Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mef‘ûlü Fâ‘ilâtün Mef‘ûlü Fâ‘ilâtün

Ḫadüñ yüzini ḫaṭṭuñ ṭutdı nitekim ey cân
Zeyn itdi gülsitânı irişdi tâze reyḥân

In English

1. O dear one, the down of your beard has covered the face of your cheek, just as fresh basil, springing up in a rose garden, adorns it. (In divan poetry "ḫaṭ" is the fine down newly appearing on the beloved's cheek; "ḫad" means cheek.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

A müfred is a poem made of a single couplet; it is not read as a fragment of a longer poem with a beginning and an end, and it fits what it has to say into two lines. Mehmet Arslan, who prepared the edition of the Mihrî Hatun Divan, states that the divan contains seven müfreds, amounting to seven couplets in all. This couplet is the fifth müfred in the edition and is found only on folio 77a of the Ü manuscript in the Istanbul University Library. Its metre is the muzâri pattern "Mef‘ûlü Fâ‘ilâtün Mef‘ûlü Fâ‘ilâtün"; by Arslan's count this pattern is used in only four poems of the divan. The two lines rhyme on "cân" and "reyḥân". To whom it was addressed, and on what occasion, is not known.

The couplet has an interesting textual circumstance. In the edition, as the second müfred, on the previous page of the same manuscript (76b), there is a couplet beginning "Ḫaṭṭuñ ḫadüñ yüzini ṭutdı nitekim ey cân". Arslan records in a footnote that the fifth müfred is the same as the second, the only difference being that the first three words at the beginning of the first line have changed places. The second lines are identical letter for letter. That the same couplet is written in two places in one manuscript with a slight difference in word order may suggest that the copyist's source circulated the couplet in two forms, or that the same couplet was carelessly written a second time; the edition offers no explanation, and it is not known which was the poet's original wording. In neither arrangement does the meaning change: what holds the face of the cheek is in both cases the down.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet is devoted to one of the most frequently treated subjects of divan poetry, the appearance of the first down on the beloved's face. According to Gülşen Kaya's study of Mihrî's divan, the down (hat) is mentioned in the divan in rich expressions and is often used as a double entendre (tevriye): "ḫaṭ", the name given to the down on the face, is also the name of the art of calligraphy. Kaya shows that the names of the scripts reyhânî, gubârî and rikâ‘ also enter poems on account of the down, and that reyhan, mostly in the form "ḫaṭṭ-ı reyḥân", evokes both a style of script and a sweet-smelling plant. In this couplet the phrase "tâze reyḥân" describes basil growing in the rose garden while at the same time winking at the fresh down on the face and at the script that shares its name.

The construction of the simile is plain. The cheek is associated with the rose in divan poetry; once the cheek is a rose garden, the greenish dark hairs that appear along its edge become basil newly sprung up in that garden. A congruence of images (tenasüp) is built between ḫad and gülsitân, and between ḫaṭ and reyḥân. The word "nitekim" ("just as") joins the two lines with a simile: what happens in the first line is an instance of the garden scene in the second.

What makes the couplet truly striking is that the down is welcomed here as an ornament. In divan poetry the down is often regarded as the herald of the end of beauty; Kaya reports that in one of Mihrî's ghazals the poet sees the down as a thorn that surrounds the rose-cheek, and complains that the lover is hemmed in with thorns before he can pluck even a single petal from the rose. In this müfred, however, we read "Zeyn itdi", that is, "adorned," and the down is welcomed as a plant that brings freshness to the garden. It is again Kaya who notes that Mihrî's divan contains a ghazal on the down and even one composed on the down of Prince Ahmed. Whether this single couplet has any connection with either of them is not known.

Bibliography

  • Mehmet Arslan (ed.), Mihrî Hâtun Dîvânı, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları (Kültür Eserleri Dizisi 576), 2018, p. 185, Müfred 5 (Ü 77a) and footnote; introduction, pp. 11-12. ekitap.ktb.gov.tr
  • Gülşen Kaya, Mihrî Hâtun Divânı'nın Tahlili, master's thesis, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Elazığ 2010, pp. 170-172. openaccess.firat.edu.tr