Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mef‘ûlü Mefâ‘îlü Mefâ‘îlü Fa‘ûlün

Cevr ile beni şol ḳadar aġlatdı felek kim
Sürḫâb gözüm yaşı ile ḳana boyandı

In English

1. Fate, that is fortune, made me weep so much through its cruelty that my eye became a red water and was dyed with blood by its tears. (Sürḫâb is Persian for "red water." The couplet can be read in two ways: the red water may be a name for the eye itself or for the tears flowing from it. In both readings what is described is tears of blood.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

This couplet is the first of the seven single-couplet poems gathered under the heading "Müfredler" in Arslan's edition. A müfred is a poem made of one couplet that carries a complete meaning by itself, and its two lines are not required to rhyme with each other. Here too the first line ends in "felek kim" and the second in "boyandı", and there is no rhyme between them. The metre is the hezec pattern "Mef‘ûlü Mefâ‘îlü Mefâ‘îlü Fa‘ûlün". According to the count Arslan gives in his introduction, this pattern is used in thirty poems of the divan and ranks fourth in frequency.

All the other couplets in the Müfredler section are found only in the Ü manuscript at Istanbul University, whereas this couplet appears in three manuscripts: F (74a), S (75b) and Ü (76a). In the manuscript descriptions of the edition, F and S are each said to contain one müfred, and it follows that the single müfred in these two manuscripts is this couplet. The S manuscript bears the seal of Bayezid II at its end and was most probably sent to the sultan. The couplet therefore also appears in the copy of the divan that was presented to the sultan. To whom it was addressed, or on what occasion, is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The subject of the couplet is one of the most common complaints of divan poetry: the torment that the felek, the revolving sky and the fortune it stands for, inflicts on human beings. In divan poetry the felek is usually a cruel, capricious power hostile to the lover, and here too it is the one who makes the poet weep through "cevr", that is, tyranny and torment. The poet does not describe the cruelty of fate in a long reproach. She gathers its whole effect into a single result: the eye has been dyed with blood from weeping.

Bloody tears are the familiar expression of intense suffering in divan poetry. It is said that when the tears run dry, blood flows from the eye, or that the tears mix with blood and turn red. Mihrî works this conceit through the word "Sürḫâb". The word is a compound of "sürḫ" (red) and "âb" (water); it likens the eye or the tear to a red water, and it also anticipates the phrase "ḳana boyandı" (was dyed with blood) at the end of the second line. A congruence of images (tenasüp) is built among red water, blood and tears. Because the simile is not stated openly and the red water is put directly in the place of the eye, a metaphor (istiare) can also be seen here.

The construction "şol ḳadar ... kim" in the first line is the modern "o kadar ... ki" ("so much that ..."), and it gives the couplet a cause-and-effect order: the cause is the cruelty of fate and the result is the eye dyed with blood. This tight structure suits the müfred's ability to establish a full meaning in a single couplet. The couplet reads as a complaint that is complete in itself.

Bibliography

  • Mehmet Arslan (ed.), Mihrî Hâtun Dîvânı, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları (Kültür Eserleri Dizisi 576), 2018, p. 185, Müfred 1 (F 74a, S 75b, Ü 76a); introduction pp. 11-14. ekitap.ktb.gov.tr
  • İsmail E. Erünsal, "Mihrî Hatun", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 30, 2020, pp. 37-38. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr