughs at my state while I weep without end. Alas, can a soul endure this? It kills people.

3. O friends, weep; O rival, laugh. For one day, before death arrives, these distresses, the beloved's hurts, will kill me. (In the first line "weep" is tied to the friends and "laugh" to the rival. Derhem means "confused, in disarray" in Persian; if the word is read as dirhem it yields the sense of "coins". Manuscripts F, M and S give the word as verhem.)

4. What healed the sick heart was the beloved's image; the difficulty is that now medicines kill me. (Em means medicine, salve in Turkish. Manuscript F reads epsem; with this reading the image is what quiets and soothes the sick heart. In manuscripts F, S and Ü this couplet changes places with the third.)

5. If Mihrî dies among the thorns of cruelty, what grief is it, O rival: dog-killers will kill you, while she is killed by rose-mouthed beauties. (Since the rival is likened to a dog, his death is left to the "dog-killers"; the lover's death comes at the hands of the beauties.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The ghazal stands forty-eighth in the Harfü'r-Râ section of the divan and has five couplets. It is written in the metre "Mef‘ûlü Fâ‘ilâtü Mefâ‘îlü Fâ‘ilün". The redif (refrain word) is the phrase "-ler öldürür" ("... kill(s)"); the rhyme rests on the sound "m": ġam-lar, dem-ler, âdem-ler, derhem-ler, em-ler, gül-fem-ler. The order of the couplets varies among the manuscripts: in F, S and Ü the fourth couplet stands third. The ghazal is found in all four manuscripts. It is not known for whom it was written. According to Sıtkı Nazik's comparison, the same redif "öldürür" is used in a ghazal in the divan of Mihrî's fellow Amasyan Tâcîzâde Cafer Çelebi; the two poems meet only in the redif, and their rhymes differ.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The subject of the ghazal is the listing of the things that kill the lover. In the first couplet, through the repetition "sometimes... sometimes... sometimes", separation, griefs and the memory of union are listed one after another. That separation kills is to be expected, but that union kills too adds an antithesis to the couplet: since the moments of meeting have passed, their memory also burns the lover. In the second couplet the enemy's laughing and the lover's weeping are set against each other.

In the third and fifth couplets the figure leff ü neşr (a list of terms followed by their counterparts in the same order) is plainly visible. In this device several concepts are named first, and then the words relating to them are given in the same order. In the third couplet the verbs "weep, laugh" match the words "friends, rival" in order: the friends will weep, the rival will laugh. Kaya too explains this couplet to mean that, because the beloved's hurts will kill the lover before death arrives, friends will weep and rivals rejoice. In the fifth couplet, likewise, "you" pairs with "dog-killers" and "her" with "rose-mouthed ones". According to Kaya, the couplet says it is no grief if the lover dies by the thorn of cruelty, since the rose-mouthed ones kill the lover and the dog-killers kill the rival. The relation between thorn and rose also builds a congruence of images (tenasüp) in the couplet: the lover gives up his life among the thorns of cruelty, but it is the rose-mouthed beauties who kill him.

The fourth couplet is drawn from the language of medicine. Kaya mentions this couplet among the images of illness and physician in the divan: though the beloved's image was once a cure for the sick heart, with growing longing this image has made the sick lover worse. The repetition of the same root in "emsem eyleyen" and "emler öldürür" makes the turning of medicine into poison felt at the level of the word as well. That Mihrî treats death from so many angles in this ghazal accords, as Kaya notes, with the divan's habit of presenting death mostly as something that comes from the beloved's hand and from separation from her.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Online sources