Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilün
(Elif) ey ḳâmeti mevzûn u eyâ ḫûb-nigâr
Bitmedi ḳaddüñe beñzer daḫi bir serv ü çenâr
(Bâ) bugün gülşen-i ḥüsnüñde ḳo efġân idelüm
Yaraşur ṣaḥn-ı çemende k'ide feryâd hezâr
(Tâ) temâşâ iderüz vaṣluñı luṭfuñla bugün
Dil-i dervîşe ‘aṭâ eyleseñ ey şâh ne var
(S̱â) s̱enâ-ḫân olalı bülbül-i cân gülşende
Ḥüsnüñe ḳarşu olur şâm u seḥer ḫoş güftâr
(Cîm) cemâlüñi görüp ġayra naẓar eyler isem
Dostum tîr-i müjeñle iki gözümi çıḳar
(Ḥâ) ḥayâtum gider ey dost yüzüñ görmeyicek
Sensüzin d'imdi nice eyleye cân tende ḳarâr
(Ḫâ) ḫayâlüñ yazalı naḳşını dil levḥasına
Gözedür ḳıble-nümâ gibi gözüm leyl ü nehâr
(Dâl) dâd itmez iseñ dâdımuzı ḫûni gözüñ
Beni nâ-ḥaḳ yere öldürse gerek âḫir-i kâr
(Ẕâl) ẕâhid güzeli sevmege tevb'itmiş imiş
Döndi cürmini bilüp itdi yine istiġfâr
(Râ) revâ gördi felek biz nidelüm gülşende
Bülbüle âh u fiġân hem-dem ola ġoncaya ḫâr
(Zâ-i) zülfüñde beni ‘aşḳ ile Manṣûr gibi
Cân fedâdur yoluña eyleye ḫânum ber-dâr
(Sîn) senden çevürürsem yüzümi itme mecâl
Kes ḳalem gibi başumı dilümi yar ey yâr
(Şın) şehâ ẓulmüñ eli şehr-i dili yıḳdı dirîġ
Çıḳısar cân bedenden idiser terk-i diyâr
(Ṣâd) ṣandum ki seḥâb içre nihân oldı ḳamer
Yâr ḥüsninde meger itmiş imiş zülfini târ
(Ḍâd) ża‘f-ı ġam-ı hecrüñle ḳo ölsün yeridür
Dil-i âşüfte ki cânâ aña pend itmedi kâr
(Ṭâ) ṭavâf-ı ḥaremüñ eylemişem bunca zamân
İ‘tiḳâdum budur ey dost beni yaḳmaya nâr
(Ẓâ) ẓulüm eyleme ‘âşıḳlaruña luṭf eyle
Eylemişdür bularuñ ‘aşḳuñ odı cânına kâr
(‘Ayn) ‘aynuñ dil ü cânlar mı ḳodı ‘âlemde
K'itmedi ġamzelerüñ tîri ile anı şikâr
(Ġayn) ġâyetde ṣafâdur k'ola yanuñda ḥabîb
Ol saña nâz ide sen an'idesin bûse-kinâr
(Fâ) firâḳuñ gicesinde şu ḳadar âh itdüm
K'oldı dil âyinesi derdüm ile jeng-i ġubâr
(Ḳâf) ḳandîl-i ruḫuñdan yaḳar ey dost delîl
Ki güneş ‘âleme envârını eyler iẓhâr
(Kâf) göñlüm evi vîrânını ma‘mûr itdi
Ḥamdü-lillâh hele ‘aşḳuñ olalıdan mi‘mâr
(Lâm) la‘l-i lebinüñ yâdına bir meh-rûnuñ
Ḫoş olur nûş ide mül çün irişe vaḳt-i bahâr
(Mîm) Mihrî düşeliden heves-i ‘aşḳuña yâr
Oldı rüsvây-ı cihân gitdi ḳamu ġayret ü ‘âr
(Nûn) nem var daḫi ‘aşḳuñda budur taḥṣîlüm
Dilde ġam dîdede nem sînede âteş her bâr
(Vâv) var itdügüñe ṣoñra peşîmân olasın
Gül yüzüñ dâ’iresini ṭutıcaḳ bir gün ḫâr
(Hâ) hebâ eyleme sa‘yini bu ben miskînüñ
Çoḳ zamândur ki yoluña dil ü cân itdi nis̱âr
(Lâmelif) lâyıḳ ola mı ki ‘aceb ḳapuñda
İtlerüñle bile ben daḫi olam ḫıdmet-kâr
(Yâ) yeter cevr ü cefâñ ile beni şâm u seḥer
Dostum ḫâne-i ġamda iñilet zâr u nizâr
In English
1. (Elif) O you of balanced stature, O beloved of fair face; no cypress or plane tree like your stature has yet grown.
2. (Be) Today, in the rose garden of your beauty, let us lament; it suits the nightingale to lament in the middle of the lawn. (The lover likens himself to the nightingale in the rose garden.)
3. (Te) Today, through your favour, we watch the sight of reaching you; O king, what if you made a gift to the dervish of the heart?
4. (Se) Since the nightingale of the soul began to recite praise in the rose garden, it speaks sweet words morning and evening before your beauty.
5. (Cim) If after seeing your face I look at another, my friend, put out both my eyes with the arrow of your lashes.
6. (Ha) O friend, if I do not see your face my life will go; without you, how can the soul now stay in the body?
7. (Hı) Since the picture of your image was written on the tablet of my heart, my eye watches you night and day like a compass that shows the qibla. (A qibla-finder is a compass showing the direction of prayer; the eye always turns to the beloved.)
8. (Dal) You do not grant our lament its due; if you do not answer with justice, your blood-shedding eye will in the end kill me unjustly. (Dâd means both "justice" and "the cry made for justice".)
9. (Zel) The ascetic repented of loving the beautiful; then, understanding that this was a crime, he turned back and asked for pardon again. (The pious man, counting the giving up of love for beauty a sin, repented of his repentance.)
10. (Re) Fate has thought it fit to be thus, what are we to do in the rose garden: let sighs and laments be the nightingale's companion and the thorn the bud's.
11. (Ze) Though love will hang me by your locks like Mansur and turn my house into a gallows, my life is sacrificed for your path. (Hallaj-i Mansur is the Sufi who was hanged for saying "Ana'l-Haqq". Three manuscripts read "cânum" instead of "ḫânum"; with this reading it is said "let love drag my soul to the gallows".)
12. (Sin) If I turn my face from you, give me no chance; O beloved, cut off my head like a pen and split my tongue. (The reed pen is cut and split at the tip when it is prepared for writing; the poet applies this treatment to her own head and tongue.)
13. (Şın) O king, alas, the hand of your tyranny has destroyed the city of the heart; the soul will leave the body and go, abandoning its home.
14. (Sad) I thought the moon was hidden in a cloud; but the beloved had darkened her fair face with her hair and covered it.
15. (Dad) Let it die of the weakness that the grief of separation has brought, it is right that it should; O beloved, counsel did not help that distraught heart.
16. (Tı) For so long I have circled your sanctuary; O friend, my belief is that the fire will not burn me. (The beloved's door is likened to the Kaaba; the allusion is to the belief that whoever circumambulates the Kaaba is cleansed of sins and protected from the fire.)
17. (Zı) Do not oppress your lovers, show favour; the fire of your love has penetrated their souls.
18. (Ayn) Has your eye left a heart or soul in the world that the arrow of your glances has not hunted? (No heart or soul remains that the arrow of your glance has not caught.)
19. (Gayn) To have the beloved at one's side is exceedingly pleasant; may she coquette with you, and may you kiss and embrace her.
20. (Fe) On your night of separation I sighed so much that the mirror of the heart gathered rust and dust from my pain. (Old mirrors were made of metal and rusted; the smoke of the sigh darkens the mirror.)
21. (Kaf) O friend, that the sun shows its rays to the world is proof that it lit its light from the lamp of your face. The couplet can be read in two ways: if "delîl" is taken in the sense of "guide", the guide who shows the way lights his lamp from your face, and only thus does the sun scatter its rays.
22. (Kef) Thanks be to God, since your love became the architect, it has repaired the ruined house of my heart.
23. (Lam) When the time of spring comes, it is pleasant to drink wine remembering the ruby-red lip of a moon-faced one.
24. (Mim) O beloved, since Mihrî fell to the desire for your love she has become a disgrace to the world; both concern for honour and the sense of shame have gone entirely.
25. (Nun) What do I have left in your love; my whole gain is this: always grief in the heart, tears in the eye, fire in the breast. (Nem means "what am I" in the first hemistich and "wetness, tears" in the second.)
26. (Vav) Go on, so that you may regret what you have done afterwards; one day thorns will surround the circle of your rose face. (The thorns are the beard and moustache that grow on the beloved's face, describing the end of youthful beauty.)
27. (He) Do not render this poor wretch's labour in vain; for a long time she has been scattering her heart and soul on your path.
28. (Lamelif) Would it perhaps be thought fit that I too should be a servant at your door, together with your dogs?
29. (Ye) My friend, it is enough that morning and evening you make me weep in the house of grief with your tyranny and cruelty and make me groan again and again.
Literary and Historical Commentary
Structure of the Poem
This poem, which in Mehmet Arslan's edition appears as the seventeenth and last kaside of the divan, has twenty-nine couplets. It is written in the remel metre of aruz (quantitative metre), in the pattern "Fe'ilâtün Fe'ilâtün Fe'ilâtün Fe'ilün". It has no redif; the rhyme is built on the sound "-âr" (nigâr, çenâr, hezâr, güftâr, ḳarâr, nehâr, istiġfâr, mi'mâr, bahâr, nis̱âr, nizâr). In the matla couplet both hemistichs rhyme, and in the following couplets only the second hemistichs are tied to the rhyme. The pen name (mahlas) appears in the twenty-fourth couplet. The poem is found in all four manuscripts (F 40b, M 57a, S 43a, Ü 32b); the ninth couplet is missing in the F manuscript, and the eleventh couplet in the F and S manuscripts. It has no heading, and for whom it was written is unknown; no name of a patron appears in the text, and the addresses "king" and "friend" are those that the language of the ghazal directs at the beloved.
The real peculiarity of the poem lies in its arrangement. At the beginning of every couplet the name of a letter of the Arabic alphabet is written, and the couplet opens with a word beginning with that letter: "(Elif) ey", "(Bâ) bugün", "(Tâ) temâşâ", "(S̱â) s̱enâ-ḫân", and so on until it ends with "(Lâmelif) lâyıḳ" and "(Yâ) yeter". When lâmelif, which is shown in writing as a separate form, is added to the twenty-eight letters of the alphabet, there are twenty-nine couplets; the number of couplets is thus fixed by the number of letters. The letters peculiar to Persian and Turkish (pe, çim, je, gef) are not included in the sequence; in the couplet "(Kâf) göñlüm" the sound "g" is represented by the letter kef, which is written with the same shape. In the text based on the Istanbul University manuscript in Sabiha Gemici's work, the same poem is placed among the ghazals, twenty-fifth in order; Arslan, however, put it in the kaside section. Its length is that of a kaside, while its subject is, from beginning to end, that of a ghazal.
The Elifname Tradition
Poems of this kind, whose couplets or lines begin in alphabetical order, are called elifname. Lokman Taşkesenlioğlu notes that elifnames, of which close to a hundred examples are estimated to exist in Turkish literature, were written on religious, mystical or non-religious subjects and in different verse forms, from the mesnevi to the ghazal, from the kaside to the murabba. Some poets began every line, others every couplet, in alphabetical order, and some wrote out the letters separately in certain poems while others did not. Mihrî's poem belongs to the second group: each couplet is assigned to one letter and the name of the letter is placed at the start of the couplet. Taşkesenlioğlu counts Mihrî among the poets who wrote more than one elifname. Her first elifname is the second tevhid at the beginning of the divan; in this mesnevi, too, each couplet begins in turn with a letter, and it approaches its close with a couplet that includes the name of the letter, "Lâm-elif lâ dimezem". The seventeenth kaside applies the same technique to the subject of love. Taşkesenlioğlu describes this poem as one of the fine examples among women poets in which all the qualities of the beloved are described, admiration and passion for her are voiced, and love on a non-religious subject is spoken of openly.
Mustafa Özkat recalls that poems of the elifname and ebcednâme type are also counted as muvaşşah in a broad sense, and mentions an elifname by the fifteenth-century poet Serâyî titled "Ḳaṣîdetü'l-Muvaşşaḥa fi'l-Ḥurûfi't-Teheccî" (the muvaşşah kaside on the letters of the alphabet). The same study cites Mihrî, with three poems, among the poets who wrote muvaşşah. This information shows that Mihrî was not alone in poetry based on letter games, and that she used a skill that interested the poets of the period of Bayezid II. In the second and seventh kasides of the divan a prayer or a name can be read from the beginnings of the couplets; in the seventeenth kaside, however, the beginnings of the couplets do not form a name but line up the alphabet itself.
Meaning and Figures of Speech
The requirement of the letters puts on the poet the burden of beginning each couplet with a particular word, but Mihrî often makes these words the key of the couplet. The openings "(Ḥâ) ḥayâtum gider", "(Ẓâ) ẓulüm eyleme", "(Fâ) firâḳuñ gicesinde", "(Mîm) Mihrî" and "(Yâ) yeter" give in the first word what the couplet wants to say. It is also noteworthy that she places her own pen name under the letter mim: the first letter of her name determines the pen-name couplet of the poem. In the nun couplet (25) the word "nem" is used with its two meanings: "what am I" in the first hemistich and "wetness, tears" in the second. This is a fine example of the art of cinas (punning on identical-sounding words), which uses two words of the same sound with different meanings. In the dal couplet (8), too, in the phrase "dâd itmez iseñ dâdımuzı", the same word appears twice, with the meanings of justice and the cry for justice.
The images come from the familiar conceits of divan poetry, and in Gülşen Kaya's thesis many of them are cited separately as examples. The beloved's stature is above the cypress and the plane tree (1); her beauty is a rose garden, and the lover is the nightingale lamenting in that garden (2, 4, 10). The heart is likened to a dervish and a gift is begged of the beloved (3). The hair is a cloud that covers the moon (14). The heart is a city and the beloved's tyranny destroys it (13); love, on the other hand, is the architect that repairs the ruined house of the heart (22). The mirror of the heart rusts with the smoke of sighs (20). In explaining the sixteenth couplet, Kaya notes that the beloved's quarter is circumambulated like a Kaaba and that the belief that the one who circumambulates will not burn in the fire gives the lover confidence. In the couplets about the eye (5, 18) the lashes are arrows and the glances hunters.
Some couplets use the material they take from the tradition with a sharp drama. In the eleventh couplet the lover is likened to Hallaj-i Mansur, hanged for saying "Ana'l-Haqq", and the beloved's lock becomes the gallows; the allusion (telmih) ties dying for love to a sanctity. In the twelfth couplet, she asks that, if she turns her face from the beloved, her head be cut like a pen and her tongue split; this comparison, taken from the opening of the reed pen, comes from the world of people of writing. The ninth couplet is a light mockery: the ascetic who repented of loving the beautiful later counts this repentance a crime and asks for pardon again. In divan poetry the ascetic (zahit) is the type of the rigid pious man who does not understand love, and Mihrî, by making him repent of his repentance, voices the superiority of love.
The twenty-fourth couplet makes the poem especially interesting as the voice of a woman poet. Mihrî, in her own name, says that because she has fallen into the beloved's love she is "rüsvây-ı cihân", that is, disgraced before the world, and that concern for honour and the sense of shame have gone. For the lover to be disgraced and notorious is a familiar conceit of the ghazal, but that this is said by a woman's pen and under her pen name reveals the openness to which Taşkesenlioğlu also points. The twenty-sixth couplet warns the beloved that she will regret it when thorns surround her face, that is, when her beard grows; Kaya cites from another couplet an example of the beard that grows on the face being likened to the brushwood that spoils a rose garden. This couplet remains within the traditional language of the ghazal, in which the beloved is thought of as a young man.
Bibliography
Primary sources
- Mehmet Arslan (ed.), Mihrî Hâtun Dîvânı, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları (Kültür Eserleri Dizisi 576), 2018, p. 48-51, Kaside 17 (F 40b, M 57a, S 43a, Ü 32b) and footnotes on manuscript variants. ekitap.ktb.gov.tr
Academic studies
- Lokman Taşkesenlioğlu, "Divan Edebiyatında Elifnameler ve Bilinmeyen İki Elifname Örneği: Memî Can Saruhânî ve Ömer Karîbî Elifnameleri", Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü Dergisi 58 (Erzurum 2017), p. 159-202 (Mihrî Hatun: p. 168-170).
- Mustafa Özkat, "Muvaşşah / Tevşîh ve Türk Edebiyatındaki Yansımaları", Türk Kültürü İncelemeleri Dergisi 55 (Spring 2026), p. 162-220.
- Gülşen Kaya, Mihrî Hâtun Divânı'nın Tahlili, master's thesis, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Elazığ 2010, p. 90, 121, 145, 163, 182, 185, 189, 204, 206, 213-214, 235, 266. openaccess.firat.edu.tr
- Sabiha Gemici, Mihrî Hatun Divanı: Karşılaştırmalı Metin, Cümle Yapısı ve Cümle Türleri, doctoral thesis, Uludağ Üniversitesi, Balıkesir 1990, p. 467-468 (Gazel 25).
Online sources
